Gamedev here. It's nice that the article recognizes the recent "mellow games" popularity. There's always been that current in gaming - in the 2010s "walking simulators" were popular (but with much more focus on story), in 2000s / late 1990s it was "game toys" like The Sims, or online MUDS and Second Life and so on.
People always wanted virtual places to just chill, and not have to be challenged all the time or have to struggle etc.
But also the article's focus on chores feels like a distraction. It's not that chores as such are exciting, it's more that you're messing around in a virtual world with often unexpected physics (job sims), or otherwise simplifying the complexity of real life (trucking sims etc). And lots of this popularity is also because, with Unity and Unreal, it has become very easy to make these kinds of physics-based 3D worlds with wacky physics, especially for tiny teams on small budgets - so lots and lots of people are making them.
I love it when games have a creative mode. It's a nice balance between challenge and fun. Subnautica for example has a normal mode, a hardcore permadeath mode and a creative mode with no death and infinite resources. Building bases everywhere and watching the beautiful underwater landscapes and marine life is just so soothing.
LittleBigPlanet was a blast on creative/user-made maps.
You could have a fairly stupid concept (free-falling sponge, with a shark that follows you while only in water), copy the whole level and mod it to whatever new state you wanted.
Just build your city. Tech up. Send your explorers. Enjoy the beautiful scenery and soundtrack. And try to ignore the increasing semblance between our energy policies and the game's world.
I personally feel there's a distinction between what's probably usually meant by "mellow games" (my drug of choice is still Euro Truck Simulator on that front) and MUDs, though. MUDs can be mellow, sure, but at least the ones I played had a lot more variety to them than the "X Simulator" genre which tend to have a narrower scope (and maybe more detail within that scope).
I guess I'd compare my experience of MUDs most closely with the Harvest Moon/Rune Factory genre in that you can fight monsters and level up or socialize with other characters (in this case, real people!) or take part in various in-character activities/festivals/etc. Much like some modern MMOs like WoW or Final Fantasy in some respects except I find the creativity lies more with the players even in the modern MUD scene.
I may be wrong, but I think there is more depth there, you are also interacting with a proto-AI in action. The virtualisation of a chore in a machine feels like a previous step to the learning of that chore by the machine.
No, Walking Simulator generally refers to games that eschew almost all gameplay besides walking around and looking at things. Like with any genre, there is no hard line of what is or isn't a walking simulator but think games like Dear Esther [0], Firewatch [1] or Proteus [2]. While RPGs typically do have a focus on story, there is also a heavy character building and/or progression component as well as almost always some form of combat.
I've noticed that while initially derided as not being "real games", AAA games have started to co-opt the design into even the most action-heavy games. Uncharted, God of War, and Returnal have long sections of just walking and character building.
Games constantly have this tension of 1. wanting to include story 2. but a truly interactive story is really freaking hard (no sarcasm), so 3. the story isn't interactive, which means that 4. the solved problem of telling non-interactive stories is cinema, so games use cinematic techniques.
The problem is that this strange attractor for games is constantly pulling the game into just being a movie, because the need to control things for the cinematic portion spreads. If I need you to be wearing a shirt with pockets for this cutscene, you can't shop for arbitrary clothes, or they just don't show up in a cutscene. If this character needs to be alive for a cutscene five hours in, you can't kill them now. If you can't kill them now, you must be denied the interactivity to do so. It is very difficult to confine this need for control in a story-heavy game because it naturally tends to spread out until everything is completely controlled for the benefit of the cinema and it is just a fancy movie.
I'm neither condemning nor praising this right now. Just describing.
"Walking simulators" solve the problem by essentially stripping you of all ability to change the environment except on very specific rails. This can support non-linear story telling, but not arbitrarily-changing stories. In the case of AAA games, a key indicator of this is your character suddenly holstering the weapon that is otherwise their constant companion with no player input, and since the only verb you meaningfully had to change the environment up to this point was "shoot", now you have no environment changing abilities, and the game need not explain why suddenly everyone and everything in the world is bulletproof since you simply can not fire.
That said, I think the case for calling them "not real games" has some virtue to it. It isn't like there's a bright shining line, but there's certainly "games" that are more interactive (in the limit, consider something like Minecraft) and there are games that are less interactive (in the limit, things that are essentially just choose your own adventure), and as is so often the case in practical philosophy, just because we can't draw a bright shining line doesn't mean we can't at least come close, or that the inability to draw a line means that we have to pretend there are no differences at all.
> a truly interactive story is really freaking hard
Why do you think that is? I am not ignorant of reasons and explanations, such as needing too much content, but what do you think are the fundamental reasons?
You, the real human, cannot say whatever you want to the NPCs. Instead you either have to rely on a few scripted choices, or a silent character. Neither of those are very fun. Interactive also implies the ability to change outcomes. That is also difficult as every outcome requires writing, animating, etc. So games give the illusion of choice with a few well defined branches, then railroad you into a few endings.
Another approach is to not craft an explicit narrative. Just give a fleshed out, lived-in world and let the person explore. Let knickknacks, street trash, architecture, NPC behavior, etc tell the story. How can a game describe a dystopian world without an NPC saying "I sure do hate being oppressed!" and giving a questline for toppling the government? Maybe draconian transportation systems, NPCs eyeing the character if not dressed right, ugly architecture seeping into established spaces.
Yeah. Basically, imagine a world in which every single player of Final Fantasy X had a full DM behind them. Even if we stipulate the entire world prepped as a playground beforehand, who knows what you'd get up to in such a scenario? Who knows how radically divergent all our experiences would have been?
Such a thing is simply impossible today, and for the forseeable future. The closest you can get is AI dungeon, and IMHO and with all due respect to the creators, that's little more than a glimpse at the possible future, it is as far away from this reality as Pong is from FFX.
Since Uncharted is an attempt to make a game series by putting AAA game stuff in the skeleton of an Indiana Jones movie, it suffers what they call “ludonarrative dissonance” by not just being a walking simulator game.
Indiana Jones might kill one guy per movie; Nathan Drake has shot thousands. He’s one of the most prolific mass killers in human history. And yet the cinematic parts of the game don’t seem to notice.
> Indiana Jones might kill one guy per movie; Nathan Drake has shot thousands. He’s one of the most prolific mass killers in human history.
Having no idea about either of these games, I guess this is because, again, they combine a story-heavy narrative with a plain old shooter. I sometimes wish that these games which have interesting setting and/or narratives would actually try to innovate on the gaming part and avoid the "just kill them all" genre.
There should be something more between a "walking simulator" and a "kill them all" that allows you to enjoy the setting while still having some type of actual game inside.
That is kind of what survival games or "minecraft-likes" are. A lot of those games have little to no combat. Most of the game being enjoying the setting while engaging in the light game systems. No Man's Sky is probably the best example I can think of; while there is combat it is almost entirely optional or avoidable.
It's not a binary spectrum between action game and walking simulator.
Tomb Raider had some sections that probably fit the walking simulator genre, but also areas of action and puzzle games.
Walking simulator is defined by moving and exploration. Interactions usually involve reading, or changing your environment (not in ways to unlock new areas, but perhaps to see new things). Playing one, you clearly note the vibe. There isn't much to do except move forward and see/experience new things, building out a plot and understanding of a narrative as you do so. You don't generally drive the plot through your actions, but instead learn about it.
Tomb Raider is a pretty standard adventure game with a couple major exceptions:
- There's a lot of combat.
- The world is 3D rather than being 2D backgrounds.
But most of your time is spent wandering around solving puzzles and trying to figure out where to go next. It would be a better game, in my eyes, if they took the combat out entirely. Compare Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
Depending on the walking simulator, they've got more in common with some kind of immersive art installation than a "game". I get why people want to draw the distinction.
> Uncharted
Funnily enough, my favorite parts of Uncharted 4 were the parts where it became a walking simulator. I was surprised both that the game contained so much of that, and that I liked it better than the rest of the game.
I consider walking simulators to be in the same category as the old LucasArts-style point & click adventures.
Often there is the very reduced or entirely eliminated puzzle-solving component.
In the old point & click adventures, with the very linear story, if you can't figure out a puzzle, then you are stuck. You absolutely can't advance through the story.
With the walking simulators, if you miss some bit, then you miss a part of the overall story, but you'll still get to the end and get the big picture. And you can usually go back and pick it up if you realized you missed something.
BTW, some walking simulators I can recommend:
Gone Home - very good story.
What Remains of Edith Finch - also very good and heartbreaking story.
Tacoma - also decent.
Observation - trippy story
Return of the Obra Din - this is a bit closer to the old point & click in the sense that you are a detective, and must actually Sherlock your way through.
I wouldn't have classed Return of the Obra Din as a walking simulator, but more of a puzzler like Myst. Was great, though. I'd recommend both The Talos Principle and The Witness, along those lines.
My favorite pure "walking simulator" I've played, by a mile, is Firewatch. Haven't played What Remains yet, though.
This is kind of a sliding scale -- I'd put Jazzpunk or Thirty Flights of Loving in the same category but I think they're traditionally considered "adventure games".
Feels like a very different genre from, like, IF where you have to work hard to see the whole story (Trinity, Curses).
