When I was at university I had a friend who had a strange hobby. He would sit in his room and play a hunting simulation game on his computer. “Game” struck me as a misleading word for what this program allowed you to do, though. You’d have to sit hunkered in the digital undergrowth waiting long, long stretches for a deer to walk through your gun sights. So long, in fact, that the game came with an inbuilt noughts and crosses function so you had something to entertain you while doing this supposedly entertaining thing.
His other friends and I thought this noughts and crosses thing was hysterical. Why play a game so dull that it needs another game inside it? But simulator games, of which hunting is just one type, have only grown more popular since then – and to an astonishing degree. The global simulation games market was worth an estimated $4.86bn (£3.6bn) in 2020, and is expected to generate about $21bn by 2030. And I don’t just mean games like The Sims or Rollercoaster Tycoon or Stardew Valley: brightly coloured games in which there are clearly exciting objectives and lots of things to do. I mean games that are almost outlandishly dull in their conceit. There is Farming Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator, where you drive an HGV across the continent, another where you pilot commercial flights in real time – and many, many more.
I write video games myself, narrative point-and-click stuff, so I have watched this trend with interest and confusion. I wanted to know: what is it about these games? Lawn Mowing simulator seemed the most purely boring to me, but sadly it is only available on PC. You can download an expansion pack for that one that allows you to mow lawns in “ancient Britain”. Wonders never cease. So instead I went for the PowerWash simulator as the game to try to get into – because when I was in the throes of an acute heartbreak some years ago, my poor mother suggested that instead of crying all day in the kitchen I might like to power-wash her patio while crying instead. Which I did, and remember finding it an oddly satisfying if abject experience. Power washers work very well. The patio became clean. Something was not going to shit.
You play as – and this may shock you – someone with a power-washing company. The first job is to clean your company van, which you got for a great price at an auction because it is dirty. Little notifications pop up, informing you of achievements, such as “indicator clean” and “hubcap clean”. A percentage dial in the top left corner tells you how clean the van now is. You can choose your nozzles and go into commando crawl mode to reach tough corners. Tantalising messages pop up about a large dirty house that may soon need your attention. As you clean, you unlock new assignments. Over the course of two hours with the TV on in the background, I restored a neglected playground to its former glory. It’s not too dissimilar to a colouring book, designed for type-A freaks among whom I unfortunately count myself.
And I’m sorry to say that I did find myself absorbed. It’s satisfying to complete the pointless tasks, calming to have to do something for which the stakes are so, so low. I can see the appeal, but I sort of wish I couldn’t. How I long to be the kind of person who couldn’t be sucked in by the need to reach 100% on a digital dirt bike-cleaning project.
But it made me feel, ironically enough, grubby. Would I recommend this to anybody? No, not least because if someone said to me, “Oh hey, have you tried this power-washing game?”, I would probably feel it my duty to perform some kind of welfare check on them. But also because I can’t help but think that there are more adjusted ways of soothing oneself, no matter how surprisingly absorbing a simulator game may be. Being in nature, perhaps. Taking a bath. Or playing a game that doesn’t put you in the degrading position of feeling a thrill after unlocking the ability to buy more multipurpose cleaning fluid.
I went back to my friend from university and asked him what it was that had him so enthralled on those rainy afternoons in his bedroom. “There’s something very appealing about a world realised in micro detail,” he said. “There is beauty in the mundane, in the hyper-realised world of simply waiting for something to happen, rather than it constantly happening. It encourages a paying of attention.” This annoyed me, because by virtue of being smart and feeling true, it didn’t leave much room for me to start another round of making fun of him.
So maybe that’s what it is: there is a satisfaction to be had in paying very close attention to something. And it’s good to be encouraged to pay attention to things – but I think you need to be careful about what, exactly, you choose to pay attention to. Or I certainly do, anyway.
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Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist