I enjoy job simulator type games and really like the aspect of decorating and taking something and improving it. I’m a sucker for visual progress and I’m comfortable with physical labor in real life, so why can I only do it in games and structured activities?
Games are designed to be fun. Work isn’t.
In addition to what others have said already;
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Results are rewarded. If you do something right in-game, you usually get something like “good job!” or an immediate positive rating, useful items etc. as a direct reward. That way you immediatly feel like you accomplished something good. In the real world, you do the task, check out and go home - no positive feedback, no feel of accomplishment. You just completed a menial task, that’s all.
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Virtual customers are easier. If you do your virtual job right, they will be happy and nice. In the real world, you can do everything right and still get yelled at for the most bullshit reasons (I work in customer service so I might be biased a bit here) which makes it hard to maintain a positive attitude. In games, you usually don’t have to deal with someone trying to return clearly worn underwear for a refund and then throwing a loud, childish hissy fit when you tell them that you can’t do that.
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Games ususally don’t randomly throw unexpected setbacks at you at the most inconvenient times. They’re predictable, easier and overall more structured. Someone mentioned Truck Simulator in the comments, for example - I haven’t played that game but I highly doubt that it features 3 hour long traffic jams while your virtual avatar desperately needs to pee, the sudden appearance of an angry hornet or giant spider inside the driver’s cabin, flat tyres, naked methheads trying to climb your truck or your virtual boss calling you ingame to yell at you for something that is out of your control.
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Games ususally omitt the nasty parts and enhance the pleasing parts. Example: the curry cooking minigame in Pokémon SwoSh - you select ingredients, throw them into the pot, stir it for a while and your 'mons will be happy to get a nice meal. What you do NOT have to do: chopping and cleaning the ingredients, sorting out rotten food, cleaning the pots and pans, picking up Pokémon poop after they’re done digesting what they ate, getting IRL back pain from having to carry 427 cans of cream around at all times, setting up and maintaining the fire, disposing of garbage like packaging material or fishbones. You never have any picky eaters refusing to even taste the curry, you never have any ingredients go bad, your utensils will never break and you didn’t have to buy them in the first place as they magically just appeared in your inventory the moment you unlocked the ability to cook curry. and what you cooked always, always looks aesthetically pleasing unless you deliberately fuck up real hard, whereas even the most delicious tasting curry in the real world can look like slop, which just doesn’t feel the same. It is kinda easier to feel satisfied with a virtual steaming hot plate of pretty food.
It’s almost as ‘game’ is supposed to mean something.
Because with the sim, you feel in control.
Because a well designed game does not include drudgery. “Work-simulators” focus on results and progress and gloss over many of the hours of outright boredom or physical exertion to get there.
For example, truck driving simulator does not include the pain in the ass and boring part of loading or unloading the truck. Farming simulator does not include the painstaking process of removing rocks from the field.
While I grew up on a farm, my first proper career was something called OBC seismic. What it is isn’t as important as the fact that it involved placing a 6km long sensor cable on the seabed with a winch and position it properly. To do this right requires practice, and as the principle is farly easy I wrote a small simulator that our trainees could try out. At first they found it interesting, and even the seniors from other departments enjoyed toying with it. The biggest lack of realism was that it didn’t involve doing it for 12 hours straight, only stopping to unscrew 25 meter sections and replacing them. Barring drudgery and repetitive boredom could’ve probably made it an interesting game similar to other work simulators.
I don’t mind drudgery though. I’ve done real life construction work, I love legos, before I had internet I dug a hole in the backyard just to see how deep a hole I could dig. Progress being made is the goal sure but that doesn’t make me shy away from the boring and frustrating parts. It’s just that when it comes to decorating my apartment, cleaning my room, doing dishes, mowing lawns, whatever, I just can’t find myself getting started in the first place rather than giving up partway through.
I think a lot of the stimulus that comes from interacting with mobile devices is more insidious than most people realising.
Try changing your phone to grey scale in the usability settings for a day and you’ll see what I mean.