"Walking simulators" is term for games the focus is on exploration and storytelling rather than combat and more traditionally skill based gameplay mechanics. Most of the game loop involves walking from place to place, enjoying the scenery and discover the next part of the story. As a rule you're not really tested in the game and as such you cannot really fail the game, although the choices you make can lead to 'better' and 'worse' endings.
Action seems like the wrong word. Walking simulators lack any skill requirements. They’re basically just choose your own adventure stories with a small number, or even just one, choice to make, but you navigate with a character movement instead of picking options from a menu.
It's still a bit of a derogatory term, and it doesn't entirely match up to history. Text adventure games, point & click adventure games and so on were very similar in gameplay mechanics to many games that get this moniker.
Many of them do incorporate enough puzzle elements that the game consists of more than just taping down the up arrow. Often, the term feels like it attempts to reduce the term "game" to something more narrow than what the art form does and has encompassed, historically. Not all games require mechanical skill. Not all games are what you expect them to be. Etc.
My partner absolutely adores House Flipper a game where you clean up, repair, and decorate derelict houses.
She, like the people in this article, really loves this style of game because there is no direct competition. Sure there are tasks to complete and achieve but there is no clock, no angry mobs of people yelling obscenities at you, and no enemies getting in your way while you try and do your thing.
These games are good to veg out with, they give you some of the satisfaction of doing a good job, while keeping you from doing all the hard work.
No it's not my kind of game, but House Flipper is now one of my top three games played on steam (for game time) because my partner uses my steam account for gaming.
> Sometimes you just want to tend a garden or walk a forest
I do both of these things a fair amount IRL, I'm not trying to single you out I just want to understand motivations for playing these games, is there a reason you do these activities in a game as opposed to IRL?
You can start a game instantly. No travel. No travel expense, either. No packing. No un-packing. No arranging for someone to watch your pets if it's going to be long enough for that to matter. No dealing with taking the kids with you, or finding some other place for them to be. Your spouse doesn't have to want to go.
No spiderwebs on your face. No biting and/or disease-carrying insects. No oppressive humidity. No getting soaked by a sudden rainstorm. No sunburns. No twisting an ankle and having a horrible time getting back out. No taking a wrong turn and ending up having to go much farther than you'd counted on, to get back.
Much or all of the game world may be crafted to be interesting. Even very nice natural areas have boring bits, and you can't fast-travel past them.
You can do it even if you're injured, or tired.
If the game has tasks, they usually have far faster reward loops than their real-life equivalents. The real-life versions might have more clean-up or mess. You have to actually physically do a bunch of stuff where the game might have a button press. You also have to know how to do it, and have the tools (if any) to do it. This is why obsessive players of games that feature gardening or farming usually don't become avid hobby-gardeners in real-life.
Even that game skips a lot of the tedious bits from unpacking stuff though. There's no packing stuff first. there's no moving van. there's no discarding empty boxes.
I do gardening in my spare time but I also enjoyed playing Stardew Valley - a game where you bring back to life an abandonded farm.
Video games have faster feedback loop compared to real life. You progress and get rewards much faster. For example, I could finish an entire growing season in one long evening of playing. And it's not just scaling time. The tasks themselves are simplified to balance complexity, difficulty, and fun. You only have a handful of tools that never break. You don't have to worry about plant diseses, pests, droughts, floodings, or freezing temperatures in spring. The only thing you need to manage is watering (which you have an infinite supply of) and crows (which are repelled with a scarecrow).
The barriers of entry are lower too. There are games that let you drive a truck of fly a plane; things which would be prohibitively expensive in real life.
It's cheaper (no need to buy supplies) so you can do things you'd never be able to afford IRL. Which also allows you to experiment with more things. This also lessens the consequences of failure.
You can do the activity when there's free time (like at night) with no real planning.
You can put the task down for months on end without negative results because time is constrained to the game world. Or put another way, constant upkeep tasks and their results can be perfectly saved.
Game worlds can be tightly controlled if you wish it. Reality is uncontrollable.
> You can put the task down for months on end without negative results because time is constrained to the game world. Or put another way, constant upkeep tasks and their results can be perfectly saved.
After a very brief taste of Elder Scrolls Online I realized I really, really dislike when game time rules seep too much into real life and start contaminating my schedule.
Nowadays I can't stand even the simplest habit-forming daily rewards loop of mobile games.
If the goal is visual evidence of accomplishment, then one gives you that while relaxing the other gives you that while bending over and tiring out your core/upper body.
I won’t make moralistic judgements on which is better, but I will say all else equal, a lot of people prefer physical passivity.
A few potential reasons: In games the rewards are much more immediate, even if we play a game that requires waiting. Gardens and forests may not be near, available, or accessible when gamers are ready to relax. Gamers may not be physically able to partake in such activities. You might need to pay or buy something (shoes, a car, a park pass, garden mulch, tools...) to participate.
People live in flats with no garden, or don't live near a forest or anything beautiful really, or finish their shift when it's already dark. Or maybe it's just raining or 105 F outside.
True in very large stretches of the US, as well. Though we also have a bunch of huge regions with beautiful, varied, striking natural environments, of course.
The only difference between that and what GP said, is that in Rust you don't have any player agency in deciding when people come after you or not. Switching between adrenaline/calm single-player games, you get to decide at your own pleasure :)
Same exact deal here. I LOVE powerwash simulator mentioned in the article. Also love sweating out hours in payday 2 getting raided by horde after horde of enemies.
One of the major criticisms of contemporary digital work is that there’s very little tangible/ non-abstract evidence of work product.
Even if you just dig ditches, at least you can say “hey I dig these ditches that I now see” at the end of the day. This is very satisfying to our brains.
I predict a lot of future recreation will look like “visual evidence of accomplishment without needing the tedious labor required to do the same thing in the physical world.”
You can kind of see why Zuck cares so much about the meta verse from that angle, it’s just too bad that he’s so nuerodivergant he’s getting the details wrong.
Once you've watched an episode or two of the Property Brothers, you have really seen them all. Their style, along with the rest of the HGTV style, is starting to look tired and dated.
I won’t speculate why but I will posit that this is not a new phenomenon for the casual gamer. Consider The Sims, originally released 22 years ago and enthralled a huge audience of people who had no other interest in games. Where the purpose of the game was to literally play house and go to work. Now that everyone has a gaming “console” in their pocket perhaps it’s not surprising that these more monotonous time killers have caught on with the broader audience.
I played "The Sims" a lot when it came out. And so did a lot of other people I knew.
Things I did in the Sims:
* Box in one sim into a room to see how long they can survive by themselves.
* Set various sims on fire.
* Try to get sims to drown in the pool.
* Holding house parties WHILE people are drowning, to see their social scores drop at the horror of dead bodies.
* Try to "summon the clown".
* Try to kill the clown by burning its picture / effigy on top of the fireplace.
Etc. etc.
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"The Sims" isn't about "housework". It was about "pretend house", the same toy-houses / Poly-pocket / action figures that we kids grew up with except in video game form.
Just as I imagined fights and killing and battles with action figures as a (younger) child, the Sims offered me a "virtual" version of that, where I can play around and toy with the sims.
I wasn't completely a "Sim Sociopath" (I often made "new saves" when I was in a sociopathic mood). I also tried to reach the top of the job ladders (level 10 jobs and whatnot) and tried to make lots of money sometimes. But not always.
Sometimes, you just want to watch the world burn, and "The Sims" 100% allowed you to mess up the dollhouse's life entirely.
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I never got into Grand Theft Auto, but based off of what I've seen in that game... it sounds more like a sandbox game than a 3rd person adventure game. (Where simulated people act "kinda sorta" like a human with social effects, so you can mess around with the world with your own sick, twisted imagination. Or jump off a building with a motorcycle to see if you can reach the other building with enough speed (etc. etc.))
And of course, don't forget "The Painting Goblin", in which you make an inescapeable, fully equipped basement home and lock one of your sims in there. Then you force them to get _extremely_ good at painting, such that one of their paintings can sell for thousands and comfortably support the rest of your sims family, who never have to work a day in their lives.
I also partook in this, except with lots of "goblins". I forced them to live in a house locked away from the outside world with plenty of canvasses in the house, and plenty of things to do that weren't painting (indoor pool).
The specialty rule is that there weren't enough beds, so I tried to get them all into relationships so they would share beds with minimal interaction. If they didn't, then some would pass out on the floor.
They all lived a life of luxury with how much money they printed.
You just decribed the appeal of sandbox games in the most morbid way lol.
You are right, games let us do things you couldn't and they just give you more control.
Sandbox games specifically just let you do whatever you want, from testing to see how long npcs can survive X scenario to making the perfect environment in your eyes.
Thats why my most played game is garry's mod. One day I am putting npcs into a mini world war and the other I am pitting them against a death robot I build.
> Sandbox games specifically just let you do whatever you want, from testing to see how long npcs can survive X scenario to making the perfect environment in your eyes.
Its really no different from how most children act, honestly.
I don't think the average sims users played the game to burn houses down. It's among the most popular game in history not because people wanted to kill their sims, but because it was the first game to appeal to traditionally feminine activities like interior design, socializing and family-making. I get that many of us may have drowned some sims or goofed off, but that's not why the game is among the most popular game of all time.
