Real Jobs, Job Sims, What's the difference?

Just a week ago I had never heard of Lethal Company but, since playing a few evenings now, I am a loyal employee working hard for The Company and I actually crave putting more hours in. This is in stark contrast to the ritual groan I deliver ahead of driving to my real job, which shouldn't make sense right?

On one hand my job is pretty easy. I clean a little in the morning, sit around waiting for customers, and talk to people who come in. Shockingly, I also clean a little at the end of the day. I help to fulfill a niche in my community and most of the customers are genuinely grateful for my help, or at least grateful for the product. I get paid a meager wage but a fair one, and I get to go home alive everyday which is a big plus.

On the other hand, Lethal Company is hostile and unwelcoming. I am usually scared, underprepared, and confused. I don't actually know if I'll make it back to the ship when I'm out scavenging, and there is no break scheduled during my shift. I will start working before noon and won't get back to the ship by 10pm some days. I’m not earning a wage (real or in-game) and instead I'm relying on my fellow crew to reap the bounty of dead hopes and dreams on unforgiving moonscapes, all so we can afford to buy tools for the next mission. The only glimmer of light in this line of work is the cold and robotic accolades afforded to me by The Company. Although often it isn't even an accolade, just a statement to the effect of “The Company appreciates hard work.”

So why do we actually play this game? What is it about job simulators that pulls us in? If you read the Vice article by Timothy Kennett you might believe it is a symptom of an overly-capitalist society. I do use Lethal Company as the prime example of a job simulator because it challenges the points Kennett makes in his article about what makes these games attractive.

Kennett says that job simulators are “a utopian version of work: one where your goals are clearly defined and you're in control.”

I will let you decide if Lethal Company represents a utopian version of reality, however I am going to challenge his first point that job simulators are attractive because “your goals are clearly defined”. Lethal Company does have a clear goal: meet your quota. In many more ways Lethal Company is obtuse and confusing, including how you're meant to actually achieve your quota. In Lethal Company you are exploring old dingy abandoned facilities looking for things to pick up and sell, and you have a nifty scanner that points these things out for you to grab. Problem is, you only have 4 inventory slots and somehow you need to measure the value of a flashlight against a damn plastic fish before you leave the facility. You ask “am I close to satisfying the quota? Can I get outside without sight? Should I raise my voice and ask my friends if they can grab this or is there a blind dog around the corner?” Once you make a decision, you turn around to leave and get eaten by a box with a girlish figure. So much for the deliberation. Indeed when playing Lethal Company you are fighting against uncertainty instead of reaping the rewards of clear instruction. One of the top guides for Lethal Company right now describes dedicating one member of your four person crew (a quarter of your carrying capacity) to monitor the radar and feed data to the team because you can reliably earn more with fewer- better informed- crew members instead of more members with less information. In short, Lethal Company is a job simulator which uses ambiguity as a selling point regardless that your quota is clearly defined. 

To address the 2nd half of Kennett's point, that your level of control is part of what makes job simulators attractive, Lethal Company challenges this idea as well. You are subject to The Company telling you what your quota is, and your pace by extension, that's outside your control. Furthermore: weather, monsters, and your fellow scrappers take much of your control away. Until you've invested multiple dozens of hours between researching and playing Lethal Company you will not have the necessary knowledge to seize that control. More important than whatever degree of control you have, Lethal Company does not give you a sense of being in control. I would argue that you have to love Lethal Company first and only then will you be willing to learn how to seize control. Therefore, being in control can not be a universal element of this genre of game nor is it what makes these games popular.

I do detract Kennett often here but his article is more about attempting to explain the societal implications of the popularity of job sims so please check it out before drawing conclusions about his take. This isn't “Let's Review Vices’ Article on Job Simulators”, so I'll move on to other points.

Jamie Madigan of psychologyofgames wrote the book on making your game attractive to gamers, literally. He has his own take on job simulators which have some points I'd like to address. Firstly this quote from his Venturebeat article: “They strip away all the bureaucracy, consequences, and — let’s be honest — necessary restrictions that the real world imposes on work, and they let you experience an idealized and imminently convenient version of that job”.

Once again there is this, I believe incorrect, idea that job simulators are attractive for their idealization of jobs. I won't refute that Farming Simulator 22 is an idealized farming job, but I will point out that in real life you encounter fewer man-eating giants as a salvager than Lethal Company would have you believe. Even the context and setting of Lethal Company resists the idealization of your job by having the company you work for be The Company, and your liaison is a temperamental kraken named Jeb. In real life it sucks to work for a faceless corporation, but in Lethal Company it's as if The Company is intelligent enough to hide behind a facade, but can't relate to us enough to make that facade believable. If Lethal Company is popular, and Lethal Company is not an idealized version of salvaging, why then should it be understood that idealization is a facet of the job sim genre and not a coincidental- and possibly nonexistent- element of the biggest titles? To be clear, when I say ‘possibly nonexistent’, I only mean that it is simple to describe a job sim you enjoy playing as an idealized version of that job when the reality is that it is an idealized version of a game simulating that job. This might be pedantic, but pedantry is my specialty.

