Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

InternetJanuary 19, 2022

Escaping escapism: The rise of mundane simulator games

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Gamers are flocking to lawn mowing, truck driving and house cleaning simulators. For IRL, Josie Adams discovers the appeal of mundane games. 

Every day, Emma Maguire goes to work as a communications professional in Wellington. Every night, she drives a truck through Europe. She bought her truck simulator for $2 on Steam, a game-purchasing platform, a few years ago. She’s never looked back. While hiking and dancing are tools she’s used to de-stress physically, she now has the option to check out of her brain almost completely. “I find driving a truck is more chill [than hiking]. You don’t have to move.”

Maguire is one of a slowly-growing number of people who are opting for “mindless” simulator games; games like Lawn Mowing Simulator, where you drive a ride-on lawn mower, or Powerwash, where you clean houses. Euro Truck Simulator 2 has sold more than nine million copies. What paint-by-numbers is to visual art or First Dates is to television; that’s what these simulators are to gaming. These games, which simulate mundane tasks or everyday jobs, are described by users as meditative and soothing. “You just sit there and drive for two hours and listen to podcasts,” said Maguire.

Would Maguire like to drive a truck in real life? “Absolutely not,” she said. In real life she cannot drive a car, let alone a truck.

While spending your night driving a virtual truck might seem strange, this kind of game has a long-established history. In 1979, the first Flight Simulator game was released. A reviewer called it “the single most impressive computer game” they’d ever seen: “The German fighter pilot capabilities range from OK to very good and seeing them stacked over their field was almost a physical pleasure.”

In Airplane Mode, released last year, there are no German enemies.There is Sudoku, a nice window view, and a call button to order drinks. The simulation is for passengers, not pilots.

The gaming dream is often extreme: even in the early days, games like Battlezone and Bad Street Brawler were designed to make players feel ultra-accomplished and badass. Today’s games, like Halo and Fortnite, imbue players with cool powers and gear and dump them in strange new worlds. It’s easy to see how simulations like Euro Truck Driver could be the antithesis of gaming culture, but they may just represent an evolution of it.

Lee*, who is keeping his last name a secret so as not to be embarrassed in front of his workmates, plays Snowrunner. This is another truck simulator, but with snow. He’d never been a “simulator person” until he downloaded the game six months ago. “I stopped playing all other games when I started playing it,” he said. “I’m now watching Farming Simulator videos.”

He said that after a long day at work – he’s a UX designer for an Auckland software company – he likes to put on some Four Tet and drive around the icy roads of Michigan: “You put music on and stare at trucks for a while.” Lee has a self-imposed set of restrictions, and refuses to leave Michigan until he’s completed all the tasks nearby.

Why all the meditative virtual driving? Are Lee and Maguire more stressed than the rest of us? The answer, they both reckon, is no. They’ve just got a different outlet; one more and more of us are discovering.

Victoria University senior lecturer Dr Simon McCallum, an expert in gaming development, said simulator games aren’t just about doing virtual chores; they’re about doing chores slightly more easily. “Power washing is an amplification of your power over hand washing things,” he said. In a simulation you do these apparently mundane tasks more easily, and without any complicated decision-making. “In a complex world, where we have lots of challenging interactions, sometimes people seek out simple things.”

Victoria University senior lecturer Dr Simon McCallum says mundane games help reduce the complexity in our lives. (Photo: supplied)

He compares the appeal of simulator games to the Scandinavian-inspired slow TV movement. “My wife stayed up and watched the sheep-to-jumper television programme,” he said. “They were going for the world record for how quickly you can go from wool on a sheep to a fully done jersey.” It’s fast for a jumper, but slow for TV; and that’s what we crave. 

He said a big benefit of slow TV is that we don’t have to activate our executive function so much. “You’re not having to make choices. You’re not having to negotiate. You’re not having to socialise. You’re not having to keep up with a complex plot,” he said. “I think the complexity of our world and the stress in our world may mean that we are wanting more of that than we have in the past.”

