How Boring Games Took Over My Life

Planes, trains, and automobiles – these are all methods of transportation that we all take in our daily lives. Maybe you’re commuting to work, maybe you’re going out for a relaxing drive, or maybe you’re just trying to practice for your pilot’s licence by doing a figure of eight around two skyscrapers when it all goes wrong and gets misunderstood by the world for the next two decades. Regardless, these are also popular settings for simulator video games like Euro Truck Simulator, Train Simulator, and Flight Simulator. Come to think of it, they really need to get someone to fix their branding. 

You would think with us using these forms of transport in the dullest parts of our lives that replicating these journeys in video games – the time when we’re trying to escape the despotic hell we call earth – would be the last thing you’d want to do. That’s what I thought, anyway, until I slowly became more and more addicted with performing menial tasks in these so-called video games. I went so far down the rabbit hole that I started pondering new careers; maybe I should get my trucking licence and long haul some cargo, or maybe I should become a train driver, that’s good money I hear. How about being a pilot? Yes, having the fates of hundreds of passengers in my hands certainly won’t spike my anxiety multiple times per day. Side note: please share this so I don’t have to pursue any of these careers, it’s better for us all if I’m not in charge of a 747. 

It all started with Euro Truck Simulator, a game that has been out over a decade. It sounds pretty boring, right? Just delivering cargo from place to place, following real-life rules in a virtual world. Wah, don’t speed; wah, don’t crash a valuable cargo of watches; wah, don’t run cars off the road. But, when a game goes on sale for cheap, you don’t complain, you just buy, so that’s what I did. I was shocked when it gripped me far more than I thought it would. Soon, I swapped my Xbox controller for an expensive wheel because, come on, you need that authentic experience. It started sinking its claws into me in a way that other games just haven’t, and I found myself recruiting more drivers, buying more trucks, and taking out loans to upgrade my trucking business. Cruising down the highway listening to TruckersFM for hours allowed me to zone out and relax, and I wondered if maybe it triggered something in my ADHD-addled brain, or maybe that’s just how they get you. 

It wasn’t long before I found myself going to Game Pass and playing Train Simulator. Ah, yes, a whole new series of controls to learn, because this time I was in charge of a train. Then it was flight simulator, which had me crawling around in dark spaces of my house trying to dig out my flight stick so that I could sit in a cockpit for many hours flying from place to place. Heck, I even found myself installing Forklift Simulator, carefully driving around warehouses on my forklift and loading cargo into vans or stacking and rearranging pallets on shelves. Each game required me to start from scratch again, learning a new set of controls and practicing with each new vehicle before I could fully master it.

But, strangely, it wasn’t just vehicles. At a friend’s recommendation, I tried out TCG Card Shop Simulator, which is a game all about opening a trading card game store. You get to order new stock, put that stock on the shelves, price it, sell cards at the cash register, set up tables and tournaments for card game connoisseurs to come and hang out at your store. Even just describing these games sounds boring – that is until you play them. 

However, one question has just been floating around in my mind ever since I started this simulator game adventure, and that is, why am I spending my time replicating people’s jobs in a video game when I could be out there in real life making some mega bucks doing the same thing? The answer, I think, lies in the realities of doing the stuff we don’t see or do on-screen. Being a trucker isn’t so glamorous when you have to live out of your truck and work 12-hour shifts, rather than being able to press the quit button whenever you like. Or, for that matter, working late nights in a card shop or driving your forklift around a warehouse all day for minimum wage. Not to mention that all of these jobs take decades of practice to perfect in real life. 

What is so enchanting about the monotony of simulator games, then? Why replicate the mundane in the time when you’re supposed to be free to do whatever you want? I don’t know about you, but for me, simulator games act as a kind of therapy. I can zone out and perform a task that at the same time requires me to focus my mind and allows me to forget the existential horrors of daily life while also letting another part of my mind wander and process whatever is niggling at me. It sounds counter intuitive, so let me explain it with a euro truck simulator analogy. In the game, you start and manage your own trucking company. You can choose what jobs to take and have to haul goods between warehouses. Doing so gives you money to upgrade your company, so there’s an overall, long-term goal. But in the actual driving portion, you simply follow your GPS while listening to the radio. Due to the fact that if you lose concentration in a game, you won’t squash a family of 6 on their way to vacation, there’s something soothing about being able to play, in air quotes, the game and make progress in lifelike setting, without it taking up the full bandwidth that these tasks require in real life. 

There’s something almost intangible about playing simulator games. It’s almost as if they open a portal to another world that’s similar to ours but different; one where you can be anything you want to be, and I’m sure therein lies the addictiveness. In some kind of Freudian notion of living another life and having the agency to pursue all of the other life paths that you could have taken but didn’t. Another reason that simulator games are so attractive is that they’re, in a strange way, the ultimate form of escapism. It appears almost contradictory to say because some people like to escape to RPG fantasy worlds, but becoming a bus driver or an airline pilot trumps these other fantastical settings to a great extent, largely because the worlds that we inhabit when we load the game up are much like our own, so – for me at least – it triggers something deep down that says “maybe you could never be a magic-wielding mage, but you could learn a new set of skills. It’s not too late.” And in learning the intricacies of whatever you’re simulating, whether it’s controlling a vehicle or running a store, you build the confidence to know that hey, if you can do it in this quasi-real world, you can also learn these skills to change your real life. A great example of this being, of course, learning the 1:1 take off sequences in Flight Simulator or DCS. 

There’s also the fact that these quote unquote boring games can give you a literal perspective shift. Take, for example, flying at 30,000 feet in a Boeing 747. Imagine you’re good enough at flying now that you can hit autopilot and navigate by heading, so you don’t need to worry about the controls. You’re above your favourite real life city or country, and you glance out of the cockpit and see tiny houses and buildings. You managed to successfully take off and navigate a plane full of imaginary people to that exact point, which I’m sure is a metaphor for something or other. In a strange way, these in-game events put everything you’re worried about into a perspective you can’t really get regularly in your day-to-day. One thing is for certain when it comes to simulators – there’s a very real philosophical element to all of these kinds of games if you try to experience them as more than just a monotonous time sucks. 

So, for those watching this that haven’t dived very deep into simulator games, then I implore you to open your mind to the joy you might just get out of what is seemingly boring, because you might find yourself experiencing far more than you expected. And for those of you who are already initiated into the simulator genre, know that I understand now, and that I’ve joined your ranks. Maybe we’ll cross paths one day, on a lonely night flight across the Atlantic, or perhaps you’ll pass me overturned in my truck on the side of the autobahn, with my delivery of apples slowly rolling across the road because I was spacing out and pondering the meaning of existence. I’m not speaking from experience, you are.

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