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.<p>People always wanted virtual places to just chill, and not have to be challenged all the time or have to struggle etc.<p>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.
My partner absolutely adores House Flipper a game where you clean up, repair, and decorate derelict houses.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
Lots of these games have a few key things:<p>#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.<p>#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.<p>#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.<p>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.
I'm not sure the qualifier 'in gaming' is necessary. Lots of us spend a our free time doing gardening, DIY, walking or cooking for entertainment.
Once I realized that real life chores are an excellent way to exercise and feel productive, I love doing chores.<p>Mopping a floor by standing on a rag is great for the core.
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.<p>My father in law is a trucker and the <i>only</i> 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.
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.
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.<p>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.
Simpsons mocked it years ago: <a href="https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Yard_Work_Simulator" rel="nofollow">https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Yard_Work_Simulator</a>
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.
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.
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<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_Time_Fun" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_Time_Fun</a>
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.
> Mundane chores are all the rage in gaming<p>Oh, are they? Spontaneous nostalgia ensues…<p><a href="https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Donald_Duck%27s_Playground" rel="nofollow">https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Donald_Duck%27s_Playground</a> (1984)
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:<p>• Lawn care and mowing - my favorites - both are Christians and do the charity of free lawn care for those having troubles<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSI40gkivzw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSI40gkivzw</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unQl_quNh-w" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unQl_quNh-w</a><p>• Rug cleaning - my favorite - those boots! But wait until the end of some of his videos - it's a surprise<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m_m9WCXwpY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m_m9WCXwpY</a><p>• Construction - my favorite - he shows rain or shine, sick or not; with a wonderful down-home accent<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1-svX2Oq6M" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1-svX2Oq6M</a><p>• 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.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZHws5d4rNU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZHws5d4rNU</a><p>• Art Restoration<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egsEKeCXf60" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egsEKeCXf60</a><p>• Magnet Fishing<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlOEcihXsU0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlOEcihXsU0</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_LjAL84CYE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_LjAL84CYE</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O55nCaG2QM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O55nCaG2QM</a><p>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."<p>Imagine if we did that to actual jobs. But no, instead we simulate satisfying work conditions for profit.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation</a>
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.<p>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.<p>"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.<p>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.
I miss cheats in modern(ish) videogames. Luckily, you can get some with emulation of older (cheatless, or hard-to-cheat-at) games.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
This makes it clear that people <i>just want</i> to do something useful in their lives. Why isn't real life building on this? What are the remaining differences?<p>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?<p>How much friction can we eliminate in work? What is essential, and what is not?<p>I feel that humanity would be better served if the feeling of achievement was coupled with meatspace usefulness, and not just virtual creation.
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.