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Randomized dialog prompts and document headings describe futuristic technologies like biofuels, tricorders, and gene doping, while the documents you “type” give self- help advice. Stock photos of office work pop up, with headers like “There is joy in work” and “No one ever drowned in sweat.”You are constantly validated and “promoted” for your simple tasks. You feel the condescension from whatever computer handed you this “work,” and you realize you’re neither important nor useful. The only real change you can effect is choosing from four desktop wallpapers and four background MIDI tracks. It’s an interesting preview of a future (and a present) where human work is mere decoration around automated labor. Can’t You See I’m Busy! While many games can be discreetly played inside a real copy of Excel, the 8- year- old game suite Can’t You See I’m Busy!
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Breakdown is a Breakaway clone inside a Word doc; Leadership is Helicopter inside a line graph. Crash Planning is a Bejeweled knockoff disguised as a calendar; Cost Cutter is a quirky tile matcher inside an animated bar chart. The idea is that you can play these games at the office without anyone noticing; there’s even a “boss button” to hide the most egregious game elements. The ruse is a bit thin, especially now that the fake software looks ancient. So the faux desktop interface is more stylistic than practical, and it emphasizes the relative monotony of the games themselves. To open a game, you click a button that oscillates between “start game” and “start work,” a winking gesture that feels sadder each time it loops.
These games are designed to make time pass. To play them is to admit that you don’t even need to be entertained, just distracted. To play them is to admit you are wasting your life. The whole genre of games that look like work share a muddy boundary with work that looks like games, a manifestation of crumbling work- life balance and the rise of social networking, the ultimate grey area between work and pleasure. The desktop sim genre has stagnated in the past few years, maybe because the office drone found a better time waster in social media. There are spreadsheet interfaces for hiding your Twitter and Facebook use, but this isn’t even necessary in the growing number of jobs that include social media management. When work is play and play is work, neither are very satisfying.
Looking busy has a bad rap. Sometimes you have to look busy so you can actually work on the things. While the player might advance up the ranks, gameplay never shifts into the top- down style of a god game or a Sim. City. The most common format is first- person.
Most tabletop officecore games also play out on this level, focusing on interaction between characters. The Stanley Parable.
The Stanley Parable is a video game about video games, but it’s also about exercising free will and challenging the limitations we unconsciously accept. Before it spirals into Matrix- like ontological absurdism, the game opens in a mundane office, depicting a mundane job. The later game’s mechanics, and even much of its message, could have been mapped onto all kinds of settings. But the modern office ties strongly into those free- will themes. To imply authority and obedience, the game could have started in a prison or a mental institution, but the office environment projects the same qualities with a subtler horror.
It also turns The Stanley Parable into a power fantasy. When Stanley disobeys the narrator, he’s like Office Space’s Peter Gibbons ignoring Lumbergh and dismantling his cubicle. Every office drone has wanted to reject the system like this. Job Simulator (Office Worker level)2.
VR game Job Simulator also takes place in a computer- automated post- job world, where museum- goers try out extinct occupations like auto mechanic, gourmet chef, store clerk, and office worker. The office level particularly highlights the disassociation between workday and product. As a chef, your job is to make a pizza; as an office worker, you have to “make job happen.” As at so many real office jobs, tasks like drinking coffee and chatting up co- workers are as important as doing any actual work. Job Simulator is a fumblecore game where half the fun is struggling with awkward controls. The incompetent feeling of this interface is reinforced by a tutorial bot that treats office rituals like exotic local customs, and who suggests you use “an ancient human technique called . Comfortingly, the robots seem to be just as clueless as you are about how business works, and they congratulate you for banging on your two- button keyboard or assembling a dadaist Power. Dot deck. You can’t really fail at this job.
Payroll. Payroll is a first- person adventure game set in a 9. While one playthrough takes just 2. There’s no heavy satire here, no frame story or fourth wall to step behind. Your goals are typical work goals. You can get fired, or you can do your job and earn retirement.
For an office sim, it’s optimistic and peaceful. The bitterest this game gets is a charmingly dreary simulation of an office birthday party. Generic Office Roleplay.
The Generic Office Roleplay Facebook group is more of a sandbox than a game. Australian teen Thomas Oscar created it in 2.
Oscar shut out unfunny ideas, striving for realism, rejecting friends who all wanted to play as janitors. Like any good DM, Oscar set boundaries around the roleplaying. But as discussed on Reply All, newer players got much sillier, replacing all the subtle jokes about fonts and social tension with goofs about iguana invasions and golden staplers. Years later, the current content is mostly middling, but this is still a fun destination for casuals. Synergon. Serious office roleplayers should consider Synergon, a loose RPG system presented satirically as a LARP, or live action roleplay.
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