Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole on the agendas behind job simulator games
For most of their history, videogames have been highly effective propaganda for the ideology of work. This is the idea that being an employee is what gives a person’s life meaning under modern capitalism, allied to the promise that effort will be rewarded. According to one line of analysis that began with the sociologist Max Weber, this is a transplantation of religious ideas into the economy: duty to God becomes a duty to one’s boss, and the reward of a heavenly afterlife becomes a promotion and pay rise.
Or, in videogames, a high score. Explicit employment simulations go back to arcade classics of the early 1980s such as Burger Time (1982), in which you, a hard-working chef, must climb up and down ladders to collect burger ingredients while avoiding “enemy foods” such as hot dogs and eggs. (The notion of “enemy foods”, interestingly, predates the modern outbreak of questionable food “intolerances”.)
More naturalistic was the following year’s Tapper, in which you have to rush around a bar serving beer to drinkers while collecting empties and tips. (And so it endorsed an American-style tipping culture, the purpose of which is to create ever more servile employees through the customer’s threat of withholding the money they need to live on.)
It is a straight line from such early efforts to the hyperreality of modern job simulators such as Euro Truck Simulator or Farming Simulator, but these are not the only videogames that endorse the ideology of work. Implicitly but powerfully, nearly all games do, in the sense that they set the player goals, whether explicitly tedious fetch missions (as though one were a virtual Deliveroo rider) or grander projects, and promise that, if one only puts in enough effort to fulfil these instructions, one will bask in joy and fulfilment: one’s life in the fictional world will have meaning.
The curious thing is that we all know this is not actually how the world works. In the real world of work, mediocrities get promoted upwards past their capacity to do any real harm, while those who work skilfully at their assigned roles are invisible. In the real world, corporations demand loyalty from workers but show no loyalty in return when their profits are threatened, as has been proved by the list of companies, from hotel chains to airlines, who simply sacked thousands of people or put them on unpaid leave once the pandemic hit. The ideology of work is a fantasy that serves the interests of the rentier class, not of workers themselves.
How refreshing, then, in these strange times, to see the brilliantly satirical little game Good Job, a scabrous office-work comedy which illustrates the truth that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. The player is the offspring of a CEO, sent to work in the company’s offices and given humdrum tasks (set up a projector for a meeting, fix the internet connection for accounts) to be completed in absurdly slapstick ways (for example, by using a power cord as a catapult to hurl office furniture through glass partitions). It is both a cute isometric puzzler and a fable about nepotism and fear. All the other office workers – featureless black rounded human shapes like those on safety signs – keep working, whatever chaos is happening around them. They know that if they even raise an eyebrow at Golden Boy’s behaviour they might lose their livelihoods.
As a fantasy of running riot in an antiseptic corporate environment, Good Job is hilariously cathartic. (I can happily attest to having perpetrated the literary equivalent of such catastrophes many times in the days I spent working as a sub-editor in newspaper offices.) The timing of its release during lockdown adds an extra spice, since even going to such an environment seems exotic. Look at all those people, sitting too close and breathing on one another!
The future of job simulators, of course, will have to change along with the future of employment. How many people needed to travel into offices all that time anyway? How many jobs, in hindsight, were unnecessary or socially harmful? Perhaps games such as Good Job will come to seem just as much historical fiction as the Assassin’s Creed series of murder-as-job simulators. What might really tax developers’ creativity, though, is a satisfying simulation of working from home: sitting around in sweatpants trying to complete tasks about sitting around in sweatpants trying to complete tasks might be just that little bit too meta.
Explicit employment simulations go back to arcade classics of the early 1980s such as Burger Time