Work Simulators — Get Back to Work!
OR, Work Sims in an Era of Production…OR, Why We Love Work Simulation but Hate Work Reality
On paper, there are a number of games that just shouldn’t work, whether due to their narrative structure, their game mechanics, or their tone. But games often find a way, forging strange, unique, and memorable experiences in the myriad titles they offer. But there’s one in particular that stands out to me: I don’t understand how it works as well as it does, and I am simultaneously intrigued and entertained by them all the same. Call them what you will: efficiency machines, cute farming games, “casual” titles in some cases. I see them as their main category, the connection between all of them: Work Simulators. And make no mistake, I love them, both in theory and in practice. I’ve pumped a hundred and ten hours into Stardew Valley (a 16-bit style farming simulator), and nearly as much into Factorio (an efficiency-driven factory creator), and I’m constantly tempted by games that simulate everything from truck driving, to gas station management, to mail delivery.
But why? These are games that, at the end of the day, are about work. And…let me check…yeah, we’re still living in a capitalist hellscape where my survival and continued existence depends on me working in exchange for not-enough-to-live. Work doesn’t want you to focus on you, it wants you to focus on production, on profit, on the work. It’s a place that advances based largely on nepotism, or overworking oneself to a debilitating point. It’s a place where goals are given to you, and you’re held responsible if other factors don’t line up to permit their completion. It’s a place dictated by policies, procedures, and “this is how we’ve always done it.” Why would I want to spend any more of my time doing anything resembling working? Why wouldn’t I boot up something more fun, or less tedious? Why wouldn’t I play anything to distract me more effectively from the pain of trying to pull myself up by my own bootstraps?
After mulling it over (sometimes during my actual work…don’t tell my boss.), the answer is unnervingly simple: because Work Simulators/Work Sims are a more perfect realization of Work as it can be. Work Sims are everything that workplaces try to advertise themselves as, despite the aforementioned reality: a place where you can focus on you, a place where you can advance your “career” and yourself, a place to make and achieve goals, and a place where you have the freedom to complete your work your way.
Focus on You
A number of admin-style jobs I’ve worked have me bouncing between different interfaces, different programs, all of which operate, you guessed it, differently. Same can be said for a lot of those workers across the board. Our attention is constantly split, and we’re always switching to different “modes.” We can’t achieve, let alone maintain, a sense of momentum. But Work Sims? It’s all one program. One layout. One, self-contained setup, made all the more consistent through universal art design. When everything is self-contained, we can concentrate, not on what program we need to adjust to, but on the work we’re doing. On us. Point for games.
The other end needs some prefacing: I have met some of my best and dearest friends doing the work that I’ve done. From college housing to food service, I still keep in regular touch with many of them, and at least send birthday cards to the ones that I don’t have text chains with. But not everyone is so lucky to work alongside good people, or (more prevalently) work for good people. Workplace politics, alignments, and rivalries are abundant, and I can recall such standoffs defining the work we did more than our actual work. Work Sims, though? None of that. It’s just you and your work. When there’s nobody else to lean on your cubicle and complain at you, or bosses calling into your work to tell you to clean up, you can just focus on you. And some Work Sims (usually the cutesy farming ones) will give you townsfolk to talk to, but even then, it’s at your leisure. You choose when to engage outside your work. You focus on you and your work until you want to focus on some other element!
Also, there’s something to be said for the art design and aesthetic of Work Sims. Sometimes, it’s the bright and colorful approach of Stardew Valley, and other times, it’s just making your pocket of work yours. Personal creative liberty, whether on your truck, your farm, your factory, or what have you, beats the hell out of corporate décor, any day. Making a workspace your own gives ownership and, in my experience, makes you more invested in what you’re doing, helps you focus on you and your work. And it hits that much harder when alien bugs roll up to eat your stuff! Factorio is wild, y’all.
Advancing Yourself and Your Career
More and more, it seems, I find myself being thrown into a job with minimal training, constantly having to ask “hey, how do I do this?” and seeing no trajectory that takes me further. No advancement, just consistency, just being an interchangeable cog, just knowing your place. No you, only us. Christ, the workplace is haunting.
Work Sims excel by presenting players with the tools they need to start working: tutorials, customizable options, the whole gamut. Players learn, more or less, on-the-job. They’re not expected to come in with an arbitrary number of years’ experience, or to be subject matter experts in some obscure program or certification. Work Sims understand that people want to try new things, to diversify, and allows them to do exactly that, no barriers to stop them.
And they’re no different from the real-world workforce: players still start at the bottom. But 1.) there’s no Big Boss bearing down on you; 2.) there is a clear path forward and upward (more on that later). From the word “go,” players are their own boss, and are completely self-reliant.
To use Factorio as an example, players begin by mining materials by hand. Once they’ve done enough of that, they construct machines to mine for them, and they can concentrate on their next task. That cycle continues throughout play: find a thing to do, do it, get the resources to automate it, automate it, find the next thing to do.
Whether it’s Factorio’s more complex automation or Stardew Valley’s work-offsetting resources (sprinklers, greenhouses, etc.), Work Sims give the satisfaction of advancement without having to crush some other employee underfoot to get there. We are our own boss from the start, and when our goal is just to learn and improve, we become hungry for every new challenge down the line.
