The perils of productivity simulators

Hello readers! Just some miscellaneous waffle from me this week. I’ve been doing a fair bit of book writing recently, but I don’t have much to say about it – nothing entertaining, anyway. From an outsider’s perspective, book writing must appear to be very mundane: just a figure staring at a screen, sometimes hammering out some words on a keyboard, sometimes tutting, sometimes frowning at a wall, and sometimes Googling oddly specific or incriminating queries such as “how much water does a horse drink per day” or “how long does it take a body to decompose in a desert.” Maybe one day I’ll manage to discuss my writing method in a humorous and engaging manner – but for now, I’ll spare you the details. 

Instead, let’s talk about what else I’ve been up to. The sudden burst in writing has only occurred due my other work commitments having temporarily reduced, leaving me with more free time than I’ve had in a while. Specifically, I’ve managed to reach that blissful, undefined limbo period between submitting a manuscript and receiving feedback – and now that this manuscript is out of my hands, probably being torn to shreds at the hands of somebody else, I am finally free to work on something else.

But there’s a catch. A few weeks ago, I bought a new laptop. My old one is now too weak for anything more than simple word processing, but the new one can handle a lot more (at least when Windows 11 isn’t trying to run some stupid background process without my permission). So, I opened Steam for the first time in years, wondering if, perhaps, perchance, I might be able to install some games on this machine. Nothing big, of course – just something to pass the time. (For those readers who are unfamiliar, Steam is a platform that lets you buy and launch PC games, and spy on your friends’ gaming activity).

My first challenge, of course, was to remember my Steam password. And my second challenge, after I requested to reset my password, was to identify a series of buses, bicycles and zebra crossings, to convince Steam that I wasn’t a robot. My third challenge was to try and convince myself that I wasn’t a robot, after I spent 15 minutes failing the second challenge (Alan Turing would be horrified). And then, as luck would have it, I remembered my original password anyway. Time well spent. Am I a robot? Who cares.

And so it begins… 

There are, broadly speaking, three types of game that I like to play: those that involve exploration and puzzle solving, those that involve designing and creating, and those that involve strategy and planning. When I opened up Steam for the first time in years, I had a couple of games in mind, both of which fall into the last category. One of them was Civilisation VI, which I bought ages ago but haven’t been able to play. The other game was Cities: Skylines, which happened to be on sale for less than £3, in celebration of its tenth anniversary. Both of these games were designed to run on older, less powerful PCs, so I assumed that they might run on a newer, mid-range laptop. It would be a good test of my new computer’s capabilities, in any case.

Now, for those that are unfamiliar, Civilisation (more often referred to as “Civ”) is a tile-based strategy game that pits several players against one another in a race to develop a functioning society. The game starts with pre-Roman levels of technology, and by exploring, conquering and constructing, you unlock better weapons and infrastructure, until, eventually, you can drop nukes on your friends. Typical games last several hours, spread across multiple play sessions. The only way to end a game quickly is to play against that one friend who has invested 10,000 hours, physically ingested every line of the game manual, constructed an Excel spreadsheet (with macros) to identify the most efficient win strategies, and only ever plays as Babylon. They’ll wipe you out in forty minutes and take great pleasure in doing so.

Cities: Skylines is far less competitive. In fact, there is no competition at all, because it is a single player game. You are given a map, a small budget, and a set of tools to build roads and infrastructure. You designate areas for certain uses (e.g., residential, industry, commercial), and if the in-game people like the look of the area you have built, they move in. There is no win condition, but there are multiple lose conditions: your citizens can die of disease if you don’t provide healthcare (or if you extract drinking water downstream of your sewerage outlet), you can go bankrupt, or you can find your city so aesthetically displeasing that you wish that your Babylonian Civ friend could drop a nuke on it.

Productivity simulators 

I’ve talked about games like Civ and Cities: Skylines before, calling them “productivity simulators”. The last culprit was Stardew Valley, the game in which you build a farm from scratch, and follow a daily routine of watering vegetables, picking vegetables, and giving vegetables to virtual villagers so that they like you more (who wouldn’t fall in love after receiving green beans every day for three years?). Before that, another productivity simulator was Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a game which gives you full creative control as you colonise and destroy the pristine habitat of a tropical island, at the behest of a capitalist racoon.

But why do I call them “productivity simulators”? It’s because they fool you into thinking that you are working on something, when in reality you aren’t making anything at all. These games provide the same sort of satisfaction as creative hobbies, such as writing, drawing, or even DIY projects. And for this reason, I treat them with extreme caution.

The allure of “progression” 

Don’t get me wrong: I love these games. But I find them very addictive, and they start to take up my time to the detriment of my other hobbies. These games are designed to be addictive, of course: the designers need you to keep playing in order to sell you more game content. And one of the ways that they encourage you to keep playing, despite there being no fixed end goal, is to provide the player with a constant sense that they are making progress – that their hard work is paying off in a satisfying manner. Civ, of course, has an end goal (to nuke your friends into capitulation), but the aim in this case is for you to finish one game, then start another, as the map is random each time.

Game progression comes in many different forms. Often, it involves growth, as your island, city or civilisation increases its population, economic revenue, or sheer size over time. Alternatively, you might just be working towards your own idea of perfection, bringing an artistic or engineering vision to life. In some games, you have progress bars at the bottom of the screen, always showing you how far you are to the next (often arbitrary) milestone. These milestones have been placed strategically to provide dopamine hits at regular intervals to keep you, the player, engaged – and it works. These games mimic the feeling of working on an actual project, hitting targets and achieving goals. They make you feel productive, even though you aren’t producing anything.