On the other hand Tom Walker, an Australian comedian, has worked hard to complicate his truck driving. He has more than eight and a half thousand followers on his Twitch channel, where he live streams his American Truck Simulator sessions. He started streaming when the comedy circuit got shut down by the Covid-19 pandemic. “I needed something to do and a job, probably in that order,” he told The Spinoff. “I started truck streaming because it was low impact enough that I could just natter on to the chat.”

On Twitch, viewers can donate money in exchange for a moment of game control, or a fun performance by the streamer. Walker set up a couple of options: for $5 you can yank the wheel of his truck left and right. For $13.37 he enters “Wig Mode”, and wears his girlfriend’s blonde wig for 20 minutes.

Tom Walker, a popular Twitch streamer, playing American Truck Simulator. (Image: supplied)

While he mostly streams for money, he also does it for love. “My audience are smart and funny and I appreciate them too, not just for the financial aspect,” he said. “There are genuinely people in the chat who I look forward to seeing.”

While players like Lee and Maguire are more casual, Walker takes the simulations at an expert level. He used to be like them, taking long-distance contracts and driving for hours using the keyboard. “It was relaxing and low-stakes and felt like I was just zooming along the road, able to not think about anything,” he remembered. “I didn’t know a Scania from a Volvo.

“Now I’m a freak with a steering wheel, pedals and an H-pattern shifter that plugs into my big computer and I can spend minutes trying to get a park right.”

Oskar Howell is a “gamer advocate” and ex-gaming reporter. He knows even the most boring simulators can be made extreme. His simulator of choice, Farming Simulator, has been turned into a full-on esport – the elevation of a game to the level of a professional sport – by its fans. “Players will strategically ban or pick vehicles to make the lives of their opponents difficult, then spend 20 minutes in a low-octane esports environment where they rush around delivering hay bales,” he said. “It’s bizarre, but I can’t fault it.”

Oskar Howell, a “gaming advocate”, playing Fall Guys at the Devolver Games booth at PAX 2019. (Photo: supplied)

Howell said real-world simulators have always been “something of an oddity” in the gaming community. “Why would the average person devote their time to a career that they could pursue in the real world?” he asked. “I spend most of my time playing in virtual worlds I’d never want to experience in real life, like warzones or fantasy worlds.”

That being said, he absolutely froths the virtual farm. Like the other gamers we spoke to, he finds mindless simulations soothing. “People want the occasional detox from the high-intensity life of shooters and racers, and if that means driving around a virtual combine harvester, so be it.”

During the Christmas break, Howell played 100 hours of Skyrim over 17 days. Sometimes he’d take a night off to play Farming Simulator as a “break”. “If I played Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [a competitive shooting game] for a solid month of grinding, I might expect to need a night or two of something slower-paced like a Farming Simulator to detox and reinvigorate,” he said.

This is the core of the simulation evolution: we play them to rest. Just like in Airplane Mode, we’ve become passengers in the game, not pilots. Lee used to fly planes, and used the older flight simulators to enhance his learning for a pilot’s license. Truck simulators, he said, don’t work the same way: “It’s not like [Flight Simulator], you’re pretty much in a truck with some hairy arms that go left and right, and then you fall off a cliff.”

While Lee doesn’t feel modern simulators have the same extreme environments as older games, the stakes are still higher than in real life. “My God, if trucks went over [in real life] the way trucks go over in Snowrunner, we’d be in a very poor place.”

McCallum believes there’s a dual appeal in simulator games: like slow TV, they require very little brainpower. But like traditional games, they also give us a sense of accomplishment. “You’re motivated because you’re wanting to see completion, and you want to have the right level of agency in the world,” he said. 

“One of the nice things about Lawn Mowing Simulator is that when you’re done, the lawn stays mowed.”

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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

InternetJanuary 14, 2022

Inside the wild architecture conspiracy theory gaining traction online

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Thousands of conspiracy theorists believe our entire architectural history is a lie. For IRL, Josie Adams dives into an alternative world history: the Tartarian mudflood.

