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Pop CultureJune 3, 2018

House Flipper is the renovation simulator for the eternally renting millennial

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Born after 1980? Going to be renting your entire life with no end in sight? House Flipper is the game to simulate a renovation future you’ll never see. Adam Goodall reviews.

When I was a kid and my parents made me go to Mitre 10 Palmerston North with them, I would go straight to the part of the store where they kept the house paint. In that part of the store, Resene (or Dulux, or maybe Cabot) had set up a computer kiosk. Members of the public could only use one programme on the kiosk. In it, you were asked to pick a pre-furnished room in a house that looked like it had been built for a four-page spread in Better Homes and Gardens. You were then given a palette, the full range of Resene (or Dulux or Cabot) house paints. Tap a colour, tap a wall or ceiling or floor, watch it change from a reserved white to a powerful purple.

I’d play on that kiosk until my parents found the hose or lawnmower or whatever that they were after. I loved it.

Spot the Buble!

The first house I sold in House Flipper was a one-bedroom rescue. The victim of an electrical fire, it needed some serious remedial work: the walls were crumbling, the carpets were grey with ash and the doors were rotting in the frames. I went to work. I painted the walls sharp green, stripped out the bad carpet and replaced it with complementary beige, retiled the bathroom, mounted new weatherboards on the walls outside, installed a new shower and a new toilet and a new wall-mounted television. I put a poster of The Rock’s 2006 Xbox and PS2 game Spyhunter: Nowhere to Run on the bedroom wall because I like to leave a piece of myself in every house I renovate.

I spent two hours and $5,000 renovating it. I watched the sun fall and rise on the house as I worked. I sold it at auction to an artsy woman named Veronica for a $20,000 profit. She was disappointed there were no flowers in the house, but not that disappointed.

House Flipper is a renovation simulator that’s been near the top of Steam’s global bestseller charts for two weeks running. You play a young entrepreneur looking to make a fast buck on the housing market, buying houses, doing them up, selling them on to a loose cast of archetypes for a tidy profit. In between you pick up odd jobs for extra cash, cleaning out garages and renovating homes so people can move their grandmas out. This is the formula that did it.

Spot the Buble, again…

It makes sense, though. House Flipper gives you the freedom to design a house you’d want to live in. It lets you paint it the way you want. It lets you knock down interior walls and put up new ones. It lets you put up pictures without worrying about what the blu-tack or nails might mean for your bond. It lets you take photos of your house then sell it on, getting your foot on a property ladder that you can never fall off.

House Flipper is all about that fantasy of doing easy work and earning easy money. You can buy a house for $40k, renovate it for $5k and flip it for $60k without negatively impacting the housing market. There are no quick time events you can fail, no unreasonable demands from your buyers, nothing more complicated than clicking and holding the left mouse button. You have a level of control over these houses that is almost impossible to imagine in real life if you’re a millennial born into an international housing crisis with no signs of slowing. The apartment I live in will always have boring cream and grey walls, but I can paint this three-room townhouse ‘Amaranth Adventure’ and no landlord’s gonna be able to stop me.

This freedom is limited, though. House Flipper asks you to perform the role of renovator through rote patterns of highlighting, clicking and holding, and these patterns get gruelling as the houses you buy get bigger and bigger. Tiling a bathroom: buy a pile of tiles and put them on the floor, click on the pile, highlight a section of the wall, click and hold, repeat until you’ve run out of tiles in the tile pile, buy another tile pile and start again. Installing a toilet: click on a glowing screw or piece of plastic and hold until the animation has completed. Installing a shower: like installing a toilet, but it takes five times as long.

It’s not Buble, but it’s no better.

You can’t change the property’s blueprint, either. You’re allowed to renovate within the four walls you’re given, but no further. You’re allowed to tear down the interior walls, but the exterior walls stand strong against your sledgehammer. You’re allowed to extend the bathroom or make it smaller but you can’t change its location – someone who came before you, someone with more freedom than you, set the fixtures.

This isn’t a Sims-style ground-up home design simulator. It’s more like Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 or Farming Simulator 2018 or that programme on the kiosk in Mitre 10, one with boundaries and repetition and incremental progress. There are no limits to how your business can grow as long as you stick around and accept the limits to how you perform your business.

Typically in these types of simulator, the limits to how you play aren’t designed to be purposefully stressful: they’re designed to be calming, even meditative. Here, though, they’re constricting. Like that kiosk in Mitre 10, the design expressions available to you are ultimately shallow. Wall tiles come in a handful of colours, but none of those colours matched the bright, summery aesthetic I wanted for the first house I renovated. I painted that bathroom white. There’s only one kind of shower, only one kind of washing machine, only one kind of mirror. You don’t have that kind of control.

Spot The Rock – invariably better than Garfield or Buble.

There’s very little scope for discovery or surprise, and House Flipper doesn’t even seem all that interested in playing against that, in embracing the meditative state of performing labour digitally. You can upgrade your renovator, but the upgrades are almost exclusively for speeding up your labour – paint faster, tile faster, do less to finish your odd jobs. If the game knows that its animations are tedious, slow and pointless, what’s their worth in the first place?

