BexM

remind me to talk to you tomorrow about city builders in this context

if you are interested in trains, the JR East Rail simulator is very good but stupid expensive. It’s basically super accurate but frustratingly japanese: 1080p max res, locked framerate, massively expensive outside of japan

Yeah, it was deleted.

Did you ever see the youtube series by a leftish city planner who used cities skylines as a tool to teach basics about urban planning?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&list=PLwkSQD3vqK1S1NiHIxxF2g_Uy-LbbcR84

Years ago I designed a pair of games, one played on 19th century telegraph hardware (you'd tap out morse code, and a big honking 1800s device based on magnets and metal bars would clack morse code back at you) and another on a desk-sized 1920s telephone switchboard.

Finding the right level of abstraction is extremely difficult. I made these things because I truly wanted to teach people about how old tech worked, in a way that simply presented the objects as they would have been used contemporanously and encouraged people to be driven by their own intellectual curiosity. Doing that for a 5-minute installation piece ended up being fairly easy to make something extremely fun, but the times I've tried to scale up that sort of experience into a longer game simulation context has been much harder.

have you ever heard of My Summer Car? its made by a couple of Finnish devs, and you rebuild a 1970's Nissan Cherry from a complete teardown. it forces you to pick out the right size of spanner for each bolt. last I checked, it didn't have a manual; it just kind of expects you to know how to assemble an engine block.

(Hope you're ok with a total stranger chiming in! pls delete comment if not)

I saw a joke once that a video game is a power fantasy of crossing of your to-do list and I think the simulators coming out are a version of that. Completing mundane things but without all the friction and annoyances that accompanies them in real life. So for Power Wash Simulator, it'd be not worrying about things doing damage with a power washer, getting yourself wet, wasting water, etc. I personally like the frictionless aspect of these games but can see why it'd be frustrating to those who want to dig deep into the details.

Honestly, this is a topic I want to dig into eventually, but working with what I have right now, job simulations are, for me, the epitome of the streamer game. A streamer game is any game that's specifically for somebody to use as a streaming platform of some kind. This is distinct from making games directly for somebody to play. In fact, the things that make a game fun to play - depth of mechanics, an emphasis on skill, the possibility of repeating segments of a game a lot, surprise - are also what make streaming more difficult. Hence, a certain subset of streaming games (others preserve and exaggerate these elements as a means of provoking a streamer's reactions) tend to make the game itself predictable enough that it doesn't demand too much focus from either the streamer or their chat. Job sims like Power Washer Simulator achieve this by stripping away skill and complexity in favor of discrete tasks, but others like Vampire Survivors make do with de-emphasizing skill in a genre framework that still relies on it to some extent.

you should take a look at sophie's safecracking simulator, it's very much the thing you're describing here

Car driving/racing games are an interesting case because they go all the way from dumb fun like GTA through intermediate sims like Forza or Gran Turismo into deep sims like Assetto Corsa, and then into the details around the cars like the F1 season sims.

And since I race cars myself and have an actual reality to check against, it's interesting that the ones people seem to enjoy most such as Gran Turismo - they're my least favourite. They're close enough to look and feel authentic to most people, but the places they're not accurate (such as how the cars deal with loss of traction and collisions) really bug me. Maybe it's an "Uncanny Valley" deal.

(I should note that yes you can turn the realism up on Forza and GT, but generally people don't - they switch to sims like AC instead).

The thing I realize is that despite the fact that I don't like it very much, GT is still an excellent way for normal people to be introduced to the complexities of driving a car fast. Weight transfer, lift-off oversteer, the racing line - all that stuff. The fact that it doesn't implement those complexities perfectly kinda doesn't matter - the point is it teaches people they exist, they understand the principles, they're done in a way that is approachable, and that's the important thing when asking "does this make someone a better real-world driver". And of course it's fun, and fun increases exposure time, and that leads to a degree of mastery. Whereas you throw someone straight into a race car in AC, and they're not going to be having fun - so unless they're doing it specifically as training because they just bought a real car, they're probably not going to stick with it.

And then you get to odd things like Euro Truck Simulator, which I do enjoy. I've never driven a truck, I'm sure it infuriates people who do, but it has introduced me to some of the complexities of driving a truck, such that I can appreciate they're difficult, interesting, and have a bunch of subtleties. On the other hand - Munich to Paris in 20 minutes! :-)