All Work And All Play

A Normal Blog Post About Simulators

If you've used Steam at all in the last 14 years you've likely noticed an uptick in 'sim' games and in the most recent years, an absolute deluge of them. Powerwash Simulator, Truck Simulator, Surgeon Simulator, Flight Simulator, Farming Simulator, Supermarket Simulator, TCG Shop Simulator, Construction Simulator, Escape Simulator, and so on so forth until the sun goes dark. Merely looking up 'simulator' on Steam provides just shy of 25,000 results.

So you may be asking: "Where the hell did these all come from?"

On a micro level the answer is fairly simple. More and more people get onboarded to video games once 7th gen starts, but as that number ticks upwards you start to see a slow-growing yet ultimately substantial number of gamers who don't share the sensibilities of other gamers - what are often derogatorily called 'gun and ball dudes' by people in my spheres. These players, who likely got onboarded with something like Stardew Valley or Slime Rancher or Animal Crossing or a similar game with a primary non-combat focus, typically don't pay any mind to 'big releases' and instead funneled out of the theme park to go dick around with the smaller games.
In practical terms this suddenly meant that there was a not-insubstantial market of gamers who could be trusted to stick around when, say, Fromsoft suddenly post the second Elden Ring DLC without a trailer or even a press release, and are going to be otherwise unoccupied when GTA 6 comes out. This demographic has always existed - we'll get to that later - but now it became a fixed, tangible point in the great rivers that is the grand customerbase of videogames.

On a macro level, the answer is that they've always been here. Sim games are as much a pillar of videogames as RPGs, gun and sports games. Flight Simulator predates nearly the entire JRPG genre by a few years, Football Manager is a financial monolith that nobody pays attention to despite each game pulling in a bajillion dollars, and GIANTs (the Farming Sim guys) enjoy more money and prestige than your favourite studio off the back of their main product. The AAA industry regularly does blood sacrifices and torment nexuses just to release titles that've made less money and sold less copies than Euro Truck Sim 2. These games have always existed, always had appeal, and are almost certainly going to survive any hypothetical 'collapse' that people keep handwringing about.

But the question remains: Why do people play these?

Okay, I Lied

I've said in the past that I don't consider myself a games writer or analyst and am merely a blogger.

Well, it's a blogger rite of passage to see a post online that sticks in your brain for so long that the only sensible response is to make a 3000 word blog post in response.

Near the end of 2025 I saw a post from someone who was going through the Powerwash Simulator games and they made a bunch of comments I found disagreeable. They are, paraphrased:

And these stuck with me. Both because I think they're an extremely bleak way to view anything (and this person is not an isolated anomaly) but because I… Well I didn't have an immediate retort in my brain. I knew intuitively that they were wrong, yet I had absolutely nooooooooooo idea how long it'd take me to arrive at an answer.

It's August 2026 now. Let's answer the question.

Labour of Love/Love of Labour

To answer this in full we need to back up and talk about the real world for a minute.

If you've never worked a 'blue collar' job or known tradesmen you might not really be fully keyed into this fact, but people who're involved in manual labour jobs tend to love the labour they do. Statistically if you're reading this directly off my page (i.e not via repost or share) then you know and agree with the phrase "there's no such thing as unskilled labour" but many in my spheres don't fully comprehend the logical endpoint of this sentiment. Tradesmen, in my experience, are often deeply proud beasts who love the work they do and react quite fiercely to it being denigrated.

You may be wondering what this has to do with Sim games and the answer is so, so much simpler than you're likely thinking: All of this 'backbreaking' labour can be enjoyable. Fun, even.

It feels good to spend literal weeks on a project and then see it in its completed state. It's gratifying to navigate deeply challenging terrain while carrying something fragile in inclement weather and successfully make the delivery. It's rewarding to arrive at a near-literal pile of shit in the middle of the woods and turn it into a beautiful building. There's pride to be found in approaching a problem that seems literally alien to someone and solving it with the same effort you'd expend to put chicken in the air fryer.

Here's a fun anecdote from my personal life: Two years ago the boiler in our house went on the fritz, so the local council sent out a technician to fix it. He showed up, did a diagnostic test, partially fixed it, and told us he'd be there the next day. The day comes and goes and sure enough he appears on the dot at exactly 10am… In a suit. Because that day was his wedding day and he figured he'd close some existing jobs before going off to get married. In his words: "Job and ma wife on the same day, cannae beat it".

Looping back to Steam, there's a particular genre of post/review that always tickles me. I don't have any examples immediately to hand, so allow me to do my best impression:

>Wake up at 6am
>Hop in my truck
>Drive several days from Ireland to Warsaw
>Misread a speed limit sign
>Crash into a family of 4 on a bend
>Spend days in hospital
>Discharged
>Come home
>Boot up Euro Truck Sim 2

These are jokes, but there's a measure of reality in them. I have a tendency towards 'dad' games (typically slow paced with little to no combat and a mass of problem solving) and it's not uncommon to find players for whom their real job reflects the game they play. Most of the best Cities Skylines guides are written by people who work as traffic coordinators or city planners and you've almost certainly heard about the numerous instances of the War Thunder devs accidentally being party to espionage because an actual real life aircraft technician tried to correct their work.

What's In The Box?

So, the Magic Circle. The barrier you pass through in order to do suspension of disbelief. I'm not here to litigate the concept - like any design device it's best treated as a thought device and not a pillar of existence - so much as I'm here to put on my pretentious hat for a little bit and talk about an alternative device I've been using for games where the 'play' aspect differs from the norm.

My alternative is the Magic Box. If the Magic Circle is something you pass through in order to suspend disbelief and engage in lite roleplay, the Magic Box is instead engaging with the disbelief. In the real world I'd refer to something like a jigsaw puzzle or a rubiks cube; you are still engaging with something on a level of play whose value exists on a transactional layer - trading time for entertainment - but there is zero attempt being made to make you think that you're doing anything other than playing. You're never pretending to be a Jigsaw Solver named Hohenheim or anything of the sort and any justifications are self-propelled; you are always someone sitting on their sofa at 7pm and ignoring that their hot chocolate has gone cold.

If the Magic Circle is meant to subvert, suspend or subsume reality, then the Magic Box deliberately reflects it with some layer of distortion.

In the last section we answered "Who likes this?" and here I'll use the Magic Box to explain the core question of this entire post: Why does so much play look like work?

1400 words in and we've already accepted that some labour can be fun, and half of the answer to the question lies not so much in what Sim games include but what they exclude. There's this amazing Limmy clip of him playing ETS2 that I really love.

Limmy collides with a caravan and sends it flying, and he then engages in the roleplay by describing the aftereffects of committing quad-manslaughter against an entire family. It's incredibly funny (if you like Limmy's sense of humour) and emblematic of some of the fun quirks that come from Sim games, but it's also illustrative of the Box. The trucks are real, the roads are real, the traffic is real, but the collision itself sends the Play towards the edges of the box, where the aftereffects are simply erased once they cross the proverbial boundaries. He takes some damage, loses some money, and the game continues.

It's easy as an outsider or a tourist to look at Sim games and assume that they're work, but 'work' is often about not-doing as much as it is doing. They remain play by simply avoiding the parts that often make real work stressful, tedious or even dangerous.

Euro Trick Sim, for instance, allows you to travel from the UK to Europe without having to acknowledge that Brexit massively upended the lives of people in the British shipping industry and resulted in multi-hour waits at borders. You can pilot massively heavy trucks with even heavier cargo loads and not ever, ever have to consider what would happen if you crashed a Methane tanker going downhill near Glasgow and accidentally wiped Easterhouse off the map. Traffic collisions are merely deductions in 'health' and money with no need to worry that you've probably killed several people and left others crippled in ways they will never fully recover from. ETS will never, ever, abruptly tell you that Kenworth have stopped selling replacement parts for your truck and then promptly lock off any of your options, leaving you with no choice but to buy old trucks from dodgy resellers and then spend hours upon hours upon hours trying to repair your engine.

The inciting example, Powerwash Simulator, is an even better example. Real life powerwashers are much, much more powerful than they seem. They can crush glass with impunity if improperly configured, are fairly damaging when used on some wooden surfaces, and the range at which they're used is often the difference between a nice job and £4,000 in property damages. They have immense utility but they are ultimately tool, and every tool is as potentially dangerous as it is helpful.
In Powerwash Simulator, all of these logistical concerns are gone. There's no need to carry soap with you, no need to ferry around water mains/water tanks, and no need to account for damage. PC nerds love to say that building a machine is just expensive legos. I'm gonna take a page from their book: Cleaning can often just be adult colouring books. When you remove the dangers of powerwashing, when they're excluded from the Magic Box, you get that same catharsis.

It is, in all forms, still play…

Capitalist Gator Roll

…But it's never going to be work.

The last point we've yet to tackle is simultaneously the simplest and yet most complex: "This is capitalist".

On some level I can see where the thought comes from. If I were writing dystopian fiction based on the modern world, I would include a worldbuilding note like "every videogame is a simulator meant to prepare you for labour and anything else is banned". Said out loud, the very notion of video games - something often associated with a very bland and straightforward ideal of 'recreation' - being built around things people do as a job just sounds dystopian.

What punches a hole in this train of thought is that games have been asking you to 'do work' for decades.

I know my audience and thus I'm aware that you near-immediately thought about live service games and their chain of dailies, weeklies, timed events and preparatory grinding. Not invalid, but these are natural evolutions of existing compulsions. To be competitive in Starcraft or Command & Conquer always required you to log shifts practicing and training. If you didn't want to get rolled by the unemployed, you were always going to have to devote some time to random matches in Unreal Tournament as a way of staving off rust. You were never going to reach any meaningful heights in Diablo 2 without putting on your hat and clocking into The Loot Factory. So on, so forth. All the industry really did, past a certain point, was capitalize on the behaviours players developed on their own.

Yet that doesn't excuse it, is the thing. In ye olde days the preference for Sim games took the form of people craving a more direct return on time investment. You could stoke a nascent gambling addiction by gem farming in Diablo 2 or you could sit down with a German bus simulator and do rounds through Munich.
In today's climate the appeal of Sim games is that they're honest and upfront about what they offer.
American Truck Simulator says everything in plain terms; make a 2,400 mile journey from the west coast to the east and receive $300,000 that you can convert into trucks or garages. There's no need to material grind, roll the proverbial slots on armor stats, crawl up a skill tree or do a chain of raids to acquire a nebulous goal. These things aren't inherently bad or evil but I'd never castigate someone for being exhausted and chasing something more honest.

There's also the matter of freedom. The open world and RPG-lite crazes both games like a storm and that was only galvanized by the phrase 'roguelite elements' infesting the wider world. These games, often born of the blind veneration for concepts they don't really get, love to sell people on the idea of mechanical or exploratory freedom. "There are so many paths to power! So many avenues of progression! You can go anywhere and do anything!" are things that'll pop up in marketing but… This isn't necessarily a lie but more often than not it's deceptive.
'Freedom' is something offered in the early game and is less freedom and more of an opportunity to screw around and feel your way through the systems. This freedom typically evaporates around a certain level bracket, region, or whatever. 'You can level up anywhere!' remains true up until, say Level 50, at which point you're funnelled into a specific region or dungeon that you must do to carry on progressing through similarly linear mechanical corridors.

Let's use a practical example: In the earlier parts of Tokyo Xtreme Racer it's trivial to succeed by using any car you want. Kei cars, hatchbacks, sports cars whatever. The AI isn't too bright, doesn't get many hidden buffs, and the earlier parts of the map are filled with the kinds of tight turns that benefit worse cars. Unfortunately this is a trap; later parts of the map are filled with long straight pathways and extremely lengthy curves where merely turning well isn't an option. Furthermore, the AI starts getting tons of buffs to acceleration, tire grip and turning capacity. Despite the game adding more and more common cars to the roster, the game itself overwhelmingly prioritizes sports cars and more popular tuner vehicles. To add insult to injury, the ability to buff up cars to a more 'endgame' level is unlocked so late in the game that it almost feels like a taunt. I love the game, don't get me wrong, but it's our best example at present.

Sim games, in contrast, are often much more keen on allowing for true freedom. Snowrunner, despite the name, starts in the marshlands of Michigan in the USA, far from any snow. While I enjoyed my time learning the ropes, I was genuinely kind of hung up on the name. To my surprise, the game immediately allows you to bail on Michigan and instead move to Alaska, where you can run in the snow. It is markedly harder than Michigan (ice is very hard to drive on, shockingly) but the option is always there and the game will never fight you on it.

On a broader level, Sim games overwhelmingly options to tailor the experience to whatever you want. I really, really, really like doing long haul drives in the Truck Simulator duology, but there's an option in the menu to turn down the average job length if you love the driving and hate the longhauls. Despite being a Sim, Truck Simulator and indeed many games like it, often offer the tools to cut down on the Sim elements entirely if you want a more casual, relaxed and merciful experience. There's an entire system of traffic offenses that's so meticulously detailed that you can eat a four figure fine by accidentally pulling into a state that doesn't allow double-stack trailers and it massively, massively impacts the gameplay and the way you solve the proverbial travel puzzle… But you can just turn it off. It's your game, bruv.

That's small scale stuff, though. As far as the actual experience goes, Sim games love inundating you with options to, as so many modern games trying to claim the imsim crown declare, 'play your way'. I love American Truck Simulator but I find driving through the flatter states to be a slog, so I simply… Don't do those contracts. I love ferrying gas tankers due to their relatively low weight, so I keep a truck specced in gas transfer lying around in case I want easy money and a calm drive. Equally, I always struggle with high-load trucks that have lots of wheels, so I often reserve these contracts for days where I'm willing to accept that driving uphill may be a literal uphill battle. That's one game, sure, but it's a microcosm of the broader experience. None of these are 'wrong' ways to play the game, they're not fighting the developers or pushing boundaries. They're choices that were offered to me, and I made.

So, yeah. Maybe the proliferation of Sim games is capitalist, but I'd argue that they're positively radical in a world where even fuckin' Street Fighter is asking you to clock a shift at the dailies factory.