Look at the still active mod community, social network communities or youtube communities. There are some goofballs doing extremely antisocial things but the 99% of that community are authentically playing the game and enjoying it as an interior design / life simulator.
I fundamentally believe that game developers ignore female and feminine interests in games to their massive detriment, and games like the Sims demonstrate the massive size of the feminine audience for non-violent and rewarding peaceful games.
Also, while sims also attracted a lot of female players, especially relative to games at the time, I think there's also something to it dressing up the dollhouse experience in video game trappings that made it appeal to boys too in a way that
would have been frowned at if they played with an actual dollhouse.
While there might be overlap, the sims offered players status/career simulation, the option of mating and killing the sims, and a whole host of other things that represented departures from someone's actual life. I'd guess the appeal of the sims was more down to simulated optionality of lifestyles and relationships (+ obvious destructive fun through fires, grim reaper etc) than it was about doing one mundane task.
Off-topic: Playing a simulation game like RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 as a kid, I feel in hindsight may have had given me a world-view improvement which story books and other passive learning may have not filled in.
Nowadays, there seem to be quite a few kid EdTech startups/solutions which use gaming. This seems relevant, as the interactivity (from the simulations' simulated actions) helps it seems.
I remember playing The Sims when it first came out. It felt like someone had just distilled the drudgery and futility of modern life into a digital form. I never understood the appeal.
#1 everyone likes doing things that are considered chores. They just don't like to do them when it gets boring / stressful. For example I like powerwashing... but if I had to do it for 10 hours straight I'd hate it too.
#2 lots of those things require special circumstances, training, skills, big cost investment, risk. The game eliminates all that. Don't own a house? can still power wash without having to buy the gear, a house, and wait a few years.
#3 risk is a big one. I enjoyed truck simulator (for a short bit). Why? Because I can veg out while driving and there's no consequences. Or literally plow through traffic and not care. I can be as careful / careless as I want to be and it just works.
Its a way to take things you hate doing and have to pay attention while you do them, and let you veg out and enjoy the enjoyable part of the task.
It's definitely different, but it can be pretty similar really. Tending my actual plants and tending plants in stardew valley are both pleasant things I like to do while listening to an audiobook or podcast.
Have you ever lived in modern society? Its basically occupational therapy keeping you busy with maintaining your <insert local environment>. And its hugely popular.
Have you ever lived in modern society? It's basically occupational anti-therapy keeping you busy with paperwork for rich people. And it's hugely unpopular, but the bad guys have all the resources and weaponry, so it hasn't changed yet.
Jesting aside, that is the traditional role of games IMHO: let you experience society's mechanisms in a reduced, non overwhelming way, and get better at it with no/less fear of consequences.
I understand what you are talking about, but i just dont have that perspective. I just came back from replacing the mudgard and drivers door on a Citroen. Its going back to service in these minutes.
The foldit [0] game has players solving protein folding problems that have real world implications. More ideas in this angle would be data labeling type situations to power machine learning systems. These are currently done through MechanicalTurk or large offices in low cost areas of the world dedicated to the task.
The tools are not usually that polished or that pleasant to use, and don't have the same gamified and reward angle. So if you could figure out how to package the work, add some whimsy, and cross validate results you might have something.
i first had this idea more than a decade ago: a way to translate gaming tasks into something productive on the other end of the pipe. the gamer doesn't realise, and the company actually solves issues by just letting the gamer play the game.
in the non-gaming world, i think the closest mass market idea has been google's captcha which actually trains an AI in the background. that's very naive and very simple, and definitely not a game, but imagine something similar with puzzles (i.e. Witness, the game, is all about puzzles. why not replace those puzzles with puzzles from real life that actually need solving).
If you haven't read Ender's Game, I highly recommend it based on this topic.
I think the tricky part is - if it's an unsolved problem, how does the game know when a task is complete? Feedback loops are a core element of game design, and part of the reason tedious tasks can be satisfying, but unless it's directly manual labor, I'm unsure how to create a proper feedback loop
I thought the same. Ender's Game and the cell classification task have something in common: the end status to achieve (whether to eliminate all opponents or identify something that's known). If we think this way, these two tasks could still be treated as machine learnable tasks (albeit poorer solution possibly). A genetic algorithm for example, could be trained to derive the means to achieve the goals. In cases where we don't know the end goal of the game, how do we train ourselves towards an unknown objective or without guidance of known answers.
Neil Stephenson’s REAMDE touches on this idea, and reaches the somewhat inevitable conclusion that if you can automate enough about a real world task that you can translate it into gaming terms, and determine automatically whether or not the player has succeeded at the task (in order to reward them ‘in game’ for completing the task), then you have probably done all the essential work needed to have a computer do the task in the first place.
I think everyone and their dog had this idea the first time they learned of "grinding" in computer games, it's just that somehow, nobody's found out a way to turn the game-type grinding-input into real-world-type-grinding-output.
I do consider the protein folding game an interesting exploration into the realm, but since there are still more minecraft-carrots harvested than proteins folded, I'd say it is not an example of how to do it, but rather a datapoint in the right direction.
I think the work they do in the series Severance was like this. They were in some gamy looking interface and had no idea what they were actually doing but got good at doing it and apparently it was important
True! I mow my lawn with a push mower for the exercise. Neighbours think I’m nuts. I have toyed with getting a scythe but I have pets and the unthinkable could happen.
I used to use a scythe. It got a lot of thumbs up and such from passers-by. It's a pretty fun way to cut the grass; if you sharpen the blade nicely it's surprisingly effective. I used to use it in combo with a push mower, they're good on that super long grass that your push mower can't get through.
Nowadays I've succumbed to laziness and convention and use an electric trimmer and mower, but the scythe still comes out once in a while for kicks.
Something about the relaxed and repetitive motion, doing things a little differently and without a noisy machine, and of course the imagery of Death personified, reaping Souls.
It'd be pretty hard to hit a pet with a scythe used correctly, as you have full control of the blade at all times and it's pretty easy to stop/divert if necessary. I'd rank it about as dangerous as a push mower, which could catch a tail I guess.
My dad got one years ago from https://scythesupply.com and it works great, especially with the longer/taller weeds. Looks like they only have left-handed ones in stock "right" now.
Push mowers are actually best for the grass because of the scissor-like action, especially if you cut it low. I use them in combination with a scythe to cut long grass (I let it grow in the colder months).
That's the inspiration behind the shovelglove exercise routine - use a big hammer with a weighty end for exercise, keep it mildly interesting by pretending to be doing labour work with it (shovelling, among other things).
I think Euro Truck Simulator was the first game of this sort that I can think of that really had some kind of broad-ish appeal to it. Not necessarily “mundane chore” but more like “job is a game” game.
My father in law is a trucker and the only video game he plays is the Euro/American Truck Simulator games. Which I find interesting because I don’t think I would ever be interested in a game where you write computer software as the main goal.
There are several games like this in the "Zachtronics" genre, like Shenzen I/O or Exapunks. They revolve around programming puzzles, often with very low level languages or with other constraints. They can be a lot of fun, especially because there is often a real sense of progress. The story evolves after each puzzle you solve, instead of just "there is another ticket waiting for you in JIRA" style tedium that a programming job can be like.
Even Factorio was too much like programming to me and I had to stop playing because it became too much like work. I can’t imagine a game where I actually have to write anything closer to software than that.
I know of a lot of software developers who LOVE Factorio, because it ticks the boxes that their day job doesn't while using the same problem solving whatsits.
TIS-100 may still be of interest to you. It involves a highly-constrained development environment, with very clear goals, on a very unfamiliar style of system.
It's more of a puzzle game with programming elements, than a programming game. Understanding how code works simply makes it easier.
i'd argue factorio is closer to electrical engineering than software dev, but it definitely scratches the same itch of a well-engineered solution to a novel problem.
I had to stop playing Factorio because I felt it was too much like work. The “obsessive refacoring and optimization” aspects of the game are like crack cocaine to me.
I mean a lot of software development and techie life has become gamified; github streaks, collecting stars, getting :+1: votes, apple watch circles, no-fap or no drinking streak apps; tinder stars, instagram votes, youtube watches, badges/achievements, the list goes on. Lots of things are gamified, and I'm actually surprised there's not more of video game style sound or visual effects when you do these things.
I think people gravitate toward the grinding tasks (mundane chores) because they provide stable incremental rewards for work done which is in stark contrast to many people's real world jobs.
Is there any business working on remote controlled robots or is everyone only focused on AI? Seems like you could probably find a lot of cheap labor if they can control the robot from their house.
While I'm sure there's some truth to that, a lot of the "mundane chore" games are fun because they remove the un-fun parts, like having a boss, being required to do things on a schedule, and not being allow to screw things up.
Even just having the threat of being fired over your head is enough to make those chores not be fun, even without all the other stresses.
My wife and I have been playing co-op Stardew Valley lately, and while it's a "farming sim", most of the ugly parts of farming are conveniently left out:
* cleaning up animal poop
* spreading animal poop on fields
* slaughtering animals / pest control
* working with deadly tools like power take-offs
* competing with giant factory farms [though we just finished the first in-game year, so maybe Joja Corp will start having that effect in future years]
Almost the essence of game design is "oversimplifying life in a way that makes it fun while leaving the player with meaningful connections to their reality".