The reason that I treat these games with such caution is because I know how addictive they can be, while providing very little in return (we’ll come back to this point in a moment). I also suspect that these sorts of games are particularly addictive to a certain type of person: someone who is prone to obsession, loves organisation and project management, and gets a dopamine hit whenever they produce something. For better or worse, I fall into this category. And I can find these games very hard to put down.

But is that a bad thing? 

Stating the obvious here: games are designed to be fun. So, if you enjoy playing productivity simulators, what’s the problem? If you’ve spent six hours constructing an elaborate virtual motorway intersection rather than making a physical clay pot with your own two hands – what’s the issue, so long as you had fun? On the face of it, there’s no issue at all. Everyone has hobbies. Spend your time in a way that makes you happy.

But for me personally, I can’t help but see these games as a guilty pleasure, rather than a worthy time investment. I guess it’s analogous to the difference between fast food and a home cooked meal. The productivity simulator provides satisfaction in a predictable, concentrated manner, and has been engineered specifically for that purpose, whereas a self-driven creative hobby requires more input from you, and yields varying results. And while a productivity simulator might trigger the same responses as a self-driven hobby, in engaging with it, you become a consumer rather than a creator.

Again, this consumer-creator reversal isn’t necessarily a problem. Media is designed to be consumed, and it should be. That’s how we entertain ourselves, and it’s how we learn. I’m not here to argue that reading a book or watching a film is somehow lesser than writing a book or directing a film – that would be silly. Clearly, games should be enjoyed. I guess my worry is that productivity simulators fall into a grey area in which the consumer feels like a creator. When you read books or watch films, your brain is in a different gear to when you’re writing or directing. If I can break it down to overly simplistic terms, reading and watching are activities that refill your energy tank, whereas writing or directing deplete that energy tank. But when you’re playing a productivity simulator, it can go either way. For me, I can become so invested and obsessed with a productivity simulator that my energy tank starts depleting in the same way that it would if I was writing. Maybe even more so.

The upshot of all this is that productivity simulators can start to feel like a drain on my resources. If they reach a critical level of obsession, they start to feel like work. And rather than putting the game down and thinking “hey, this isn’t super relaxing” or “why do I feel more tired now than when I started”, I keep chasing the thrill of making stuff. Because who doesn’t feel a sense of pride when they pull up fifty virtual turnips after several hours of diligent virtual watering? Who doesn’t feel like a genius when their elaborate, multi-levelled motorway junction facilitates seamless virtual traffic flow?

Is it still real if it’s virtual? 

I realise that, up until now, I have been treating virtual turnips, islands and motorway intersections as if they are somehow lesser than their physical equivalents – maybe even meaningless. But are they? Yes, you can’t eat virtual turnips. And yes, nobody can drive their car around your virtual, perfectly scaled copy of the Gravelly Hill Interchange. But they still provide joy to their creator, and they can even provide joy to thousands of other people.

Most productivity simulators have huge online communities. Thousands of people are out there sharing their in-game creations, whether that’s a fully optimised factory conveyor belt system, or a cutesy kitchen designed for an anthropomorphic cow. These are personal creations and artistic expressions. Yes, the art is constrained by the limits of the medium (in this case, by the game assets and programming), but this is always true for any type of art – even oil paintings or sculptures. Some mediums will give you more creative freedom than others, but as I’ve said previously, I enjoy the problem-solving that comes with restrictive mediums such as Lego bricks. The same is true for video-game creations.

But if we treat the outputs of these games as art, then is it even fair for me to call them productivity simulators? If anything, they have facilitated productivity. Perhaps my distrust of these games is simple snobbery. Perhaps a virtual vegetable patch is just as worthy a creative endeavour as a finished novel. Admittedly, this will depend on the quality of the novel… 

The trade-off 

Let’s go back to the over-simplified concept of the energy tank. Working takes energy from the tank, and relaxing puts energy back in. Reading books and watching films fills the tank. Writing novels drains the tank. Playing productivity simulators to an obsessive degree also drains the tank. The problem boils down to a simple trade-off: if I spend too much time playing productivity simulators, I can’t spend as much time writing – otherwise the tank will end up empty.

However, I think the problem has another layer beyond this simple analogy. Imagine a second tank, not representing energy, but the fuel to create something. This tank doesn’t empty over time: it fills. And when it is completely full, it explodes. The best way to empty this tank (and avoid an explosion) is to produce something (you can probably see where this is going). The easiest way to empty the tank is to pursue some creative hobbies, but playing productivity simulators also seems to work – at least in the short term. This is one of the reasons that I find productivity simulators so fun and rewarding: because they act like a creativity pressure valve. But again, if I release pressure using a productivity simulator, I lose the pressure that could have driven me to write something.

Am I making sense, or ranting into a void? 

The real issue at the heart of all this is worthiness. Is a life spent playing games and producing virtual cauliflowers more valuable than a life spent writing books? I don’t even know how to begin answering this. How do we assign value to the way we spend time? Should we? The very concept of “spending” or “wasting” time only exists because we know we have a budget – a limited time in this universe. We’re in a constant state of weighing up how to deploy our limited resources. And for me, I still haven’t made up my mind when it comes to productivity simulators. Yes, I have built some intricate virtual highway intersections over the last couple of weekends, and yes, I enjoyed doing it – so why do I worry that it was all a waste of time?

In summary… 

Apologies for a more introspective post this week. I’d be interested to know how other people see these types of games: whether they are a simple way of relaxing, watching buildings go up and nukes go down, or whether they are a form of artistic expression, creating the perfect pastel-pink house-share for your favourite anthropomorphic sheep. For me personally, I’ll keep a watchful eye on my playtime, and remember that, ten years from now, I will find much more enjoyment in reading the books that I have written than reminiscing about that one ultra-efficient sewerage network that I made on a Sunday in 2025. They might both be creative expressions, but one is much more profound and personal than the other. 

Happy reading, and have a lovely week!