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Comment by adra | Hacker News Reader

With so few death cage fighters, why are there so many brawler games? With so few wanting to be soldiers, why are there so many shooters? Pedantic question to pedantic answers.

But my real answer would be that some people are over stimulated at work, and some are over. The understimulated one's I think gravitate to the "grand feats" type of games while those who are overstimulated at work are more looking for either laid back or mundane games to play. All these "_ life sim" games are generally in that mundane category and that's the audience most captive for these forms of entertainment.

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Experience the risk without actually taking any risk.

Although, I can offer an anecdote. I really enjoy playing truck simulators, namely American and European Truck Simulator. I had to drive a large box truck recently and I found it super easy - the high up position, looking at the mirrors to back up and parallel park perfectly, and the joy of the open road. Then I realized that truck drivers do this every day for weeks on end as a job. Really appreciate the folks who keep our economy moving.

I think one of the underappreciated issues with the 21st century economy is how many of us do the same thing, day in, day out, hyperoptimized to the point it's economically hard to justify switching tasks. (Or, perhaps more accurately, the 20th century economy, which is still largely with us.)

Do a little of this today, a little of that tomorrow, even a little of this and that within a day, and I feel like we could all tolerate a bit more mundanity (for lack of a better word) in our lives. Cut vegetables, drive a truck, pump sewage, work a factory line, it'd all be easier if we weren't doing the same thing all the time, 40+ hours a week.

> economically hard to justify switching tasks.

I vaguely remember some factories would not let workers change jobs once they got good at them, to their detriment (with carpal tunnel and other RSIs)

That is less so now that factories are more automated. The factory I used to work at (not in, but same building) bragged that within 3 months everyone had done every station once. While a little productivity is lost because of experience, the boredom factor means less people quit and so overall they do better

I suspect having that cross training is also desirable that there will always be someone who can run machine X and that everyone becomes disposable.

People are not disposable because they need to be trained. Sure we have books, but everytime you need to look up order in the book a minute is lost compared to someone who knows.

The wrenches don't allow doing steps in the wrong order or wrong torque, but that only gets so far

Actually I never thought of it this way. When I feel very understimulated at work (most of the time) I tend to have a ton of side projects and/or play the action kinda games. Bringing balance to stimulation is definitely an interesting persepecive.

It can't just be work, given the popularity of video games with kids who don't have jobs yet. I guess you can speculate under or over-stimulation of life in total, but that definitely doesn't comport at least with my personal experience. I played a bunch of sports as a kid and played video games about sports on top of that. When I was a real Soldier in a tank unit, a whole bunch of the tankers played video games involving tank combat. Plenty of infantry played first-person shooters.

Some people just enjoy what they already do and want to do even more of it in a way that doesn't create additional physical hardship and risk.

Generally I get what you're saying, but do keep in mind that there are some life sim games that are extremely high on stimulation.

Endless ATC, Firefighting Simulator: The Squad, Transport Inc., Cold Waters, The Invisible Hand, and 112 / 911 operator, and Tin Can come to mind. There's also "study sims" like DCS World which push you really far into the simulation thing, both in requiring a high degree of competence and in the amount of stimulation you have flying a mission.

I thought age was a factor. In my youth I had way more patience for the likes of Harvest Moon, and enjoyed the roleplay. However, I didn't know what to expect. I wanted to develop and customize the virtual property, pursue virtual relationships. At a certain point you can't help but see the games for what they are. I quickly grew bored with the repetitive menial tasks. I liked the "idea" of a game like that, but not what it amounted to. Now I can say the same for most jrpgs.

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