I can tell you from the farm my wife and I operate (currently in our 7th in game year), you will eventually become the giant factory farm to get to the end game.
But that’s why I love Stardew Valley in a different way than my wife. It hits the comfy aspect for her, a light dating sim, plus the combat is light enough that she’s gotten good at it there than she does in other games. For me, I get to optimize farm layout and selling strategies (like me realizing after all this time in-game that Slime Eggs are a high dollar item and totally should have gotten a slime hutch much sooner)
Why though? I don’t have an issue with your question or the idea of people remotely controlling pressure washers but whats the case for automation over elbow grease? Why do we always feel the need to automate and optimize instead of just being happy with things taking time and being difficult?
A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means.
I'm not sure it is. Yes, an AI solution isn't necessarily an easy problem to solve, but once it is solved, it scales extremely well. Having someone pick strawberries by robot does not. For every robot, you need an individual at the helm. How do you train them? How do deal with fluctuations in the number of people interested in picking at any given time? In a game like described above, part of the appeal is people have 0 obligations. They can start when they'd like, they can finish when they'd like, and there is no real world prize/penalty based on how well/poorly they perform. A person can hop on for 30 seconds or 5 hours, on a whim. They can get distracted, completely screw up, or sit idly while they do something else, and there are no real world consequences. If you try to recreate that same lack of obligation for a real world problem, you very likely could be setting yourself up for hurdles you simply can't deal with. If you begin to add consequences, you remove the appeal of the games with no obligations, and people won't participate.
AI is hard to get going, but I'm not sure it is any more difficult than some of these other options, and once you do, you will scale far better.
Right, but why not just go out in the field and pick strawberries instead of trying to involve AI and robots? To me this is an area where Ian Malcom’s point about can/should applies.
You're free to leave your job and go pick strawberries in 30 degree heat for a summer. You'd quickly see why no one wants to do such jobs. You speak like someone who has never worked in a factory or out in the fields. It's not glamorous, and there's a reason why these jobs are not desirable.
I worked manual labor jobs of varying types for the first ten years I was a part of the work force and I experienced many types of suffering during such work, including being driven so hard I passed out and almost losing my foot to a stump grinder. I couldn't get my boot off because my foot was so swollen. Farming is inherently dignified and noble. The problem with picking strawberries is the corruption that would drive the strawberry pickers to pick as much as possible at any cost.
Because as this article shows, there is a large number of folks who would consider doing this type of work remotely but would not do it in person? Because it would enable folks who are handicapped to do this kind of work? Because it's simpler to do than perfecting an AI (hell you could train an AI based on this work)?
I am totally onboard with helping folks who are handicapped and addressing other issues of disadvantage or injustice. My point is that I don't think it would be useful to try to make the act of strawberry picking itself easier.
Berry farming in Calfornia is rapidly disappearing because our cost of living is so high it makes it more economical to ship year round from Chile. Many other crops will likely follow, at least according to a friend in agricultural finance.
Medium term, as the global QoL increases the cost of labor for intensive crops are going make our diets very bland without further mechanization.
Fruit picking is monotonous and back breaking work that pays absolutely miserably. That we have to import labor to do it, and even imported labor complains and strikes about pay says a lot.
Have you ever picked strawberries professionally? My understanding is that it's physically demanding and exhausting. Why not have automated fields providing cheaper produce?
I haven't, either, but I have picked other kinds of fruit for a whole day and it's indeed pretty hard work. And in my case it was a family orchard, so it was "my" fruit and I got to munch on it while I worked; a commercial operation that presumably frowns upon its workers eating the merchandise sounds downright miserable.
Because instead we can delegate tasks that no one wants to do to robots, machinery and computers, and instead focus human labour and brain power on other things. Which is how we got to the point that we are at in the first place.
the reality is somewhat more complicated than that. Every time you outsource something you also lose a means to exercise your brain power or your physical body. It's why many of us are in decidedly worse shape than some of our ancestors. There's a company in the Netherlands that makes mechanical rather than electric lifts[1] that involves human action. One result, people who use them are less frail and sick. It's a technology that augments rather than replaces the human body.
And there's a big difference between the two. We got to where we are because a lot of the things we built have aided us and increased human potential, not diminished it. Even a gun which can be used for good or bad ultimately leaves decision making to someone with a brain. Putting that gun on a robot and even giving the ability to make a decision up? That's a very different kind of technology.
It's coming / happening, there's Japanese elderly people operating welcoming / serving robots, military servicemen operating drones, and of course every operator job in your power plant and whatnot is that kind of work.
That already exists, there are construction sites where excavators work 24/7, being remote controlled by people from different time zones, to not break work time laws.
> What place has a law that prevents you from hiring three sets of locals to work three different 8-hour shifts?
You hire 2 people to work 12-hour shifts. The machine is moving in your country, but the employees work somewhere (and for someone else) with lax labor laws.
We used to make fun of our roommate in college, who would notoriously never clean, but would spend hours a day playing a video game in which a little robot cleaned a house.
One of the most popular mods in skyrim makes it so your character now has to regularly eat, drink, wear warm clothing, stay dry, get decent sleep, etc. I never got the appeal. There's an argument that the game is realistic played this way, but its still a game. You press a button to go to sleep and the camera fades for five seconds. That's not exactly adding realism or making the game more satisfying or challenging really, that's adding mundane stuff to the list of chores you now have to do to mess around in game.
Clearly there is an appeal for doing these tasks somehow for some people. I think it can get a little bit unhealthy if it becomes a means to escape the real life RPG you should be focusing on. I was a little bit in this state back when runescape was more popular 15 years ago or so. I would spend hours clicking around diligently gathering and preparing crafting materials in game, while I neglected very basic tasks around the home. Maybe people need to figure out how to turn laundry and dishes into a quest with checkpoints and lore and xp to get them as motivated as they are to do virtual chores.
Other than the sleep part, an awful lot of "survival" genre games work that way. Like ARK Survival Evolved, for instance.
Honestly they do become a chore, because your character is constantly weakening and you die a lot. As you advance in the clothes and tech you can build, you stay alive longer.
But it absolutely is work. You need to harvest X to build Y, so you can unlock the ability to build Z, and then you need to find half a dozen As, Bs and Cs before you can do D, and D takes your character some time in game ...
They become very absorbing and huge time-sinks. What's notable for me is that when you turn the difficulty down, either by reducing the resources needed to build, or reducing time constraints on activities, there's just not much game left there.
The first Harvest Moon, which a lot of these mellow games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley follow on from, came out in 1996; Shenmue came out in 1999. I'm sure there's even earlier examples than Harvest Moon even.
Idle games are the perfect distillation of what some people want from video games. Seeing numbers go up from low effort actions gives you that artificial sense of achievement that can be missing from real life.
I see them as natural continuation of "simulation" games, titles like SimFarm from 1993, or Harvest Moon from 1996. These had several aspects that are explicitly micromanagement, like placing things one by one, waiting for some time, then clicking on everything once again.
Right. When you move in to the boyfriend's place and there's not really enough space for what you have, and so your art stuff must be "tidied away" out of sight I was like "Oh - oh no..." and then IIRC the next move is back to your childhood bedroom. No need for words.
[Although if you do want some words, those words are "Fuck Off Fund"]
The only ever video game idea I had was a VR hand dryer simulator crossed with some Guitar Hero and RPG elements. You can build it up with historical hand dryers and funky toilet locations. It doesn't really matter around what activity the core gameplay revolves if the end result is fun.
I like this one too. You could add expansion packs that also simulate different soap dispensers and water armatures, so the story arc of how the hands got wet in the first place is covered as well. And challenges to remove various types of gunk from your (virtual) hands in the most efficient way possible (less water, less soap used, fastest,...).
I would play a VR dish unloading game where I had to throw breakable items into place from a distance and hope they balanced or that breakage was minimised.
There's a VR game series (?) called job simulator that has you doing joke versions of common jobs, apparently for some AI overlord's amusement. I haven't played it but my kids watch a Let's Play kind of deal of it on youtube and it actually looks fun and funny to just make a huge mess dumping all the wrong fluids into a car or hurling hot dogs at a customer.
Tetris doesn't incorporate a physically-correct simulation of water that needs to be sprayed in between dishes in order to remove the gunk, so the strategy to win Tetris would not be helpful to win a proper dishwasher simulator game, even though there are of course some similarities.
It seems like any such task or hobby - a major benefit is a feeling of mastery. To the degree that it is mastery, there are healthier ways to meet this natural psychological need.
It would be interesting if we could Ender’s Game this with actual real life drones or something. But then, I can think of a million ways that could go horribly wrong.
It’s insane how much of my youth was literally wasted on dumb video games. It went way beyond normal levels of entertainment. Luckily after a year or two of college they started to lose their allure to me. But I knew many people that it seriously impacted their adult life. People dropped out of school and changed majors because they could not quit WoW, for example.
I look back on the time playing video games with buddies in high school more fondly than the time I spent playing competitive sport or throwing rocks at cars.