What if I told you the Dunedin railway station pre-dated European settlement of New Zealand? Thousands of people online are convinced of an alternative historical truth: a giant, highly advanced global empire came to our country before Europeans, and it built the railway station.

The ancient empire of Tartaria is at the centre of a conspiracy theory that’s growing online, spread via YouTube and Reddit, where more than 14,000 people regularly engage with what’s been called “the Qanon of architecture”. Proponents of the theory say there was once an advanced, giant civilisation that dominated the Earth’s surface; Tartaria. As recently as 200 years ago, a flood of mud destroyed these people and most of their buildings. Ever since, there’s been a cover up going on. But what evidence is there of this supposed empire? Why cover it up? And who exactly believes this stuff?

The Capitol in Washington, the pyramids in Egypt, and the Great Wall of China are all supposed remnants of Tartaria. Too massive to be destroyed in a flood of mud or torn down by our tiny modern hands, they stand tall and strong as clues that a civilisation much more advanced than ours once ran the world. Other buildings, like Old Penn Station in New York City and the Moir’s Chambers in Perth, were intentionally destroyed to hide Tartarian history.

And if they made it to Australia, of course Tartarians made it to New Zealand. Take a walk around any major city and you’ll notice our oldest buildings have incredibly high ceilings. Who needs a ceiling that tall? You’ll notice basement windows, often cut in half by the ground. Who would put a half-window into a basement? The answer to both these questions, according to proponents of the theory, is: a giant race of technological wunderkinds.

Northern Club Building, Auckland, with mudflooded basement windows highlighted (Photo: www.flickr.com / William Fairs)

Remnants of them remain. Places like the old government building in Christchurch, the Dunedin railway station and Auckland’s Northern Club are too big and technically complex, they claim, to have been built by the few scattered European settlers living in New Zealand in the 19th century. Even old maps of our country from the early 19th century could be proof of the empire’s existence, because who named all of those places on the map? Tartaria fans believe it couldn’t possibly have been the puny Englishmen sent here to club seals. 

More obvious evidence of Tartaria may have been deliberately destroyed post-mudflood. Luna Park in Auckland, complete with its Tartarian clown-demon idol, was burned down, and adherents of the theory believe the 1931 Napier earthquake was an opportunity to demolish the city’s Tartarian architecture.

Redditors and Youtubers who subscribe to all this are drawing, very loosely, on a real historical place: you may have heard of the “Tartars”, historical residents of a region spread across Russia and China. They weren’t part of an empire; they were residents of a massive region with many different cultures lumped together into “Tartary” by Europeans who didn’t care to understand the area beyond its association with Ghengis Khan. As Skeptoid points out, something as simple as re-labelling a modern map of Eurasia as “Tartary” can get conspiracy-prone minds racing.

The Tartarian theory was originated by pseudohistorians, who combined a Russian fervor for their lost empire (“Tartaria” being the supposed real name of Russia) with an alternative historical chronology; basically, all known historical events happened in a much shorter period of time than we are told. YouTubers picked up on these separate subjects and combined them, along with other strange things – eg the fact old photos of cities always look to be covered in mud, that World Wars I and II wiped out a ton of old world architecture, and pictures of old-timey people with gigantism, like Robert Wadlow – and developed the Tartarian mudflood theory we’ve described.

Robin Aitken, an architectural historian based in Wellington, was blunt when approached for comment on “Tartarian” architectural features: the mud everywhere, he said, was probably because of horses. “I think horses can answer for a lot of this,” he said. “Horse shit, horse hooves pounding the horse shit.” Another factor contributing to the mudslide-looking streets of the 1860s, he said, is that colonial cities were very slow to upgrade roads. “In the beginning chuck up some kitset colonial buildings and wait until the street is so fucked that you need to do something about it,” he said. 

