17 ms·

‘This game is so realistic it feels just like working overtime’

464 points by raybb 5y ago

JetAlone 5y ago
Even just reading the profiles of the characters in this game leaves me with a disgusted pit at the bottom of my stomach.
langsoul-com 5y ago
Damn site has a bottom banner for app install you can't exit... Cant we have a Web that's clean and only the content?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
CyanDeparture 5y ago
I had a similar, not the same, but similar feeling playing Overcooked¹ with friends. After 30 minutes not one of us was having fun, we were all stressed and trying to tell each other what to do in a fairly annoyed way, which wasn't like any of us. I quite like my job so it was actually worse than work. 1. "A chaotic couch co-op cooking game for 1-4 players. Working as a team, you and your fellow chefs must prepare, cook and serve up a variety of tasty orders before the baying customers storm out in a huff."
fennecfoxy 5y ago
I love love love the banner art <3
robertlagrant 5y ago
Surely ESOP's Fables?
adenozine 5y ago
The other article on the front page about video games being boring and predictable should try this game. I think that works like these are the real future of gaming. People can vote with their wallets at the end of the day. Eventually, people will wise up and start paying for better games that they actually enjoy and stop gambling. Or they won't, and they continue to hurt themselves financially and mentally. Either way, there will still be people making art-games like this, for people who think differently. I really like the idea of social culture being "frozen" and injected into game experiences. I'd love to play a game about how the Cuban Missile Crisis felt, about how the Great Depression felt, about how the New Deal felt. Reading just doesn't put the mind in that same mode as trying to make moves that benefit my main character and seeing how the events that unfold bear witness to whether or not my decisions were good. I'm sure there will be some good games soon about how insane it is that there's anti-vaxxers, or election deniers.
- verisimi 5y ago
  > I'm sure there will be some good games soon about how insane it is that there's anti-vaxxers, or election deniers. Or a game where people think they can make a difference by voting harder!
  - adenozine 5y ago
    I'm not anti-voting, but I guess I'm resigned to the "voting futility" idea that I think you're talking about. That being said, I am a faithful supporter of DSAUSA and have invested (rather than voted for) significant means towards the cause of a more socialistic reality in America. Faced with the size and influence of corporations in the world, I suppose it's the logical end of things that the world revolve around money and the means of "making" more money. I still vote too, but I guess I roll my eyes a little bit each time.
  - djbusby 5y ago
    Voting does make a difference. Also, you can contribute to any candidates campaign - so you can money-vote in many places (USA)
    - indigochill 5y ago
      > Voting does make a difference. In a parliamentary system, votes have a substantial impact. You can vote for a minority party that's actually aligned with your views and get represented if they get enough votes to get a seat in Parliament. It's not "throwing your vote away" like it is in the US. In a two-party first-past-the-post system, the impact of each vote is substantially reduced by comparison since not only are there only two competitive parties to vote for, but the winner takes everything. A vote for the "wrong" party means that vote leads to no representation. > Also, you can contribute to any candidates campaign - so you can money-vote in many places (USA) This is part of the problem in the US, because it gives the wealthiest interests the means to back their preferred representatives at amounts minority representatives can never hope to reach.
    - brimble 5y ago
curiousgal 5y ago
Couldn't find a translated version unfortunately.
geocrasher 5y ago
There's an indie game called Deep Sixed that felt this way for me. The plot is that you're a prisoner and your cell is a spaceship that gets moved around for various reasons, and to stay alive you have to constantly fix your spaceship while also battling incoming baddies. It sounded like fun but when I played it I had a genuine stress response. It felt a lot like fixing broken servers while being screamed at on Twitter. I haven't been able to make myself play it since. https://store.steampowered.com/app/591000/Deep_Sixed/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/591000/Deep_Sixed/
- godot 5y ago
  Do you think your age and life (work) experience did that for you? I have noticed myself feeling considerably differently towards different games too. Games I used to enjoy (like Starcraft) back in the days, I enjoy a lot less as an older guy now and having worked for almost 2 decades. It takes a lot of mental effort to keep up and do well (macro-ing and managing my econ, also micro-ing my army, etc.). Whereas if I play some Fortnite with friends (as a 40 year-old...) it's just pretty relaxing overall and I still enjoy gaming that way.
  - pugz 5y ago
    That's an interesting comment. I loved Starcraft as a kid. Played many hours every day. I'm now 33 and never got into Starcraft 2. Nowadays the idea is utterly unappealing. I just play the occasional Call of Duty Warzone (similar to Fortnite) and it's fun.
  - Falkon1313 5y ago
    I feel the same. Starcraft used to be what I would consider a 'light' game. As a teen I got big into the grognard strategy wargames, the kind with over 1000 units and >300 page rule books and very detailed simulation of everything. That and 4X games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri. So much planning and managing and problem-solving through epically long and large games. Nowadays, in my 40s, it's things like Fortnite (my current favorite), Subnautica, and European/American Truck Simulator. Games where I can just relax and play and not have to do much thinking.
  - 5y ago
GoodJokes 5y ago
nahimn 5y ago
Is there an english version of the game?
rubyist5eva 5y ago
hinkley 5y ago
There was a puzzle game that came out when UML was still a thing people talked about doing and put on their resumes. The puzzle was a graph of nodes and edges and you won when none of the edges crossed. I had fun with it for about an hour and then got this terrible sense if deja vu. And then it hit my like a ton of bricks. This is flattening a UML diagram but turned into a game. I pushed back from my desk and went to get some air, and that was the last time I played that game. And (coincidentally?) close to the last time I volunteered to do make class diagrams.
- markburns 5y ago
  Was it this one? https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/untangle.html https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/unta... I went and found this game again relatively recently. It reminds me so much of decoupling and refactoring software or vice versa. I spent a few years occasionally trying to remember what distant memory of an experience decoupling reminded me of. I quite enjoy both. Whilst simultaneously kind of hating the process. Incredible sense of clarity once you've resolved everything that was stepping in the way of understanding. Moments of despair and frustration. Sense of progress combined with feeling this could be never ending. Iteratively trying to step towards something better. It all seeming worth it in the end. So many parallels.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Most likely, yes. These games might be fun for students as a learning exercise. Not so much for me.
  - mikewarot 5y ago
    I love that game... something about solving puzzles just makes it feel like flow. I always crank up the complexity on it, and can do it for hours. The other game I can lose time in is Universal Paperclips[1], I looped through it 100 times before quitting. 1 - https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
    - 5y ago
thisoneworks 5y ago
I'll throw light on another linked article from the same website https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006391/how-one-obscure-word-captures-urban-chinas-unhappiness https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006391/how-one-obscure-word-... . Reading it is just blowing my mind, as someone from SouthEast Asia (not China) the conversation on competition and societal pressure rings very true.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  > Therefore, the winners demand the losers to admit that they are a failure: Not only that they have less money and fewer material possessions; they must bow down morally and admit that they’re useless and have failed. If you don’t admit it and simply quietly walk away from the competition, you’ll face a lot of criticism. It’s not allowed. This passage was pretty hair-raising. I think the freedom to fail gracefully is something we take for granted in "the west".
  - thisoneworks 5y ago
    It's funny how I highlighted it as well, along with the guy applying to mcdonald's story. The kind of social pressure and moral shaming it describes is absolutely real
  - blaser-waffle 5y ago
    There is plenty of this in The West, too. It's often just couched in different terms, or in different ways. The continued dog-pile on the poor or homeless comes to mind. To quote some dude from The West: “It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.” ― Gore Vidal
    - rsanek 5y ago
      https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/06/succeed-fail/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/06/succeed-fail/
    - mst 5y ago
      Something of a tangent but I've found it really helpful in a bunch of situations to force myself to talk/think about "what's the success condition?" rather than "what's the win condition?" to make it harder to accidentally fall into the trap of assuming there needs to be a loser. Positive sum games are a wonderful thing if you can arrange them.
notjustanymike 5y ago
"The investors give you a sum of money. You spend it, expand, and then get more funding." Tom Nook would like a word.
sixstringtheory 5y ago
I had to stop watching Silicon Valley for the same reason.
- imdsm 5y ago
  I struggle to get into shows like this too. I want something totally different.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gigaflop 5y ago
  'Startup' on Netflix was worse for me, since it didn't bother to lean into the humor at all, and the whole premise became more and more unbelievable as it went on. Silicon Valley was at least fun to laugh at.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Ever watch "Betas" on Amazon Prime?
- p_l 5y ago
  I still haven't broken farther than maybe 15 minutes with Silicon Valley, and I don't even get to work there...
- blaser-waffle 5y ago
  Same with Mr Robot. I don't need to watch a show about IT security and mental illness -- that's already my life. I also think that's why Mad Men and some of the Edwardian dramas are so popular: close enough to our time period that we can identify, but different enough that we don't feel that anxiety or uncomfortable connection. My dad, for example, wasn't interested in watching Mad Men -- he's from big East Coast cities and grew up in that period, went to 'Nam, etc.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
This was how I felt playing Papers Please. I absolutely respect and appreciate that the game wasn't trying to be "fun"; it was trying to communicate a message. And I firmly believe that not all games should be fun. But at the same time... well, I have enough work to do in my life. There has to be a balance. Not every movie is "fun" but even art house films are generally "pleasant" to watch on some level.
- latexr 5y ago
  I don’t know how far you got into it, but I will underscore it does have a story and an ending (multiple, even). You won’t be in an infinite daily grind to finish, and your actions have consequences.