It depends on how you are evaluating it. Did I enjoy gaming? Yes very much. Did I enjoy it more than sports? For sure. Did gaming have more of a positive impact on my life than sports. Not a chance.
There was a game 20 years ago called a Work Time Farm where you work for literal Pennies in a sweatshop factor putting caps on pens. If you don’t have access to a PlayStation portable, you can also go play Amazon Turk
My 14 year old son and I found a gaming connection in Farming Simulator. There's something satisfying to both of us to go through the tasks of plowing, fertilizing, seeding, and harvesting a field with and upgrade path that allows it all to be done more efficiently. Going back and forth with the equipment is somehow Zen-like.
Some of the most popular YouTube channels are similar: people doing "mundane chores" - some watch for ASMR but I think a lot of it to connect to the real world - because online is not very satisfying after you get used to it after the first dopamine hits:
• Lawn care and mowing - my favorites - both are Christians and do the charity of free lawn care for those having troubles
• Repair - my favorite - makes me appreciate his skill and confirms I'll never want to do it myself. I'm not for sure but reckon he's fixin' to repair that old boy.
A common theme - they are NOT really knowledge economy jobs/work. Not everyone can become programmers. And online is far lower "information/novelty" than the real world. Another theme - these people are happy doing what they are doing - you can tell. Finally most of them how "fly-over accents" which is what most people experience everyday so it's more relatable to most people.
Pressure washing is not a mundane chore. There's something cathartic about wiping away a decade's worth of grime in an instant with a stream of water powerful enough to cut your arms off.
"But gaming companies have identified the best part of work — creative achievement ... The concept recognizes that working without the bother of deadlines or micromanagement can be a lot of fun."
Imagine if we did that to actual jobs. But no, instead we simulate satisfying work conditions for profit.
I feel like… vacuuming, doing 2-3 loads of dishes a day, cleaning up after my kids, maintaining the grounds, taking care of the chickens and so on is enough. I’d rather pay to, you know, shoot things or race around exotic lands… is this now considered a boomer thing?
What really happened is that "competitive online gameplay" now requires you to do outside research to determine the game meta, usually some kind of grind to achieve said meta, and only at that point can you begin to use your brain to optimize your individual performance. And you have to do all that fast enough to keep up with the current season before the meta changes.
This is different from the games we played growing up, where from the beginning you could use your brain to optimize, improve, and do the brain things that give satisfaction.
"Mundane chores" that gamers do are now mostly part of the "meta grind" but also niche mundane tasks like, say, trading a certain resource, doing a dungeon for the 200th time but faster, etc are in the few remaining places where you can derive this kind of satisfaction.
Developers have become so hyper focused on ensuring the "meta" play is balanced (and requires you to grind in their game), that they patch out these chores as "quality of life" improvements.
The overlap of people who engage in "competitive online gameplay" and those who play "PowerWash Simulator" is probably not that large. And it's even less likely that the latter is in any way replacing the former.
I'd surmise that the people engaging in mundane chore games are those that want mindless entertainment.
I disagree. I certainly play both types of game. Sure, you don't /need/ to have the most efficient pattern in power wash simulator. They hardly punish you even in use of your time, but when you hit that perfectly aligned parallel line with no streaks, it sure feels good. And that is the core of the gameplay satisfaction..
"Playerskill mattering" has become largely inaccessible in competitive studio games, so these indie games are able to scratch that itch by letting you jump in and immediately see the reward of improving your hand eye coordination, path planning, etc.
Yeah, I certainly enjoy my competitive RTS (though in small doses these days, nothing is quicker to cause wrist pain than a 3 hour starcraft session), or high end mmo raiding, but can also enjoy chilling in truck sim or similar
One of my best friends, a man from Iceland I met in Overwatch a few years ago plays both Overwatch when he feels like really digging into something, and he'll play simulator games (Truck sim, Cooking sim, etc.) when he wants to 'chill' or wants less of a challenge. It works well for him, since his disability means that gaming is pretty much his whole life now.
Games nowadays are less competitive than they used to be, see the simplification of controls in RTS and simplification of shooter mechanics (i.e. no quake) etcetc
Have to seen professional csgo matches? Players spend thousands of hours mastering smoke and flash throws and recoil patterns and bhopping, and flick shots. The skill ceiling for competitive team csgo is absolutely insane. Dota and lol and eve and farming simulator are right up there too.
> Players spend thousands of hours mastering smoke and flash throws and recoil patterns and bhopping, and flick shots. The skill ceiling for competitive team csgo is absolutely insane.
Just to point out, these two statements are unrelated. You can have a game with a low skill ceiling which nevertheless involves skills that take forever to learn. If those skills have a small impact on the outcome of the game, they won't raise the skill ceiling much.
The paradigmatic example of such a game is "chess dice", in which two players first play a game of chess, and then each roll a six-sided die. High roll wins; the winner of the chess game adds one to their die roll.
This game involves exactly as much skill as chess, while having a much lower skill ceiling than chess does.
This doesn't track at all. FPS such as Overwatch have characters that move faster and mechanics that are more complicated than Quake, even if the time to kill is higher. Any given MOBA has dozens of complicated skill interactions that change every match.
I don't love Fortnite, but building structures while shooting requires pretty demanding execution. "Simple" isn't the term I'd use at all.
I miss cheats in modern(ish) videogames. Luckily, you can get some with emulation of older (cheatless, or hard-to-cheat-at) games.
Eg. pokemon (gb/gbc/gba) with cheats is still a great game.. you can explore everything, infinite hp/pp, catch-all pokeballs, go everywhere, see everything, catch everything you need/want, fast power-ups and evolutions, without the constant grind of powering up your pokemon and running back to pokemon centers.
Same with games like GTA (although, there is not a lot of grinding here)... you can still play through the whole story, do all the missions even when invincible, have a lot of fun, but without the "getting kiled" parts and restarting the same mission sequence 50 times.
Somehow in modern times, cheating (to avoid the grind) has turned from inputing some random combination of commands to paying actual money for premium crystals or whatever, that give you a competitive edge against AI (and real-life) enemies, or in some game (clash of clans, etc.) to just make the obsurdly long wait times shorter. I get the monetization aspect, and developers getting paid aspect, but eg. Age of empires developers got paid too, and i can still type "coinage" in the chat window to get 1000 gold without paying extra money.
Well, the modern version of this is very granular difficulty sliders.
In the name of accessibility, a lot of recent games allow you to customize the hell out of your gameplay experience — things like “how hard do enemies hit?”, “how easily can I find ammo?”, even “how hard is it to make jumps?”, and so on.
Hades has a setting called God Mode, where every time you die, you just get straight up 1% stronger, stacking infinitely.
Cheats in single player games aren’t dead - they’ve evolved!
Anyone remember the infinite masterball cheat (red and blue) that required surfing up and down the eastern side of Cinnabar Island and fighting the MissingNo. pokemon? Good times. Also, I would 100% buy a Nintendo Switch if they released a remastered version of red/blue/yellow (no additional pokemon ffs) especially with online multiplayer.
I had foolishly used every rare candy I'd found before I learned about the item dupe glitch. I then proceeded to run around the entire world searching for hidden items hoping I'd missed one. By the 3rd or 4th city I painstakingly searched tile by tile, I found one!
Adult me wishes I still had that determination and persistence, fuck.
Reminds me of when I was playing Morrowind on the Xbox at fifteen years old and, after many months of playing, I finally embarked on the main quest. At which point I realized I had looted a main quest item from some fortress during early exploration and misplaced it. I needed it to finish the game.
I must have spent months here and there looking for that item in the world. I checked every shopkeeper in case I sold it. Then I searched every container I might have stashed it in.
Never found it. Never beat the game... (Until last year, 15+ years later, thanks to OpenMW).
Always wanted to rip the save file from the Xbox in my parents' attic and search for where I put that damn item just out of curiosity.
But your determination and persistence reminded me of mine.
You have to use the joycons. Multiplayer battles don't really work because all pokemon in Pikachu/Eevee have weirdly inflated stats due to the candy system imported from Pokemon Go. You can't battle wild pokemon; you can only catch them.
This isn't restricted to the Let's Go series, but all modern Pokemon games (starting with X/Y) are absurdly easy in comparison to the originals; don't expect that you'll ever be in any danger of losing a battle.
(Also, Pikachu/Eevee are not remakes of Red/Blue - they're remakes of Yellow. But that's a small difference.)
If what you want is online multiplayer pokemon battles with just the first 151 pokemon eligible, I'd probably go for Sword/Shield and try to round up support on Smogon for your "only gen I pokemon" format. If you want to replay Yellow, then Let's Go is what you want.
> Multiplayer battles don't really work because all pokemon in Pikachu/Eevee have weirdly inflated stats due to the candy system imported from Pokemon Go. You can't battle wild pokemon; you can only catch them. This isn't restricted to the Let's Go series, but all modern Pokemon games (starting with X/Y) are absurdly easy in comparison to the originals; don't expect that you'll ever be in any danger of losing a battle.
Oh man, that’s tragic :’( I knew there had to be a catch. I genuinely don’t understand why they wouldn’t just remake the originals! Surely I’m not the only one in my generation with nostalgia and a professional salary to spend on video games.
