I am a horrible driver, and I mastered the turning radius on my plow within about ten minutes the rest of Farming Simulator's plowing experience left me literally and figuratively on cruise control, watching my canola reserves pile up and wondering how long it would take for me to afford some chickens.Īfter a couple fields' worth of trying to text some friends while plowing and wondering how profitable livestock might be, my technical mastery inevitably gave way to boredom. These same systems can also be easily distilled into video game-sized goal/reward structures (plant wheat, harvest wheat, sell wheat to pay off loan), but they diverge from most other video games at their scale in that they don't require any learned or honed skill as much as they just reward old-fashioned diligence. If transporting large amounts of consumer goods as efficiently as possible interests you, but real-world circumstances are preventing you from being a freight train conductor or trucker, these games are the next best thing to the open road. Flight simulators, of course, have existed for long enough and in enough forms that they are now a cornerstone of both actual military training and some of the most elaborate, gear-fetishizing bedroom computer rigs I have ever seen.īut why fill up a bachelor pad with twelve CRT monitors? Why spend 45 minutes plowing a virtual field in a computer-rendered version of an actual, commercially available plow? What kinds of enjoyment can be wrung from a persistent, low-key simulation that punishes rush jobs and consciously avoids the kinds of deviations from reality that most people associate with a good video game time?Įach of these simulators represents a system that emulates an actual, more exclusionary system. Train Simulator lets you drive a train around. There's Euro Truck Simulator, in which the player can step into the mind of a European long-haul truck driver. As a result of my greed, I'm left at the bottom of the ravine, wondering why anyone would choose to Simulate a Farm in a fidelity high enough to cause debt anxiety.įarming Simulator is just one of a small genre of games built around simulating mundane, often tedious jobs. I got a little bored, which made me a little greedy. I had to take out a loan to buy the farm, so I'm $40,000 in debt to the bank. It was foolish to attempt the shortcut, to leave the robust road system that already existed in and around my land. "Now I'm in business," I think, as I attempt a shortcut over the crest of a hill and spin out of control, irrevocably lodging my $26,000 Weidemann at the bottom of a ravine. Bored, and encouraged by the implied promise of more easy forklift work, I head over to the vehicle-and-attachment store and pick up a Wiedmann Pallet Fork, which I promptly attach to the front of my Weidemann 4270 CX100 T frontloader. I don't own a forklift attachment for my frontloader, but for some reason the payment for the country club job will just about cover its cost. The birdsong is interrupted by the buzz of my PDA. Someone at the country club that apparently abuts my brand new farm wants to know if I can drive a forklift over and help them move some seeds. The scenery is nice, but not that nice, and I'm starting to get antsy. Instead of getting anything done, I'm driving around aimlessly, listening to the birds and the hum of my tractor and trying to remember where I'd planted some crops. I have a map on my PDA, and my fields have been assigned numbers, but I forgot to keep track of which field is which. I've been playing Farming Simulator for about two hours, and I'm lost on my own property.
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