- INTPenis 5y ago
  I don't work as hard at work as I did in papers please.
- the_af 5y ago
  Interesting. I didn't feel that way about Papers Please, because it has a story and it's more like a short puzzle. It's not endless. It's basically a sequence of puzzles (with a story and some choices thrown in), where each stage introduces a variation on the puzzle. There is a very limited number of stages, after which the game ends. Compare this to something like Factorio, which is essentially endless (and you're programming, so basically it's job #2).
  - kannanvijayan 5y ago
    I tried getting into Factorio and bowed out for this reason. It had kind of the same complexities as programming, except now instead of making my arrangements directly I now had to control a little animated sprite to walk around and place things. The spaceman as a character holds no compelling interest. I suppose there's probably some "pure design" mode that skips that tedium, but then the game feels shallow. You're design a bunch of dataflow pipelines organized on a 2D grid. Also the graphics feel washed out and grainy, and the whole alien species attacks thing was distracting. Playing factorio just makes me want to reimplement factorio. Not that I have the time or inclination.
gotaquestion 5y ago
I kinda felt that way about Factorio, it reminded me too much of doing CPU metal-layer layout (running roads & rails) combined with microarchitecture design (optimizing pipelines). But in reality, I think "The Stanley Parable" hit a little too close to home for me.
Apocryphon 5y ago
There really needs to be a comparative study between China's internet industry and the U.S.'s. It often seems like horror stories of 996 are like Silicon Valley unpaid overtime burnout culture, ramped up to a new degree. > “No matter how good you are at the game, the game has only one ending, which is the company being acquired,” Ding said, adding she was sad when she played it for the first time, believing being acquired means failure. “Later, I searched for a job for a period of time, encountered various setbacks, and gradually realized that the process of trying hard is more precious. When I went back and played it again, I accepted the ending, and felt that it was really in line with the current internet age.” The same market dynamics on both sides of the Pacific.
- smilekzs 5y ago
  unpaid yet enforced by company leadership overtime burnout culture
honkycat 5y ago
I feel like the workaholic culture defies everything we understand about modern productivity and I am surprised it is so celebrated in other cultures. I wonder if it is more about not raising quality of living TOO high, as opposed to actual competitive concerns. For me, I see my work and life as a balance of sharpening the axe and cutting through the tree. I practice mindfulness a lot and am constantly trying to optimize my mood and life to stay efficient and happy. I take care of myself in my down-time, and during work hours I execute ruthlessly. This has always worked well for me. I consistently receive excellence awards at work, get large promotions and raises, and have never been put on a PIP or fired. A CEO at a company I worked at once said of me "I wish we could clone honkycat 5 times to fill these positions." Not to brag. Just establishing that I perform well at work. Overall my motto is "4 good hours" of deep work a day will keep me in the green performance-wise. So what is the reasoning of this culture? Am I just mistaken?
ironhaven 5y ago
A great game I played that has a "Shocking game mechanic that teaches you something", is called Rebel Inc.[0] The game is basically a sandbox inspired by the war in Afghanistan. One of the mechanics is in order to win battles on the map, you need airstrikes in order to gain ground. The downside to more airstrikes is that it leads to civilian casualties. You are basically given a choice between fewer airstrikes or more airstrikes and covering up any civilian casualties. [0] https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/51-rebel-inc https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/51-rebel-inc
yosito 5y ago
This is how Factorio feels to me. I love the game. But I can only handle it during long periods away from work, otherwise it leads me toward feeling burnt out.
lstodd 5y ago
Idk how it's now, but ten years ago managing a part of a corp in Eve Online was a full-time job, not to mention alliances. Not very different from managing a real company.
Koshkin 5y ago
Even modern FPS are like that. In the recent installments of Far Cry, for example, I have found myself spending not a small portion of time collecting stuff, tweaking the possessions, building/fixing things. While still enjoying these otherwise excellent and fun games, I find older games, like the original Doom, Unreal, or early installments of FarCry, more enjoyable and fun - exactly because they feel less like "work."
- krainboltgreene 5y ago
  This comment completely misses the point of the article. I wonder if people even read it.
- seanw444 5y ago
  Escape From Tarkov is the ultimate anxiety simulator.
- mst 5y ago
  I really wish there were more tactical games where the battles and armies were predetermined rather than configurable - I absolutely love tweaking army composition and handling resource builds and tech trees and etc. -sometimes- but some days I really just want to be airdropped into a (preferably turn based) fight and left to think my way through winning with the resources I've been given. (then if I really just want to shoot a virtual bad guy, I go back to replaying the old Wing Commander games since for whatever reason I can climb the learning curves of those more easily than FPSes)
  - Falkon1313 5y ago
    You might like some of the games at matrixgames.com and slitherine.com because they specialize primarily in turn-based strategy/war games and have a ton of them. However, while some of them are 'pick a scenario and play', others are hugely complex with full production, logistics, research, etc. The John Tiller's Campaign Series games and Strategic Command games are pretty playable, Harpoon Ultimate if you like naval, and Field Of Glory if you have interest in the ancient/medieval eras.