Goalsetting and Objectives
In my experience, most of the work-based goals I set before me came down to “make it to the end of the day.” Further out than that, “get to the next payday.” So much of what I’ve done was based on reaction, on scrambling from rush-to-rush, or crisis-to-crisis, or just getting what I needed to survive. Any growth that I achieved was tangential, not based on any efforts or clear-cut goals I had set down. Any goals I achieved that higher-ups would thank me for, I didn’t realize I’d achieved.
Again, Work Sims reach over, pat me lovingly on the head, and show me what I can do to be better, short- and long-term. They set goals out for me, and encourage me to create my own as a result.
Short-term goals are the moment-to-moment goals the game sets for players: plant some crops, mine some iron, get enough experience to have a better truck engine. They might seem small, they might quickly be brushed aside to concentrate on the next short-term goal, but that’s their greatest strength: they are small. You can measure a short-term goal, see the end result, and what you need to do to achieve it. They are achievable, one after the other. Stardew Valley rocks at the short-term goals: plant some seeds, harvest the plants, sell the plants, buy more seeds, get better. And then the game throws you by kicking off a new season, new plants and all, still on that short-term wavelength. Whenever someone praises (or laments) a game for its “one more turn” or “one more day” element, that’s short-term goals working their magic, and they are the hook that catches players in the start of Work Simulators.
The line, on the other hand, are the long-term goals: larger, overarching goals that are made up of many (many) short-term goals. Stardew Valley wants you to make your Grandpa proud of you; players accomplish this by helping townsfolk, growing their farm, and rebuilding the community center, all elements that comprise of many smaller, short-term goals. Factorio drops you on an alien world with a singular objective: build a rocket to escape the planet. To do so, players mine, automate, explore, optimize, and expand in order to acquire what they need to construct said rocket. All shorter-term goals themselves, wrapped up in even more short-term goals.
When you start your “work” in a Work Sim, you are often given a long-term goal to strive for, and some short-term goals to get you started. The fun part comes after fulfilling that long-term goal. What do you do now? I know I kept playing at Stardew Valley, optimizing things even further, growing my operation, and diving even further into other elements of the game. Factorio is a game that can, feasibly, go on forever, challenging players to build ever-more efficient machines sprawling from horizon to horizon. I never reached that point, content with my single rocket, but the world’s possibilities can blossom out from there if players want more of a challenge, or different long-term goals. Work Sims don’t detract from the joy, the relief of fulfilling your long-term goal, but throughout the game, they’ve been planting seeds. What will you do afterwards? What long-term goal are you going to make?
Both short- and long-term, Work Sims line up objectives and goals that are satisfying to achieve, and attainable from the start. Beats the hell out of just dragging yourself to the end of the workday.
Vocational Freedom
We are all (probably) human. We make mistakes, we mess up, we’re fallible. We’re inherently driven to survive, however we can in our present situation. We’re curious, we get sidetracked, we like to explore. Work, as I know it, is largely unkind to most of those elements of our humanity. We are told to hold to the one way of doing things, to do so perfectly, and to neither deviate nor make mistakes. We are shamed for wanting enough compensation to survive in exchange for our time, labor, and skills. We are told to concentrate for so many hours of the day on singular, monotonous, draining tasks. And all without any ability to give our eyes, our bodies, our minds a break, lest we be chastised or *gasp* written up for our fallibility.
But lo. Work Sims smile down on us, showing a better way, perhaps the best way.
Every day is a new day. Every task is a new task. If you mess something up in a Work Sim (or, you know, die in the Work Sim), that’s okay. Try again. Learn from your mistakes. There’s no boss yelling at you to get it together, no coworkers making notes about your shortcomings to use at review, just you. Work Sims give you the opportunity to truly improve in the face of challenge and difficulty, without the stigma and emotional toil that comes with trying to do so in a shared environment. If you feel like you royally messed up and there’s no mechanical way to salvage things, load a save-state! You can just try again.
How many of us work just to survive? How many of us would continue working, even if our basic needs were met? Work Sims don’t (in my experience) force players to reckon with costs of rent or homeowning, or the price of food to keep your avatar alive. By removing those elements from the playing field, by ensuring that our little characters have their basic needs met, players can concentrate on what matters: the work that they want to do. It’s a little thing, but when you notice it, it can hit a little differently when you don’t see it out in the world.
Lastly, damn near every video game made since the launch of the home console has a designated “pause” button. Work Sims are included in “damn near every video game,” so you can use that. Is a particular task just not vibing with you? Pause. Are you getting frustrated that space bugs keep eating your factory, no matter what you try to do? Pause. Do you just need to step away for a minute to give yourself a break? Pause!
Work Sims give us the ability to act on our humanity: to break our concentration, stop what we’re doing, regroup for a little while, and come back feeling refreshed. In a world and a workforce that demands you go until you are unable to go further, until you burn yourself out, until you give all of yourself to your work…Work Sims let you stop. Maybe it’s for a couple minutes. A couple hours. A couple days. Maybe more. Maybe it’s to rethink an approach, or because things just got really frustrating. Doesn’t matter. You have that freedom, whether it’s to step away for a bit, or step away entirely. You can stop working.
Wait, what was the question again?
“Why would I want to spend any more of my time doing anything resembling working?”
By their design as games, Work Sims try to be (and often are) fun. They draw us in with possibility, with and escape. They bring us back to their core loops with trails of breadcrumbs, with the allure of advancement, and by allowing us to streamline our focus. They take every element that the American workplace says it is, and actually delivers. That is why we play Work Sims: because games are an escape, both from and in spite of work.