I always complete the odd jobs. When I finish, I hang a picture in the person’s house, taken from the pictures I’ve downloaded over the years. A libertarian bro got a Minion meme about communism in his lounge. A couple with a three year old came home to a picture of Detective Pikachu complaining about cramps. A scuzzy party dude bought a house full of Michael Bublé pictures. It’s my way of asserting control over these places, of saying that I designed this the way I wanted to. That’s what keeps me coming back to House Flipper, even with all the frustrations. I liked its utopian promise that I could do what I wanted to a place, that I could design it the way I wanted and that I would be rewarded for doing so. Whether you’re a kid or a twenty-something renter for life, that promise is nice for a little while, even if it’s fake.

You can buy House Flipper on Steam.


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You don’t wanna be cold like these guys! Stay inside and binge.
You don’t wanna be cold like these guys! Stay inside and binge.

Pop CultureJune 2, 2018

Staying in for our Queen’s birthday? Here’s what to binge

You don’t wanna be cold like these guys! Stay inside and binge.
You don’t wanna be cold like these guys! Stay inside and binge.

You’ve got three days off work – why would you want to spend it outside being cold when you could be cosily binge-watching the best of Lightbox in the comfort of your own home?

Some people spend their public holidays in the fresh air, having ‘experiences’ and meeting ‘people’. To them, I say: please stop. The Palace has hereby decreed that the best way of celebrating the birthday of Queen Elizabeth II is simply to stare at a screen for three days straight. I mean, if you were to ask the Queen what she’s got planned this weekend I’m pretty sure it involves ordering in some Nandos and settling down for a marathon session of Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry.

It’d be treasonous not to follow her example, so prepare to command your tiny realm with the best of Lightbox’s binge-worthy options for your long weekend viewing pleasure.

Vikings

If the Queen reckons her family have pulled some crazy stunts in their time, wait until she meets Viking chieftain Ragnor and his mates Ivar the Boneless and Sirgurd Snake in the Eye. Vikings follows these Norse warriors as they rampage their way through Europe, leaving a trail of mayhem and chaos and genuine beard envy in their wake.

Vikings is the show with everything: romance, history, intrigue and adventure. It’s also beautifully filmed and the facial hair is outstanding. Break down your shield wall and let the Vikings invade your home this weekend, because what else do you need from a television show, you animals? Nothing. The answer is nothing.

Bingeability factor: 2 seasons, watch ’em both for guaranteed safe path into Valhalla

Rise

There’s nothing better than an all-singing, all-dancing TV marathon, and Rise is here to put the jazz hands into your long weekend. Fans of Glee need to kick-ball-change their way into this musical drama series set in a small town high school theatre troupe, where folk aren’t best pleased when a new teacher makes big changes. Chuck in a ton of teenage angst, some internal school politics and a few snazzy song and dance numbers, and Rise becomes the ideal binge watch.

Rise stars Rosie Perez and Moana’s Auli’I Cravalho and because it’s inspired by a true story, you’re learning valuable life lessons while lying on the couch in your pyjamas. Spirit fingers, everywhere.

Bingeability factor: 10 episodes, so achievable you’ll spontaneously burst into song.

Suits

There’s no better way to pay tribute to HRH than binging on the show that made her grand-daughter in-law a household name. Legal drama Suits is filled with beautiful people doing questionable things, and I’m not just referring to Louis Litt’s love of mudding. The banter is brilliant, the deals are dodgy and after watching seven seasons in a row you’ll lose all understanding of who’s suing who for what and why. Don’t panic, the main thing is that Sir Harvey Specter always comes out on top. Mmm, Harvey.

Bingeability factor: 7 glorious seasons and 316 mentions of the word ‘bullshit’

Outlander

We’ll never be royals, so let’s get caught up in the love affair between Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall in time-travelling drama Outlander. Prepare to reach Reverend Curry excitement levels over the fire and love emanating between these two hot potatoes, whose romance transcends a 200-year time gap and three seasons of questionable wig choices. Come for the Scottish romance, stay for the Jacobite rebellion, the gory medical scenes and Tobias Menzies smoking a pipe.

Go on, fall through the stones and into Outlander’s arms, or maybe just grow your hair and live in a cave for the long weekend. Worked out fine for Jamie, it’ll work out fine for you.

Bingeability factor: 3 seasons, 42 episodes, a thousand astonishing wigs.

The Hollow Crown

This incredible BBC drama boasts more star power than Windsor Cathedral during a royal wedding. Who needs George Clooney in a shiny suit when you can have Benedict Cumberbatch in tights, amirite? The Hollow Crown boasts a stellar cast including Tom Hiddleston, Judi Dench, Sophie Okonedo and John Hurt, and scored BAFTAs aplenty for its acting, costumes and all-round awesomeness. This is Shakespeare as it should be, rich and sumptuous and overflowing with all the crazy stuff that happens when bunch of blokes go power-crazy for a shiny hat.

Bingeability factor: 2 seasons, 19 episodes, one big sparkly crown.

Unforgotten

I could watch Nicola Walker (Spooks, Last Tango in Halifax) on screen all day, every day. She’s her typically brilliant self in British thriller Unforgiven, where she pairs up with Sanjeev Bhaskar to solve cold case crimes. Walker plays DCI Cassie Stuart, a clever and compassionate detective who weaves strands of evidence together to solve crimes committed decades earlier.  Bodies are dug up and lives begin to unravel, but Nicola Walker never stops being awesome. Unforgotten was called ‘the detective show you didn’t know you needed’, and now you know, there’s no excuse. Watch it. Watch all of it now.

Bingeability factor: 2 emotional seasons, 1 body in a suitcase, countless furrowed brows.


You can binge all these and more on Lightbox:

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