  - 5y ago
lostgame 5y ago
Shemnue, anyone? I still have nightmares of the forklift simulator.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  That part was dreadful for me as a child. It stalled me for months in game. Or maybe it was not understanding that I needed money and shouldn’t blow it on collectible figurines and arcade games… in game. As an adult I have revisited it and it was incredibly easy. A complete non issue by all means. An interesting game design challenge for sure.
blaser-waffle 5y ago
Eve Online in a nutshell. Loved that game, but it was more work than my actual job.
- krainboltgreene 5y ago
  So you didn't read the article.
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
    Oh, it's quite relevant. The main difference is that EvE feels like a second job without even trying.
    - krainboltgreene 5y ago
      But that's not the point of the article.
      - 2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
        I guess we interpreted it differently, then. :)
- ddoubleU 5y ago
  My mind immediately went to EVE when I read the headline. I love it, I really do but it makes you ask yourself weird existential questions about games and jobs. The other thing that made me quit after few years was that the company behind it (CCP Games), with it's current management, really seems to be incompetent.
  - 2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
    Yeah, EvE is an amazingly immersive game with meta-gameplay on a whole different level compared to most other games. I'm happy CCP screwed up back during the whole pants-scandal; it made me give up on online gaming, and it was incredibly liberating to get out of it.
alisonatwork 5y ago
Another interesting game that depicts work life from Chinese point of view is Another Adventure[0]. Rather than going the Papers Please route of forcing the player to do the boring job ad nauseum, it is more structured like a series of brief narratives along the lines of The Beginner's Guide. It's short, but really made an impact on me, as someone who also worked/is working in the tech industry. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/604450/Another_Adventure/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/604450/Another_Adventure/
Melatonic 5y ago
Sounds like the Chinese version of Harvest Moon + Rollercoaster Tycoon + Paperboy :-D
ISL 5y ago
I disagree with a statement in the article: "As a tech employee, if you can’t bear overtime, you can pivot to other industries. But the social problem is not going to be solved because you quit." Quitting is the most powerful signal a worker can send. It pushes up the price of that work and is the strongest-possible declaration that something is wrong. Source: Have quit from a field that I love deeply because the environment became intolerable. Furthermore, I've now signed on to a new line of work precisely because the environment is so supportive.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  I would be curious which line of work you find has such a supportive environment, we hear so much about environments that are unsupportive.
  - langsoul-com 5y ago
    I believe those fields are where there's high demand but not enough supply. China tech can treat people like shit because there's always someone to replace them. I think the stats were more engineers graduate from China come out than the entire history of USA engineers each year. When there's high demand, then any place that systematically treats people like shit would not retain workers and die off. Of course, exceptions exist for places that pay shit tons of money.
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    They probably don't want to push down the price of their work
  - michaelt 5y ago
    Personally, I've found the western tech industry treats employees extremely well, compared to any other job I've had. Flexible hours and dress code, excellent pay, light supervision, hundreds of employers, air-conditioned offices, great safety record, interesting and meaningful work for those that want it - and it barely needs a college degree. It's not perfect, but it's better than 95% of jobs out there. (Of course, the games programming industry is to be avoided at all costs)
taneq 5y ago
TFA is basically one big spoiler for the game. Admittedly I'd probably never have actually played it but it's still annoying on principle.
_carbyau_ 5y ago
I group anything "[Job name] Simulator" with this. Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator, PC Builder Simulator, Truck Driving Simulator etc etc. There is absolutely a place for them. To learn/perfect a craft or dip a toe into it if you wonder how it all works. Just not for me. It is too worklike. Aside, can we not add "fishing" into every not-water-related game? (Warframe is a prime example...) It seems like 50% of new games now have a fishing minigame in there somewhere. I almost expected Mechwarrior 5 to have slipped in a fishing minigame somewhere....
- krainboltgreene 5y ago
  But this game is not at all like any of those games, did you even read the article?
tvanantwerp 5y ago
While I really enjoyed Stardew Valley, I had to stop playing it. I wasn't getting a chill country farmer escaping the busy city vibe. I was trying to maximize my actions for every minute of play to get the most rewards in the shortest time. It really felt like work, not play—so I gave it up.
artemisyna 5y ago
A bunch of the comments here seem to be talking about what's in the headline (a game being realistic + feeling like work) without really noticing some of the broader social commentary in the article (the workaholic — and sort of toxic — culture of tech in China). Seems like a potentially good game to train oneself in figuring out how to spend investor money though lol.

464 points by raybb 5y ago

Even just reading the profiles of the characters in this game leaves me with a disgusted pit at the bottom of my stomach.

langsoul-com 5y ago

Damn site has a bottom banner for app install you can't exit... Cant we have a Web that's clean and only the content?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

CyanDeparture 5y ago

I had a similar, not the same, but similar feeling playing Overcooked¹ with friends. After 30 minutes not one of us was having fun, we were all stressed and trying to tell each other what to do in a fairly annoyed way, which wasn't like any of us. I quite like my job so it was actually worse than work. 1. "A chaotic couch co-op cooking game for 1-4 players. Working as a team, you and your fellow chefs must prepare, cook and serve up a variety of tasty orders before the baying customers storm out in a huff."

fennecfoxy 5y ago

I love love love the banner art <3

robertlagrant 5y ago

Surely ESOP's Fables?

adenozine 5y ago

The other article on the front page about video games being boring and predictable should try this game. I think that works like these are the real future of gaming. People can vote with their wallets at the end of the day. Eventually, people will wise up and start paying for better games that they actually enjoy and stop gambling. Or they won't, and they continue to hurt themselves financially and mentally. Either way, there will still be people making art-games like this, for people who think differently. I really like the idea of social culture being "frozen" and injected into game experiences. I'd love to play a game about how the Cuban Missile Crisis felt, about how the Great Depression felt, about how the New Deal felt. Reading just doesn't put the mind in that same mode as trying to make moves that benefit my main character and seeing how the events that unfold bear witness to whether or not my decisions were good. I'm sure there will be some good games soon about how insane it is that there's anti-vaxxers, or election deniers.

verisimi 5y ago
> I'm sure there will be some good games soon about how insane it is that there's anti-vaxxers, or election deniers. Or a game where people think they can make a difference by voting harder!
- adenozine 5y ago
  I'm not anti-voting, but I guess I'm resigned to the "voting futility" idea that I think you're talking about. That being said, I am a faithful supporter of DSAUSA and have invested (rather than voted for) significant means towards the cause of a more socialistic reality in America. Faced with the size and influence of corporations in the world, I suppose it's the logical end of things that the world revolve around money and the means of "making" more money. I still vote too, but I guess I roll my eyes a little bit each time.
- djbusby 5y ago
  Voting does make a difference. Also, you can contribute to any candidates campaign - so you can money-vote in many places (USA)
  - indigochill 5y ago
    > Voting does make a difference. In a parliamentary system, votes have a substantial impact. You can vote for a minority party that's actually aligned with your views and get represented if they get enough votes to get a seat in Parliament. It's not "throwing your vote away" like it is in the US. In a two-party first-past-the-post system, the impact of each vote is substantially reduced by comparison since not only are there only two competitive parties to vote for, but the winner takes everything. A vote for the "wrong" party means that vote leads to no representation. > Also, you can contribute to any candidates campaign - so you can money-vote in many places (USA) This is part of the problem in the US, because it gives the wealthiest interests the means to back their preferred representatives at amounts minority representatives can never hope to reach.
  - brimble 5y ago

curiousgal 5y ago

Couldn't find a translated version unfortunately.

geocrasher 5y ago

There's an indie game called Deep Sixed that felt this way for me. The plot is that you're a prisoner and your cell is a spaceship that gets moved around for various reasons, and to stay alive you have to constantly fix your spaceship while also battling incoming baddies. It sounded like fun but when I played it I had a genuine stress response. It felt a lot like fixing broken servers while being screamed at on Twitter. I haven't been able to make myself play it since. https://store.steampowered.com/app/591000/Deep_Sixed/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/591000/Deep_Sixed/

godot 5y ago
Do you think your age and life (work) experience did that for you? I have noticed myself feeling considerably differently towards different games too. Games I used to enjoy (like Starcraft) back in the days, I enjoy a lot less as an older guy now and having worked for almost 2 decades. It takes a lot of mental effort to keep up and do well (macro-ing and managing my econ, also micro-ing my army, etc.). Whereas if I play some Fortnite with friends (as a 40 year-old...) it's just pretty relaxing overall and I still enjoy gaming that way.
- pugz 5y ago
  That's an interesting comment. I loved Starcraft as a kid. Played many hours every day. I'm now 33 and never got into Starcraft 2. Nowadays the idea is utterly unappealing. I just play the occasional Call of Duty Warzone (similar to Fortnite) and it's fun.
- Falkon1313 5y ago
  I feel the same. Starcraft used to be what I would consider a 'light' game. As a teen I got big into the grognard strategy wargames, the kind with over 1000 units and >300 page rule books and very detailed simulation of everything. That and 4X games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri. So much planning and managing and problem-solving through epically long and large games. Nowadays, in my 40s, it's things like Fortnite (my current favorite), Subnautica, and European/American Truck Simulator. Games where I can just relax and play and not have to do much thinking.
- 5y ago

GoodJokes 5y ago

nahimn 5y ago

Is there an english version of the game?

rubyist5eva 5y ago

hinkley 5y ago

There was a puzzle game that came out when UML was still a thing people talked about doing and put on their resumes. The puzzle was a graph of nodes and edges and you won when none of the edges crossed. I had fun with it for about an hour and then got this terrible sense if deja vu. And then it hit my like a ton of bricks. This is flattening a UML diagram but turned into a game. I pushed back from my desk and went to get some air, and that was the last time I played that game. And (coincidentally?) close to the last time I volunteered to do make class diagrams.

markburns 5y ago
Was it this one? https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/untangle.html https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/unta... I went and found this game again relatively recently. It reminds me so much of decoupling and refactoring software or vice versa. I spent a few years occasionally trying to remember what distant memory of an experience decoupling reminded me of. I quite enjoy both. Whilst simultaneously kind of hating the process. Incredible sense of clarity once you've resolved everything that was stepping in the way of understanding. Moments of despair and frustration. Sense of progress combined with feeling this could be never ending. Iteratively trying to step towards something better. It all seeming worth it in the end. So many parallels.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Most likely, yes. These games might be fun for students as a learning exercise. Not so much for me.
- mikewarot 5y ago
  I love that game... something about solving puzzles just makes it feel like flow. I always crank up the complexity on it, and can do it for hours. The other game I can lose time in is Universal Paperclips[1], I looped through it 100 times before quitting. 1 - https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
  - 5y ago

thisoneworks 5y ago

I'll throw light on another linked article from the same website https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006391/how-one-obscure-word-captures-urban-chinas-unhappiness https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006391/how-one-obscure-word-... . Reading it is just blowing my mind, as someone from SouthEast Asia (not China) the conversation on competition and societal pressure rings very true.

AlexandrB 5y ago
> Therefore, the winners demand the losers to admit that they are a failure: Not only that they have less money and fewer material possessions; they must bow down morally and admit that they’re useless and have failed. If you don’t admit it and simply quietly walk away from the competition, you’ll face a lot of criticism. It’s not allowed. This passage was pretty hair-raising. I think the freedom to fail gracefully is something we take for granted in "the west".
- thisoneworks 5y ago
  It's funny how I highlighted it as well, along with the guy applying to mcdonald's story. The kind of social pressure and moral shaming it describes is absolutely real
- blaser-waffle 5y ago
  There is plenty of this in The West, too. It's often just couched in different terms, or in different ways. The continued dog-pile on the poor or homeless comes to mind. To quote some dude from The West: “It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.” ― Gore Vidal
  - rsanek 5y ago
    https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/06/succeed-fail/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/06/succeed-fail/
  - mst 5y ago
    Something of a tangent but I've found it really helpful in a bunch of situations to force myself to talk/think about "what's the success condition?" rather than "what's the win condition?" to make it harder to accidentally fall into the trap of assuming there needs to be a loser. Positive sum games are a wonderful thing if you can arrange them.

notjustanymike 5y ago

"The investors give you a sum of money. You spend it, expand, and then get more funding." Tom Nook would like a word.

sixstringtheory 5y ago

I had to stop watching Silicon Valley for the same reason.

imdsm 5y ago
I struggle to get into shows like this too. I want something totally different.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gigaflop 5y ago
'Startup' on Netflix was worse for me, since it didn't bother to lean into the humor at all, and the whole premise became more and more unbelievable as it went on. Silicon Valley was at least fun to laugh at.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Ever watch "Betas" on Amazon Prime?
p_l 5y ago
I still haven't broken farther than maybe 15 minutes with Silicon Valley, and I don't even get to work there...
blaser-waffle 5y ago
Same with Mr Robot. I don't need to watch a show about IT security and mental illness -- that's already my life. I also think that's why Mad Men and some of the Edwardian dramas are so popular: close enough to our time period that we can identify, but different enough that we don't feel that anxiety or uncomfortable connection. My dad, for example, wasn't interested in watching Mad Men -- he's from big East Coast cities and grew up in that period, went to 'Nam, etc.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

This was how I felt playing Papers Please. I absolutely respect and appreciate that the game wasn't trying to be "fun"; it was trying to communicate a message. And I firmly believe that not all games should be fun. But at the same time... well, I have enough work to do in my life. There has to be a balance. Not every movie is "fun" but even art house films are generally "pleasant" to watch on some level.