I mean ... other than some of the multiplayer stuff mentioned, Eevee/Pikachu are tile-for-tile remakes of the old games, so if you're after a nostalgia kick I'd say they are definitely worth it.
> You can't battle wild pokemon; you can only catch them. This isn't restricted to the Let's Go series, but all modern Pokemon games (starting with X/Y) are absurdly easy in comparison to the originals; don't expect that you'll ever be in any danger of losing a battle.
If you're looking for my opinions, the restriction to catching wild pokemon doesn't really hurt the game. (It's also true that the classic "random battle" mechanic is mostly gone - instead, tall grass and cave tiles that could previously generate random battles now generate pokemon that are visible from the overworld, and you can run into them or avoid them at your own discretion. I happen to like that change, and I believe it's popular generally.)
The change in difficulty level is, in my opinion, bad. What happened is that pokemon now earn half of an opponent's experience value just by being on your team during the battle, and full value if they participate. (Catching a pokemon counts as defeating them.) The older system was that the opponent's experience value was divided evenly among participants while spectators got nothing. So for a battle in which two of your pokemon participate in defeating an enemy pokemon worth 400 experience:
- In generations I through V, your two participating pokemon would earn 200 experience each, for a total of 400 experience.
- In generations VI forward, your two participating pokemon would earn 400 experience each, and your other four pokemon would earn 200 experience each, for a total of 1600 experience.
But this 300% increase in experience earned by your team (250% in the likely case where you only have one participant per enemy) was not accompanied by any increase in enemy levels or in experience required for you to level up, or by a decrease in enemy experience values. You just earn ludicrous amounts of experience and dramatically overlevel everything prior to the elite four, and there's nothing you can do about it. It is not possible for a pokemon on your team to fall behind in levels even if you never use it at all.
As a separate concern, specific battles that were viewed as challenging in the original games tend to be nerfed in the remakes; the notable ones are Whitney in Gold/Silver and Cynthia in Diamond/Pearl.
My point still stands about the tile-for-tile remake though. I thoroughly enjoyed them. But then I wasn't at all bothered about fighting wild pokemon, and honestly the original games had virtually zero difficulty for me anyway. Just waste a bunch of time fighting wild pokemon to boost your stats every so often, then carry on winning at everything. There are reasons to try things like that in the new game - catching the same pokemon multiple times increases the chances of shinies appearing, and pokemon with better stats.
Each to their own, but for me it was a good nostalgia kick, and I'm not going to get upset if some of the mechanics have changed a bit.
Alternatively, check out PokeMMO. It's basically a multiplayer Pokemon game built on the roms of the original games (supports gen 1, and 3-5). There isn't a native Switch build though so you'd need to dualboot Android or Linux if you wanted to make that happen.
I also occasionally enjoy cheating in video games, but it's rarely about the game itself at that point anymore. I've noticed it's not really about avoiding tedious or unpleasant parts of the game for me. I just think it's funny to have tutorial enemies yielding astronomical amounts of XP and gold or to have random Great People born in my cities every single turn. No kill like overkill.
It's also educational. Creating overpowered joke Civ4 mods and reading disassemblies of NES games to adjust numbers in an emulator's debugger make for fun semi-practical programming puzzles. Honestly, I think I enjoy the process of cheating more than the result.
Try it out sometime! Load up some old game in gdb and start messing with the numbers. It can be fun.
I like WeMod[0], which is a unified GUI for trainers. It supports a lot of games, handles a lot of the heavy lifting (e.g. starting the game in offline-only mode for multiplayer games), shows any extra steps that you might have to take for a specific game, and the developers are very quick at putting out trainers for new games and updating trainers for older games when needed. You can even see the queue of the games that they're working on supporting/updating.
I also like the Xbox Gamebar widget for those games that are hard to alt-tab out of.
Cheats graduated into "assist features" (invincibility, reduced damage, etc.), which you can toggle in game options. Some recent games, like Psychonauts 2 and Control have them and does not penalize players for using them.
Play on PC! Plenty of excellent modding communities, or just the ability to drop into a dev console for a bit on most games there. My partner often does this to reduce parts of games she does not find enjoyable.
What really disappoints me is I'm seeing a lot of YouTubers and streamers advertise really hard challenge they do in games , and even often sometimes advertise them as 100% legit.
Those interest, as some of these challenges are extremely difficult, and I'm curious to learn what stragties they used. Then usually I get mid way through the, the explains the issues that make the challenge hard, before immediately dumping a console command to instantly bypass them.
I disagree with pretty much everything here. Cheating in single player games is super lame. It’s fun to be a god for a brief period but quickly it just makes the game really boring. Pokémon with infinite hp sounds awful and will massively compound any sense of a grind because now all fighting is pointless. Some games may be grindy but cheating for instant gratification is likely worse.
I would also argue most games are not really that grindy. It’s actually… rare to see in any single player game. If anything most games put you at risk of becoming too powerful too fast. If there’s a grind it is usually for the last 1% of content. And very few games actually try to sell you power ups for single player content. That’s really not a common thing as some people claim.
Multiplayer games are a different beast, but you definitely don’t want cheaters there either. Not wanting long progression curves for multiplayer games is a reasonable ask. Allowing cheaters is not.
> Cheating in single player games is super lame. It’s fun to be a god for a brief period but quickly it just makes the game really boring.
Probably depends on the person and the game. If they're enjoying the game as an interactive storytelling medium, playing through it on god-mode is probably not significantly worse than struggling to win; it's no worse than a movie.
I doubt it. There’s still a big difference between very low difficulties and god mode. God mode in the typical sense exposes the cracks in the game and breaks the immersion.
And if you enjoy dicking around and abusing cheats that’s fine but it’s about on par with smothering fine dining with hot sauce. Or reading the summary of a novel rather than the book.
Or I played this game already 3 times and I don't care about the lockpicking mini-game since I already done it 100 times, or I already crawled on some stupid long cave levels where the developers just spammed spiders, I want to enjoy certain parts and not waste my limited time on the stuff I don't enjoy.
Unfortunately few games have good modding tools, but the few games that have you will notice players using mods to "cheat" away parts that they no longer enjoy , like skipping some terrible level in Dragon Age Origins on repeat play-troughs. Other time saving mods are things like increase inventory capacity (it is not immersive anyway you can put in your pockets 50 swords anyway so why not double it and save your precious little time and not travel to a merchant).
Oh boy no. Maybe for you. Maybe for some. With a bit of empathy should be able to imagine that not everyone think like you do. What if someone wants to play pokemon for the exploration, lore and care taking of pokemon. For that person, fighting and leveling is a chore. Maybe someone does not have the actual time for the grind before each arena.
> Pokémon with infinite hp sounds awful and will massively compound any sense of a grind because now all fighting is pointless
What if the grind was not a goal or what if we actually doesnt want to fight at all. Pacific run exists. Let's me skip dat boss if I want to.
Agreed. I spent dozens of hours playing GTA5 and literally never made any progress in the story. I had too much fun driving around like a crazy person, constantly using the cheat code to avoid dying.
If you want to play Pokémon and not do the Pokémon battles then you’re on a weird edge case where it’s debatable whether you’re actually playing the game at all. If that’s what you want, sure, go ahead.
That’s actually still very different. Removing fighting from the game vs doing it but with infinite health. The former is at least self consistent I guess.
They enjoy or get satisfaction from one part of the game without enjoying or getting satisfaction from another part. Being happy there are methods to skip or minimize the part they don't like is pretty reasonable. There's no reason in a recreational hobby to struggle through something you don't enjoy in order to do something you do.
Personally I think the battles are the best part of Pokemon but if folks like the story, the exploration/discovery/search, or the collecting parts of Pokemon but don't like the battles it doesn't hurt me if they do something to minimize them and they aren't lesser for doing so.
As I've gotten older and busier I've started using cheats and walkthroughs and methods to skip parts of games I don't enjoy much more often. I'm an adult with real difficulties and responsibilities and stressors. I spend 60+ hours a week running a startup. I have other hobbies like rock climbing and Magic to struggle against and push myself to get better at.
I understand that the challenge can be a lot of fun, I finished both Hades and Doom Eternal on their hardest difficulty and really loved my time with both but sometimes a challenge isn't what I want out of a game and I just want to enjoy the story or explore the world or blow off steam.
Video games for me are usually a relaxing past-time I enjoy in the small amount of free-time I have available and I'm often not willing to get frustrated slogging through slow sections or trying to overcome difficult ones. So you bet your ass I'm playing Elden Ring with an easy-mode mod, save-scummed constantly in X-Com, used infinite money cheats in City Skylines, and fast travel anywhere in Witcher 3.
If you prefer playing games differently from me and want a challenge when I don't that's totally fine, I hope you're having a great time cause the way each of us play doesn't affect or take away from the other person experience or goal in any way.
People are allowed to enjoy different things or even the same things in different ways and its super lame to call them super lame for something so inconsequential as how they play video games.
> So you bet your ass I'm playing Elden Ring with an easy-mode mod, save-scummed constantly in X-Com, used infinite money cheats in City Skylines, and fast travel anywhere in Witcher 3.
These all seem pretty reasonable to me. The first one is a desired difficulty level. The second one… well that one’s kind of on you depending on how granular it was. The third one is a desired game mode. The fourth one is just quality of life.
