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Because a well designed game does not include drudgery. "Work-simulators" focus on results and progress and gloss over many of the hours of outright boredom or physical exertion to get there.
For example, truck driving simulator does not include the pain in the ass and boring part of loading or unloading the truck. Farming simulator does not include the painstaking process of removing rocks from the field.
While I grew up on a farm, my first proper career was something called OBC seismic. What it is isn't as important as the fact that it involved placing a 6km long sensor cable on the seabed with a winch and position it properly. To do this right requires practice, and as the principle is farly easy I wrote a small simulator that our trainees could try out. At first they found it interesting, and even the seniors from other departments enjoyed toying with it. The biggest lack of realism was that it didn't involve doing it for 12 hours straight, only stopping to unscrew 25 meter sections and replacing them. Barring drudgery and repetitive boredom could've probably made it an interesting game similar to other work simulators.
American Truck simulator's world is a 1:20 scale replica of the real world. Any drive will take about 20 times longer to complete in reality than in game. Simulator games remove most of the drugery.
It feels great to deliver cargo after a 10 minute drive. Delivering cargo after 3 hours is the start of a shift.
It would feel way better to deliver cargo after a 3 hour shift in real life if the pay and quality of life was good as a truck driver... but we live in a fundamentally broken economy that stomps its foot on the working class at every opportunity. The whole "work is hard and repetitive" thing gets nullified for the vast majority of people for most work if they are able to purchase things and have a roof over their head in what feels like a fair exchange for said work.
If you made a great living as a truck driver you would likely find yourself hard pressed to care about delivering cargo in a video game simulation.
The vast majority of players of American Truck Simulator are not professional truck drivers. There is very little appeal to playing a game that simulates your job, so most truck drivers chose other forms of entertainment than truck simulator games. This is not because of the payscale.
It takes about 8 hours to drive 500 miles. Spending 8 hours maintaining lane position is not very engaging. No amount of money will make 8 hours of lanekeeping exciting or engaging.
...and you speak for everybody here?
Better remove Ship graveyard simulator from that category...
Also, you better erase the concept of a video game having a good "grind" to it that you can sink your teeth into.... a concept that sustains entire genres of video games...
I don't mind drudgery though. I've done real life construction work, I love legos, before I had internet I dug a hole in the backyard just to see how deep a hole I could dig. Progress being made is the goal sure but that doesn't make me shy away from the boring and frustrating parts. It's just that when it comes to decorating my apartment, cleaning my room, doing dishes, mowing lawns, whatever, I just can't find myself getting started in the first place rather than giving up partway through.
Is it a lack of motivation?
Walk us through what happens when you decide to do the dishes? What is the process for preparing? What actually happens?
Are you unable to force yourself to "just do it?"
Is this a constant issue and does it cause trouble for you in your life? E.g. always a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, can't have people over, etc?
When I want to do dishes I usually start sitting at my desk or laying down on the couch or bed. Then I think about how if I want to eat later I'm going to have to do dishes because I'm out of clean plates/silverware/bowls/pots. Then I think about how I mind as well round up all the dishes in the apartment. Then I want to clean up the apartment. Then I usually start wanting to clean my room because it's gross. And then I think that I'm gross and should shower and brush my teeth. Then I get depressive and stay where I was feeling bad.
Sometimes I manage to power through and because the dishes are backed up so much I get the hot water going and let the dishes soak for a few minutes, then I have to overcome depressive thoughts again and do the dishes otherwise I sleep on the couch and the entire day has failed.
When I do manage to do dishes anyways I can only do so much until the drying rack is full, and when it's full I just drain the water and grab whatever I cleaned to make spaghetti or something.
Depression & shame is rough. I fight that all the time too. Both are very demotivating. Hopefully you will find the exercise helpful. I am trying to get back to that again too. I walked to the store and back (15 min, hills) Sunday. I didn't get a chance to do anything today. Will try again tomorrow.
What (sometimes) helps me in situations like that is exercise in a gym and a plan for the day that includes leaving the house. Most days are though tough.
Because modern life is utterly exhausting and humiliating in a million different ways. Your body knows that and isn't that interested in gambling a bunch of mental and physical energy on projects that don't directly help you feel rested and prepared for the next dumb bs you have to deal with. The thing about a video game is there isn't that risk, there isn't the blowback either from negative feelings around failure to complete the task or direct real world consequences.
Video games fundamentally are about rewriting the conditions through which we are forced to have a conversation with the environment around us. They allow us to remake our relationship with ideas, projects and other humans into healthier ones that elevate our quality of life. Video games are gifts of agency that serve as sanity checks on how healthy our real world environments actually are.
Understandable, consequences of my actions are pretty demotivating. It does seem easier to blow money on a lamp in a game then decide it doesn't fit what I was going for anyways than it is to buy anything that doesn't directly aid my survival. Fear and financial instabilities are probably some big motivators to inactivity, at least for me.
Absolutely, the best response to most real world dangers is often to do nothing, keep your head down and conserve resources both for a prehistoric human and a modern day human. Doing nothing is a lot of times far better than doing something strictly from a survival standpoint. It totally makes sense that our bodies would be wired to react to fear and financial instability this way, but obviously after a certain point this rational defense mechanism can hurt us.
I think a lot of the stimulus that comes from interacting with mobile devices is more insidious than most people realising.
Try changing your phone to grey scale in the usability settings for a day and you'll see what I mean.
Basically, real life just doesn't stimulate dopamine production in the same way, it's not as satisfying.
Does it have to do with the difference between one-off tasks and recurring tasks? I’ve asked myself similar questions to yours and sometimes I wonder if tedium is harder to accept when you know that, even if you finish this task today, you’ll have to do it again tomorrow, next week, etc. So why not skip it this once? (We all know it’s never just once)
I don't think so? Even when I'm not thinking about the temporary nature of things I struggle with doing stuff. I want to learn guitar and experiment with painting and sewing, apply to jobs, and all sorts of beans that aren't temporary in terms of my lifespan. Starting just about anything I want to do is just plain difficult for me.
Ok those are really big things. For those really big intimidating things, I found Barbara Oakley’s book/lectures on procrastination quite helpful. I think they are on YT. They helped me get unstuck during my PhD. For the smaller recurring things, let me know if you find a good strategy :) When it’s non-life-changing fun stuff (e.g. music/drawing/crafts), I try to focus on the joy that I get out of even just dicking around instead of how I suck compared to Picasso.