Hobohemia
Now a video-game
In the years following the Civil War, an army of homeless men swept across America's “wageworkers' frontier” and forged a counterculture known as “hobohemia.” Drawing on sources ranging from diaries, letters, and police reports to movies and memoirs, the book, Citizen Hobo, explores the world of Hobohemia.1
From the 1910s through the Depression 30s Chicago was the undisputed hobo capital of the U.S. A small north side neighborhood know as Towertown was the center of cultural and political ferment. It was home to Bughouse Square (the outdoor free-speech center), Ben Reitman's Hobo College, and the Dil Pickle club, an unorthodox institution of higher learning that doubled as the craziest nightclub in the world. It was something like New York's Greenwich Village, but - thanks to the prominence of the Chicago-based IWW - much more working class, and more openly revolutionary.2
The University of Michigan Labadie Collection of Social Protest includes Hobohemia materials from 1905-1997. The materials are original correspondence and manuscripts, photographs, serials, pamphlets, ephemera, clippings, and realia. The collection centers around soap box culture, radical thought, and open forums for free speech in Chicago that were popular from mid-1910’s to the early sixties. 3
In Britt, Iowa there is a Hobo Museum with much memorabilia (not available in an organized collection online) and celebration of Hobo Days at the annual Hobo Convention with crowning of a Hobo King and Queen.4
But one knows the culture is near legend with a new video-game (set in “Pravslav” but borrowing from the traditions of the U.S. Hobo): “Hobo : Tough Life.”5
Todd DePastino. Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Beck, Frank Orman. Hobohemia. Rindge, N.H.: Richard R. Smith, 1956.
Hobohemia Collection. Labadie Collection Finding Aids. University of Michigan library.
MacGregor, Jeff (2019) The Last of the Great American Hobos. Smithsonian Magazine (May).
Hobo-Tough Life. Steam. 2021. Welcome to Praslav, a cold Central European city that grows even colder with the coming winter. Praslav is recovering from the political turmoil that followed the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Communist regime, which held the country in its iron grip for decades. While most people eagerly awaited the coming of democracy and capitalism, some were unable to adapt to the new socio-economic climate. Soon they found themselves on the streets with nowhere to go. You are one of those people.
For me the seminal hobo texts are Jack Black's YOU CAN'T WIN (the intersectionality of hoboism and professional crime) and Robert Aldrich's 1973 film EMPEROR OF THE NORTH POLE, with Lee Marvin as Apex Hobo A-No.1.
I'm absolutely showing my age here -- and I think this criticism is already implicit in your post -- but what is the point of a virtual reality simulation of being a hobo? Someone spent money to create this and someone else is spending money on it. It would be more authentic and less expensive (although riskier) to simply be a hobo in real life; the trains are still there.