Elden ring was poorly balanced imo. I would imagine if you’re less skilled an easy mode would still give you the full game. But I stand pretty firm that an infinite health mode would utterly ruin it.
Save scumming because something went poorly vs repeatedly save scumming a high risk move until the dice fall favorably seems a little lame to me.
I rarely have time for video games now (work full-time while also trying to optimize for rock climbing). But I really enjoy "Let's Play"s of cinematic story-driven games (especially games which are fairly linear)
I can watch on up to 2X speed, skip through sections where the player is grinding/leveling, managing inventory, toolbuilding, traveling long distances, or engaging in repetitive combat. I just finished Last of Us games 1 and 2 in ~12 hours total (playing would have taken closer to 50)
City builders like city skylines or sim city are much more fun with infinite money, at least for me. I could care less about the financial part, I just like building!
Sure, I buy that. But presumably you’re just interested in building cities, not completing challenges or a story mode or whatever. I’ve never played that specific title.
Especially since the "money" side of those games is always so very weak, you just need to learn a few steps and you'll effectively have infinite money anyway.
Yeah. Either I cheat myself infinite money or I set up a basic, in the black city, turn the speed as high as it'll go and go eat dinner. Functionally the same result, so why waste the time?
Sometimes I kind of wish the city simulator games had buildings and roads be free - the only money issue you had to worry about was balancing monthly maintenance expenses with taxes, as the cost to "build" isn't really a problem at all.
> Pokémon with infinite hp sounds awful and will massively compound any sense of a grind because now all fighting is pointless. Some games may be grindy but cheating for instant gratification is likely worse.
Yeah, cheating in Pokemon is what finally killed my love for the games as a kid. A friend wanted to show me his cool Action Replay, turned on every cheat and left my game saved in a state where it would be a lot of work to get back to "normal". Somehow it revealed all the grindy bits that I had been okay with up until that point.
But it definitely does depend on the person. My friend was still having fun with his Pokemon games after. Another friend in high school seemed to get more fun out of typing the level skip code on Starcraft than beating the levels the intended way.
Weird. I'm disillusioned with games that have grind as a major pillar. So my most memorable games have been games like Soma or Outer Wilds. Can't say I like games as a whole any less, I just avoid a number of genres.
Sort of. The lowest difficulty may be stupidly easy, not even requiring comprehension of the game mechanics. But it’s rarely so blatant that it would be described as a god mode.
Not all cheats are “god mode” and there are games that use various cheats the same way other games use multidimensional difficulty settings, as the means to disable or enable particular subsystems or dimensions of challenge (or bypass them, e.g., by providing infinite resources of one kind so that the system addressing that resource can be ignored.)
Sure. People can also just waste their lives away on shitty drugs. It’s their lives and aside from some edge cases I’m willing to ignore it doesn’t affect other people.
But maybe it’s not unreasonable to have an opinion that it’s a super lame choice. Maybe seems foolish. Or likely to lead to lesser appreciation of the art/life.
It's a good thing its a signle player game and someone cheating in their playthrough has absolutely no impact on your own enjoyment of the same game!
I agree re: cheaters in multiplayer games, though. Except for the rare cases of "everyone gets to!" ala CoD:MW2 lobbies where the cheater/host set the game to where everyone could fly and shoot massively explosive rounds. That's good fun, for a few rounds.
I am not going to jump through the hoop to read the article, but when it comes to youtube/twitch the biggest factor is not the game choice but the personality that is playing it. A powerwashing simulator stream is basically a longform improvised podcast with some white noise and a livechat.
I gotta agree, I've started watching people play cities skylines because I like that game and it's just fun to see people who are willing to spend A LOT more time than me playing and modding taking the game to it's extremes. Another fun channel is the fellow, Josh? from "let's game it out" on youtube. He captures a type of play that I did when I was younger and spent all my time coloring outside the lines so to speak, in the game worlds.
Seconding the recommendation for Josh at "lets game it out". Oh, wow, the time spent on the builds to make the game do things it was never designed to do - and funny commentary at that. he old content is definitely worth watching as well.
I’m so thankful for you and the child post to yours that brought up “Let’s Game It Out”! As someone who enjoys breaking games for fun and profit, it is delightful to watch him do things the game never thought to correct for (Thinking specifically about how he’s helped Hydroneer fix in game economy bugs, haha)
Another person who does similar gameplay, but more in depth is a YouTuber called Ambiguous Amphibian. Imagine the depths of where Josh is willing to go, and then add a layer of someone talking about philosophy and tying it back into the game they are playing. Would very much recommend if you are into LGIO!
The cities skylines channels are great because you get to see someone knowledgeable about the game (and sometimes city planning itself, like https://www.youtube.com/c/CityPlannerPlays - I now know a bit more about Skylines but an awful lot more about how a city is built) build something. It can be very entertaining both in the discussion available and also in the "hey he did what I would have done" way - similar to watching Jeopardy, I guess.
A lot of youtube is the modern equivalent of laugh tracks; you can watch something as-is, or you can watch someone with someone else prompting how you should feel about it.
Seems like half of the comments here are from people who read the title and assumed the article was about grinding in many modern video games. The article is actually about the burgeoning genre of simulator titles for literal chores, like Power Washing simulator, Job Simulator, Unpacking, etc.
While there may be some related underlying factors influencing both, they are very much not the same thing. As always, it helps to read the article before commenting.
Played an old, old Japanese game called 'Power Shovel'. It was a riot, particularly because of the Samurai warrior that would come out and insult you after every pathetic attempt to move your pile of dirt.
Wow that's a cool game, the destructible car is impressive, haven't seen that in any PS1 games! I wonder how they did that (if they hardcoded it with trigger points, or if there's some real physics going on).
I think that little video shows exactly why "mundane chores" are the rage in gaming. You get paid $80k for less than 5 minutes of operating a power shovel, running up against a time limit.
If each level was 8 hours of operating a power shovel out in the hot sun, and if you stop playing without calling in sick, or call in sick too many times you immediately lose and are banned from playing the game again, it might be a bit less popular...
Most of the comments are the comments are about the article and threads typically evolve to become more on-topic so you're better off writing something about it as well, rather than adding meta and did-you-read-the-article-ing. Plus the guidelines ask you to avoid that.
The site wants my personal information (and possibly my money, it isn't clear) to allow me to read beyond the first paragraph. (Though to be fair, even what little is shown is sufficient to clarify the subject matter :)
This makes it clear that people just want to do something useful in their lives. Why isn't real life building on this? What are the remaining differences?
Is it the extra bureaucracy involved in earning money? Is it the feeling of being exploited when working for someone else? Is it the pressure to economically justify anything we might want to do?
How much friction can we eliminate in work? What is essential, and what is not?
I feel that humanity would be better served if the feeling of achievement was coupled with meatspace usefulness, and not just virtual creation.
> The concept recognises that working without the bother of deadlines or micromanagement can be a lot of fun.
And they're right: building things is indeed fun, it's the pressure of deadlines and handling your boss/clients/etc that can make it stressful. But I don't think you can take that out of a "job" situation; other people paying for your work is the entire point of jobs.
If you are just doing things because you like it without anyone paying you for it, that's called a hobby even if you do the exact same things that you can also get paid for. (There is an obvious parallel here with the "getting paid for FOSS" discussion that pops up regularly on HN)
Until there's decisive evidence all the pressure, lack of transparency and politics is in fact necessary, there is no reason to believe it is. We've made impressive things and done impressive things without them for the entire history of our species.
Most people really just want "do X, get Y" type of deals. Those deals are becoming increasingly more rare except for minimum wage jobs working you to the bone. Not having to deal with politics has become a luxury instead of rewarding a few individuals to deal with all the politics. Even something as simple as getting a salary indication is already a hassle for Average Joe.
The job market can learn a lot from game design and gamification, but the guys at the top seem insistent on believing they know better than decades of research.
It seems relevant that all the "chore" games mentioned seem to be single player games where at most you compete against a few computer players that don't mind losing. In almost every job you will be playing multiplayer, and competing for scarce resources like promotions, money and power. The pressure, lack of transparency and politics stem from the fact that people in the workplace are usually interested in furthering their career over time and (except for the most rockety of rocket ships) can only get that if some of their colleagues don't.
Even "do X, get Y" type of deals are a threat, since the amount of Y is finite and the more that goes to others, the less that goes to you. It gets even worse when you take into account that people can lie. Someone might only be pretending to be happy "doing X" for the rest of their lives and will actually stab their coworkers in the back for a promotion. The guys at the top are definitely not unaware of this dynamic.
I'm skeptical of evolutionary psychology in general but if we think about prehistory a lot of work was doing stuff that had deadlines but you could easily understand what needed to be done. You have to go out and collect a bunch of nuts and berries, and there's a deadline because you'll starve if you don't get the food, but you know the food is out there and it's just a matter of getting it. Your ancestors have lived off food from this land for thousands of years, you know you will too. Similarly for simple crafting, you need to make the clothing or the clay pot but there's no barrier to doing it, you just have to do it. In these cases you could also have a boss, that is, some person with authority directing and judging you, but it's someone you know and someone whose role you will inevitably fill.