I'm kind of going out of order but I want to address the beginning of that quote as well, and challenge the idea that job sims are popular since they remove us from the consequences of failure. To speak on real life- of course I will be just as healthy and wealthy upon logging off from Lethal Company as when I started. That being said, within the gameplay of Lethal Company there indeed are consequences for incompetence. Actually scratch that, there are consequences for competent players as well. If a blind dog haphazardly walks onto your ship while you are absent, you will die upon return. You don't have to make mistakes to lose everything in this game, including XP. I apologize for excessive italics in this paragraph but I must emphasize how crushed I was to see that I had less XP upon resurrection (you come back to life after leaving a moon if you indeed did die). I worked hard, persevered as I was chased by spooky fellas, died in the line of duty, and got my XP debited for my trouble. The fame this game has earned indicates gamers are not pushed away by consequences, and because of that I argue again that lack of consequences is not necessary to make a popular job sim. To be fair I believe Madigan did mean to speak on real world consequences, however I am not a mind reader and have addressed his point as such because I believe there is merit in analyzing this point as it relates to videogames.

Speaking of real-world consequences I would like to introduce you to Voices of the Void (Pay-What-You-Want). VotV is a job sim that has you working in a wooded park and using a satellite array to scan the night sky for radio signals. VotV is befuddling and bemusing immediately upon surveying the concrete building you live in, which has a poster of a UFO with the caption “I want to believe” where “want to” is scratched out. The game is riddled with unexplainable and distressing events that you must work around or avoid in service of fulfilling your daily task. I’m not bringing this up just because I love VotV, but because of a warning at the beginning of the game that actually does offer a hazard, albeit a small hazard, to your mental well being. VotV has a unique warning label of Cognito-Hazard on the splash screen. Now I’m not about to tell you VotV will give you mental illnesses, but I do think that the gameplay can exacerbate people who already are experiencing the symptoms of mental illness. The next paragraph contains VotV spoilers (Bad Sun), skip the next paragraph if you would like.

The sun was cutting pieces off my body and when I ate what fell off, it restored me in my stomach as well as my acuity. In other terms, it filled up my hunger and sleep meter. Really though that is nothing to sneeze at when you’re asked to render 4 level 3 signals in a day and you still need to cycle the transformer and repair servers in the wilderness, don’t forget, the sun is still cutting pieces of meat off your body when you stand in direct sunlight. Is anyone else affected by this? Nobody says anything so I guess not. There are already people who believe the sun is speaking to them, and for them this game could be a genuine Cognito-Hazard. This is the example I chose because it is the briefest explanation of all the events that have happened to me while still providing any context at all. If I told you an invisible guy booped me for committing larceny this would mean nothing to you.

In short, VotV and Lethal Company both can be described as: monotonous jobs interrupted by intelligent nonhuman interference. VotV in particular can conceivably have real-world consequences for certain players and nonetheless both games are popular (VotV less so). It seems that job sims do not in fact rely on convenience and immunity from consequence to be great games.

I've spent all day now reading different people speak on what makes job sims engaging, and there are a few through lines I noticed. First and foremost, there are two camps of job simmers: Sim gamers fluidly move between the labels of solo player and team player. Solo players enjoy games such as Papers, Please and Weed Shop 3 whereas team players enjoy Lethal Company, Overcooked, and others. I identified that solo players prefer jobs they can't actually do. Not everyone has what it takes to be an entrepreneur in King of Retail or work a physical labor job like PowerWash Simulator, so they play pretend to do so more or less like a kid would. Team players tend to be looking for human interaction like a new age AIM, focusing on facilitating just hanging out. Viscera Cleanup Detail and PowerWash Simulator in specific stand out as interactive chat rooms. When team players don't really know what to talk about there are games like Lethal Company ready to replace intelligent conversation with “He no move when look!”

Finally, I would like to mention what I believe to be the most important aspect gamers seek in job sims: playing pretend. Rather, role playing. Job simulators always ask you to pretend to be someone you are not. You are placed into a role and can lean into it as much or as little as you see fit. We undercut pretending in our society, as if for some reason it's so unfathomable that an adult would ever want to be someone they are not. Clowns are seen as creepy for pretending, magicians are spectacles on and off the stage, celebrities deal with strangers who only see the actor/musician/influencer as a character and almost can't see the celebrity as a professional pretender. The fact that job sims clearly have a beginning, and an end, to the roleplaying makes them very attractive to gamers who need a setting to play pretend under threat threat of looking goofy.

To conclude, what makes job sims different from jobs? I'm not pretending to be a retail worker, I am a retail worker. I do enjoy pretending to be a retail worker in Job Simulator, but it seems it is the pretending I enjoy. The next time you see an opportunity to play pretend, consider embracing your inner goofball.

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