An image from Dunedin in 1865 with “aerial” and two lamp posts highlighted. (Photo: King Dave on YouTube)

And what about the houses built on an incline? “True,” he admitted. “The layout of Dunedin was drawn in Edinburgh and didn’t account for the topography, so the streets don’t follow more gradual contours making for some steep streets.” But, he said, this style can actually work to flatten social hierarchies. “If you build following the same direction as the slope, you might achieve a number of floor levels between the top of the slope and the bottom along the length of the building, and can achieve interesting things like multiple ‘ground level’ entrances to residences or tenancies, levelling the social hierarchy seen in Paris and other flat European cities, where the aristocratic live on the deuxieme etage [second floor], sufficiently above the stink and mud of the street but not too far up the stairs.”

This socially progressive sloping model, he said, is also behind the basement windows. “[They were] working on a horizontal social hierarchy where plebs had rooms at the back, in the slope with windows looking out to a subterranean hole,” he said.

But why is Aitken helping to cover up the great empire of Tartaria, and who made him do it? The only culprits Tartaria believers can point to is a nebulous new world order; the government, or shadow government, or deep state. Exactly why The Man has hidden the history of Tartaria is unclear, but it has something to do with profiting off electricity we could be getting for free.

Since 2016, the theory has been picking up traction. In recent years New Zealand has started to pop up in videos and posts; now we have our very own spokesperson. Local YouTuber David Obeda who creates content under the name King Dave – has been posting videos consistently (update, October 2o22: Obeda appears to have left YouTube). He pores over old photographs and goes for walks around our major cities, pointing out evidence: mud-drowned basement windows from the flood; aerials on top of 19th century buildings that once conducted electricity; and roads far too wide for your traditional horse-and-buggy, but the perfect size for giants.

“I came across the theory through YouTube channels like Martin Liedtke and autodidactic, who are now friends of mine,” Obeda told The Spinoff. “I was just researching and came across their channels and pretty much had my mind blown.” Once he learned about Tartaria, he dedicated his channel to exposing the truth behind our architectural history. Since 2019 he has posted 59 videos, most of them on Tartaria. “In doing so I am now the lead alternative historian in the country.”

A picture of Princes St in Dunedin in 1861. The arrow points to mud covering the lower levels of a building. (Photo: King Dave on YouTube)

The core of his and other adherents’ argument seems to be: how could 1800s settlers build these things? It’s too complicated, the buildings are too big, and Hōne Heke was giving us so much trouble Aucklanders couldn’t have had the time. “The grand architecture and ornate features in all of these neo-gothic/Greco-Roman buildings across the world are impossible to have been done by hand, especially back in the time frames they give us,” he said. In truth, it’s nice to see a little inversion of the Erich von Däniken “indigenous people can’t build pyramids” conspiracy. 

That being said, Obeda is one of the only alternative historians who touches on the subject of Māori in Tartaria. We know they were here before the alleged mudflood; we have oral history, radiocarbon dating, and plenty of archeological sites. Usually alternative historians work this in with their theories: yes, Māori were here before us; but the Welsh were here before them.

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This is not the case with Tartarian history. Obeda says he believes Māori culture as we know it was brought in as part of the cover up. He is, himself, Māori, and admits he found learning this “shocking”. “Most, if not all of our cultural history has been fabricated. Racial identity was something the controllers brought in to divide us,” he said. “Tartaria was a worldwide civilisation that lived in harmony, and had access to technology that we could only dream of.” 

Some Māori pā and redoubts, he said, are actually buried “star forts” (Tartarian military bastions). “They say the sites are sacred to keep people from snooping, but I guarantee when we start digging them up we won’t be finding old taiaha but buried ancient architecture.”

Since 9/11, “truther” movements have been on the rise; rapidly-changing technology, social mores and, yes, architecture, can stir up questions about where the world is going, and who’s driving it. Obeda says there is growing interest in the Tartarian theory: “The reason I do this is out of love. Once people realise our history has been completely fabricated, it will bring everyone together.

“The truth will prevail in the end,” he added.