I think the key difference in the modern world is that success is not guaranteed, for reasons that may be well out of your control, and failure is scary with unknown consequences. We can imagine a world with pretty much the same jobs and the same work, but with more security removing the intense stress people feel.
Success wasn't guaranteed in the ancient world either. Even if you were cultivating crops, a drought you couldn't control could wipe out your crops. Or baddies could invade and steal your stuff and kill your people en masse.
Overall, we have way more security than the ancient world did. Droughts are still a problem as the western US has been seeing, but at least we're at a point today where it just means food prices go up rather than food vanishing entirely and requiring migration to other countries or something.
As for stress, largely European workers don't seem to feel the pressures that American workers do, which probably boils down to in part a mix of higher taxes leading to better safety nets as well as generally much more vacation time from work. Also politics in European countries generally isn't as polarized, though by no means is it perfect.
Farming as a necessity didn't happen until late prehistory and early history. Before that people hunted, fished or foraged for their daily food. They had nothing worth stealing or killing for or that couldn't be rebuilt quickly after an earthquake or other disaster. In the worst case they could just move a few miles away. Dying from a drought wiping out your crops or from being attacked by raiders from the mountains or from a warlord or pharaoh that claimed to rule over you didn't happen until later. Even then your own life was still simple to understand: being a farmer or shepherd or what have you.
I don't mean to say this was all perfect, but instead that when we talk about the stress of modern jobs, we should go beyond saying no one likes deadlines or bosses, because the real problem is the, for some people literally daily, uncertainty.
As someone who has put too many hours into EVE online to count. I do mundane things in video games because of two different reasons.
1) The reward for doing the mundane thing is usually very direct and actually pretty decent if you commit to it. For example with enough grinding in EVE you can afford some very fancy spaceships. Or with hours of code raiding in Rust you can steal all of someones stuff by just typing in 4 digit codes for hours.
2) Doing the mundane thing in the game is still a form of escapism from doing the mundane thing in the real world. Except usually the video game isn't hardcore mode. If I don't do it and a die I just respawn. Meatspace doesn't have this luxury. In this case the video game is an escape from existential dread.
Haha, I used to do Planetary Interaction in wormhole space, to chill out. It was peaceful, setting up my extractors, harvesting raw materials, then running through various factories to obtain upgrades or finished products.
Of course, loading up my cargo and bringing to market was tense... but I never was attacked, probably because I only went to wormholes from hisec space. (The wormhole farming corp I was in maintained various stations but I went with the not-as-lucrative ones accessible from hisec and skipped the low/no sec ones. As I recall, I stopped a few years ago.)
I would second this sentiment. As a teen I loved the action of Privateer and RPGs but found some of the grind tedious. Later as an adult I found certain kinds of grind kind of fun, to a point. Reaching the pay off is key. Things that feel too out of reach or have pay-to-win shortcuts just completely deflate the reward and destroy my motivation.
Cheating in MP also ruined it for me. Now I mostly do SP and occasionally cheat there when it feels like the game is getting too grindy or unfair.
Well, there is liability, safety, and practicality. I have no desire for a career change, but trying a forklift or city bus or train in a simulator is a fun afternoon. I don't think the city is gonna let me joyride in their equipment, anyways.
You can go over to r/powerwashingporn and see a lot of homeowners renting some equipment for an afternoon, but you don't want them going out to public land and cleaning whatever they want because they might just damage stuff with the wrong chemicals or techniques. I know beaurocracy isn't very fun but nobody wakes up with the sole desire to manufacture red tape for no reason.
> This makes it clear that people just want to do something useful in their lives.
People want to do something with obvious, tangible impact in their lives. Most of these games have a very clear impact on the virtual world; that wall is clean, and I cleaned it. That house got built and I built it. Those shelves got stocked, and I did it. So on.
In meatspace, most jobs are either heavily removed from a tangible benefit, or have bad pay and working conditions. You can be in HR or accounting or IT, and several steps removed from any kind of tangible end-product, or you can be a berry picker working in the heat for $7/hr.
With the advent of the assembly line and exacerbated by offshoring, the high-value part of the production chain has become managing production rather than the production itself.
Well, there is gamification, whether you give a gold start to yourself or use an app like Habitica.
Personally, I struggle with cleaning because it's truly Sisyphean work. Always the same, never done, even if you do it the results don't last.
Games can be played whenever I feel like it, cleaning doesn't always work this way. A visit from the in-laws make it a chore, and my brain can't really let go of that label for some reason.
Some work comes with physical discomfort: I don't think I'll ever feel like picking strawberries in the burning sun for too long.
When I call clean, I use the time to listen to audiobooks, podcasts, attentively to music (versus just being something in the background while focus is elsewhere), etc. And focusing on the peace/serenity I feel when my area is tidy also helps.
I'm an avid player of these mundane "chore" games and I play them because they are fun.
I don't want to be a truck driver, but I want to play Euro Truck Simulator with a complete racing wheel setup. The way I see it, driving a truck across Europe while trying to follow all of the rules to minimize cost is not that much different mentally than driving a race car around a race track trying to minimize lap time. But it is less physically fatiguing.
Even though these games seem dumb (I get poked fun at a lot for playing them), most of the time, their game loops are tight enough that you feel the same fulfillment as if you were playing the latest Mario. They are always adding another challenge to the game with each level, so that by the end, you've developed a repertoire of skills that you can use to tackle a variety of complicated situations.
I don’t think we’ll ever be able to eliminate friction from “real” work and therein lies the reason why these games are popular. Real work requires sacrifice, sweat, disappointment and all the rest. These games allow you some semblance of the gratification without the friction.
You can reach 20 woodcutting in Runescape in < 1 hour as a complete noob to the game. The equivalent irl skill would take months or years of training. Video games artificially speed up the process of skill acquisition with a satisfactory level of dopamine release such that you will keep going.
Indeed and this time reduction is present in a great many forms. Imagine if a growing season in Stardew Valley took actual months instead of minutes, or if crossing a mid-sized kingdom on horseback took several weeks instead of the 20 minutes or so in most video games.
Counterpoint: Sailaway does model real-world travel time and distance, although in that case it's the whole point. I actually kind of wish there was a Euro Truck Simulator mod or something that would make the distances realistic too.
We won't eliminate all friction. But I'm not satisfied with any answer that neglects finding out what we can eliminate.
Cooking for your family feels very different than cooking at a corporate canteen, yet both are forms of useful work, and both involve some friction. The game makers know it - Euro Truck Simulator is full of both challenges (deadlines) and boredom (traffic jams), and I wouldn't call it frictionless.
So, again, which friction can stay and which needs to go?
I see what you’re saying. And I agree it would be nice to remove friction where possible but I think it would happen in very specific, local contexts instead of some revolution around work itself. In some ways work is in and of itself a process of trying to remove friction and what can and should be removed is mostly dependent on the person or org and their goals. I also think it will just be whack-a-mole and removing some friction will just uncover another form of friction. So to me the question of what can stay and what can go just sounds like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.
I think that's a pessimistic view. You posit that humanity will never be able to extract more than a tiny bit of the satisfaction lots of people feel when they are useful to the community.
On the other side, a lot of anarchist thought has been proposing that smaller communities make people more satisfied, by removing emotional friction.
Still from another direction, not all work needs to be tightly economically controlled, or justified, yet finances permeate work as pure overhead.
Dismissing the idea that work can be better than it is today seems like a passive surrender.
> You posit that humanity will never be able to extract more than a tiny bit of the satisfaction lots of people feel when they are useful to the community.
The abilities to feel satisfaction and be useful are not directly linked to eliminating friction.
I don't know anything about anarchist perspectives on smaller communities but I would actually hazard a guess that smaller communities would increase emotional friction but also the quality and sense of fulfillment that come from being deeply emotionally linked to others.
I don't dismiss the idea that work can be better but I think there's an average amount of friction in work that can't be reduced. And from my perspective it makes me feel like I gain strength, courage, and skill from working at something that is always going to be difficult in some way and to some degree.
To answer your original question as directly as possible: I think if an instance of friction disadvantages or oppresses someone or a group of people then we should seek to eliminate it.
Yes. That’s what makes it work. I think we sometimes have a perspective that we can optimize the struggle out of everything but that’s simply not true. It’s okay for life and the things we do with our life to be difficult and mundane. They’re not always so but it’s not a problem or out of the natural order of things when they are.
Not really a direct example, but the friction of accounting for and paying tax strikes me as quite insane in most places. I pay a bookkeeper and an accountant thousands a year, plus deal with loads of hassle on top of that. I can't imagine that if you designed an enjoyable working lifestyle from scratch, you'd decide the whole tax rigmarole as we know it was essential.
What you're describing is Fully Automated Luxury Communism‚ where most parts of work are automated, and people work under non-alienated conditions simply for that feeling of achievement. Or in the words of Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity”
People need to feel useful; these chore simulators are parasitic on that natural impulse.
In other news a record number of US teenagers never engaged in any real life 'mundane chores' in their life. "Physicals work is what our parents, or immigrants do!". 'PowerWash Simulator' is fun if you never worked all summer at a carwash, same with 'Viscera Cleanup Detail' etc.
