Working from home
On sim games and why I still play them
Last November I was consumed by the thought that nobody would ever be able to afford a computer ever again, so I made the unwise (but seemingly less so today, looking at RAM prices) decision to buy a gaming computer. Although I have my moments, I’m not a huge gamer, but I’m still not sure if it’s because I’ve gotten older or because the games today are terrible. I’m leaning towards the latter.
One genre of video game that is not terrible is that of the sim variety. There are thousands of these buried on Steam, sorted into hundreds of subcategories that range from the obvious (flight simulators) to the less popular (ship simulators) to the obscure (strategic air defence). The bulk of the sims that you see have pretty lukewarm user reviews, but it is probably too much to expect anything better than mixed opinions for Road Maintanence Simulator 2.
More recently though, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Flight Simulator 2024 and shelling out money on addons: new airports, aircraft, and even a subscription to a service that lets you create proper flight plans like the ones commercial pilots would file. I find the whole experience calming: building a flight plan that’s restricted by real ICAO advisories (no flying over the Strait of Hormuz, taking a circuitous route around Russian airspace, for example), setting up the plane from cold and dark, talking to air traffic control, setting it to autopilot while I walk away for 10 hours while my airliner crosses the Pacific, and then coming back to do final approach and landing. It’s like playing a puzzle game to me. The fact that I can step away and do something else and even play another game at the same time is actually not dissimilar to what actual pilots do at cruise altitude (although they wouldn’t admit it).
I’ve also been getting back into Euro Truck Simulator 2 with a new save. The game has been out for over a decade and they keep adding in new countries and cargo types. Unlike Flight Simulator you do have to do the actual driving yourself, which means I have spent almost 300 hours of my life at my desk driving pretend trucks around Europe for no material gain whatsoever. This is a fantastically soothing game, where I can turn on the radio and drive on a road for hours, like playing a more sophisticated version of Desert Bus. I have been thinking about buying a steering wheel and pedals and getting really into hardcore pornography, much like a real truck driver.
On the note of public transportation, I’ve always been frustrated by how abysmal train simulators are. Train Sim World follows the Madden business model of releasing literally the same game every year with new train routes like they’re roster updates. Trains are cool and it’s sad that the sim equivalents are, with one or two exceptions, turds. Another example of this is when I recently bought SubwaySim 2, which lets you drive on one U-Bahn line in Hamburg and Berlin each. A brilliant game in theory, but the problem is that the game is poorly made. There are annoying bugs like the emergency brake coming on for no reason in the middle of a journey, the graphics are laughably bad, and the scenarios they’ve added to keep the game interesting are just makework even by simulation standards (do they really shut down the entire line and make you go backwards just because someone dropped a bag on the tracks?). Instead of doing anything to address these, the developers are working on a feature that apparently ‘everyone’ has been asking for: more realistic noises when trains cross switches on tracks.
It doesn’t surprise me that most of these sim games are set in Germany or made by Germans: there are at least 5 different Autobahn patrol games I can think of, in addition to the very German Notruf 112 – Die Feuerwehr Simulation. Germany is a country of weirdos who love nothing more than order and following rules, and is there anything more ‘Ordnung muss sein’ than a job simulator?
None of this is meant pejoratively: after all, I love these kinds of games too (honourable mention: the Flixbus simulator with official long-distance coach licensing). My issue is that these games are more often than not, poorly made, frustrating to figure out, and in some cases, completely abandoned by the developers within a year or two. A lot of these games have interesting premises and offer a fascinating window into a job you’re never going to do, like submarine commander or Viennese tram driver, but the games are built with whatever the opposite of Protestant work ethic is. Most of the really awful sim games are made/published by Aerosoft or Astragon, who are both based out of Germany. The only sim game I’ve played that doesn’t have any of these problems is Euro Truck Simulator 2, which is perfect in nearly every way, and it’s made in the Czech Republic.1
The only kind of sim game I could never get into were the Farm Simulator games, which are so big they even have an e-sports league. They’re just not fun to me, and there isn’t even a minigame that lets you kill yourself when the grain elevator rate goes up. I think it’s because the sim games that I do enjoy are based on relatively easy things I could probably do in real life but am not allowed to (drive a truck, pilot an airliner2, etc.) whereas farming is actually difficult. I suppose a real farming simulator would also include buying a farm for tax evasion reasons like a certain British TV personality, but I guess you can’t really put that much detail into video games nowadays.
I don’t know if that means anything, but I figured it was worth mentioning.
Modern airliners can basically fly themselves anyway since they’re just laptops with a Rolls-Royce engine. It’s also why I don’t fly Cessnas in the game, because that requires actual effort.