Basically, real life just doesn’t stimulate dopamine production in the same way, it’s not as satisfying.
Does it have to do with the difference between one-off tasks and recurring tasks? I’ve asked myself similar questions to yours and sometimes I wonder if tedium is harder to accept when you know that, even if you finish this task today, you’ll have to do it again tomorrow, next week, etc. So why not skip it this once? (We all know it’s never just once)
I don’t think so? Even when I’m not thinking about the temporary nature of things I struggle with doing stuff. I want to learn guitar and experiment with painting and sewing, apply to jobs, and all sorts of beans that aren’t temporary in terms of my lifespan. Starting just about anything I want to do is just plain difficult for me.
Is it a lack of motivation?
Walk us through what happens when you decide to do the dishes? What is the process for preparing? What actually happens?
Are you unable to force yourself to “just do it?”
Is this a constant issue and does it cause trouble for you in your life? E.g. always a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, can’t have people over, etc?
When I want to do dishes I usually start sitting at my desk or laying down on the couch or bed. Then I think about how if I want to eat later I’m going to have to do dishes because I’m out of clean plates/silverware/bowls/pots. Then I think about how I mind as well round up all the dishes in the apartment. Then I want to clean up the apartment. Then I usually start wanting to clean my room because it’s gross. And then I think that I’m gross and should shower and brush my teeth. Then I get depressive and stay where I was feeling bad.
Sometimes I manage to power through and because the dishes are backed up so much I get the hot water going and let the dishes soak for a few minutes, then I have to overcome depressive thoughts again and do the dishes otherwise I sleep on the couch and the entire day has failed.
When I do manage to do dishes anyways I can only do so much until the drying rack is full, and when it’s full I just drain the water and grab whatever I cleaned to make spaghetti or something.
Because modern life is utterly exhausting and humiliating in a million different ways. Your body knows that and isn’t that interested in gambling a bunch of mental and physical energy on projects that don’t directly help you feel rested and prepared for the next dumb bs you have to deal with. The thing about a video game is there isn’t that risk, there isn’t the blowback either from negative feelings around failure to complete the task or direct real world consequences.
Video games fundamentally are about rewriting the conditions through which we are forced to have a conversation with the environment around us. They allow us to remake our relationship with ideas, projects and other humans into healthier ones that elevate our quality of life. Video games are gifts of agency that serve as sanity checks on how healthy our real world environments actually are.
Understandable, consequences of my actions are pretty demotivating. It does seem easier to blow money on a lamp in a game then decide it doesn’t fit what I was going for anyways than it is to buy anything that doesn’t directly aid my survival. Fear and financial instabilities are probably some big motivators to inactivity, at least for me.
American Truck simulator’s world is a 1:20 scale replica of the real world. Any drive will take about 20 times longer to complete in reality than in game. Simulator games remove most of the drugery.
It feels great to deliver cargo after a 10 minute drive. Delivering cargo after 3 hours is the start of a shift.
It feels great to deliver cargo after a 10 minute drive. Delivering cargo after 3 hours is the start of a shift.
It would feel way better to deliver cargo after a 3 hour shift in real life if the pay and quality of life was good as a truck driver… but we live in a fundamentally broken economy that stomps its foot on the working class at every opportunity. The whole “work is hard and repetitive” thing gets nullified for the vast majority of people for most work if they are able to purchase things and have a roof over their head in what feels like a fair exchange for said work.
If you made a great living as a truck driver you would likely find yourself hard pressed to care about delivering cargo in a video game simulation.
If you made a great living as a truck driver you would likely find yourself hard pressed to care about delivering cargo in a video game simulation.
The vast majority of players of American Truck Simulator are not professional truck drivers. There is very little appeal to playing a game that simulates your job, so most truck drivers chose other forms of entertainment than truck simulator games. This is not because of the payscale.
It takes about 8 hours to drive 500 miles. Spending 8 hours maintaining lane position is not very engaging. No amount of money will make 8 hours of lanekeeping exciting or engaging.
Because a well designed game does not include drudgery
Better remove Ship graveyard simulator from that category…