latexr 5y ago
I don’t know how far you got into it, but I will underscore it does have a story and an ending (multiple, even). You won’t be in an infinite daily grind to finish, and your actions have consequences.
INTPenis 5y ago
I don't work as hard at work as I did in papers please.
the_af 5y ago
Interesting. I didn't feel that way about Papers Please, because it has a story and it's more like a short puzzle. It's not endless. It's basically a sequence of puzzles (with a story and some choices thrown in), where each stage introduces a variation on the puzzle. There is a very limited number of stages, after which the game ends. Compare this to something like Factorio, which is essentially endless (and you're programming, so basically it's job #2).
- kannanvijayan 5y ago
  I tried getting into Factorio and bowed out for this reason. It had kind of the same complexities as programming, except now instead of making my arrangements directly I now had to control a little animated sprite to walk around and place things. The spaceman as a character holds no compelling interest. I suppose there's probably some "pure design" mode that skips that tedium, but then the game feels shallow. You're design a bunch of dataflow pipelines organized on a 2D grid. Also the graphics feel washed out and grainy, and the whole alien species attacks thing was distracting. Playing factorio just makes me want to reimplement factorio. Not that I have the time or inclination.

gotaquestion 5y ago

I kinda felt that way about Factorio, it reminded me too much of doing CPU metal-layer layout (running roads & rails) combined with microarchitecture design (optimizing pipelines). But in reality, I think "The Stanley Parable" hit a little too close to home for me.

Apocryphon 5y ago

There really needs to be a comparative study between China's internet industry and the U.S.'s. It often seems like horror stories of 996 are like Silicon Valley unpaid overtime burnout culture, ramped up to a new degree. > “No matter how good you are at the game, the game has only one ending, which is the company being acquired,” Ding said, adding she was sad when she played it for the first time, believing being acquired means failure. “Later, I searched for a job for a period of time, encountered various setbacks, and gradually realized that the process of trying hard is more precious. When I went back and played it again, I accepted the ending, and felt that it was really in line with the current internet age.” The same market dynamics on both sides of the Pacific.

smilekzs 5y ago
unpaid yet enforced by company leadership overtime burnout culture

honkycat 5y ago

I feel like the workaholic culture defies everything we understand about modern productivity and I am surprised it is so celebrated in other cultures. I wonder if it is more about not raising quality of living TOO high, as opposed to actual competitive concerns. For me, I see my work and life as a balance of sharpening the axe and cutting through the tree. I practice mindfulness a lot and am constantly trying to optimize my mood and life to stay efficient and happy. I take care of myself in my down-time, and during work hours I execute ruthlessly. This has always worked well for me. I consistently receive excellence awards at work, get large promotions and raises, and have never been put on a PIP or fired. A CEO at a company I worked at once said of me "I wish we could clone honkycat 5 times to fill these positions." Not to brag. Just establishing that I perform well at work. Overall my motto is "4 good hours" of deep work a day will keep me in the green performance-wise. So what is the reasoning of this culture? Am I just mistaken?

ironhaven 5y ago

A great game I played that has a "Shocking game mechanic that teaches you something", is called Rebel Inc.[0] The game is basically a sandbox inspired by the war in Afghanistan. One of the mechanics is in order to win battles on the map, you need airstrikes in order to gain ground. The downside to more airstrikes is that it leads to civilian casualties. You are basically given a choice between fewer airstrikes or more airstrikes and covering up any civilian casualties. [0] https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/51-rebel-inc https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/51-rebel-inc

yosito 5y ago

This is how Factorio feels to me. I love the game. But I can only handle it during long periods away from work, otherwise it leads me toward feeling burnt out.

lstodd 5y ago

Idk how it's now, but ten years ago managing a part of a corp in Eve Online was a full-time job, not to mention alliances. Not very different from managing a real company.

Koshkin 5y ago

Even modern FPS are like that. In the recent installments of Far Cry, for example, I have found myself spending not a small portion of time collecting stuff, tweaking the possessions, building/fixing things. While still enjoying these otherwise excellent and fun games, I find older games, like the original Doom, Unreal, or early installments of FarCry, more enjoyable and fun - exactly because they feel less like "work."

krainboltgreene 5y ago
This comment completely misses the point of the article. I wonder if people even read it.
seanw444 5y ago
Escape From Tarkov is the ultimate anxiety simulator.
mst 5y ago
I really wish there were more tactical games where the battles and armies were predetermined rather than configurable - I absolutely love tweaking army composition and handling resource builds and tech trees and etc. -sometimes- but some days I really just want to be airdropped into a (preferably turn based) fight and left to think my way through winning with the resources I've been given. (then if I really just want to shoot a virtual bad guy, I go back to replaying the old Wing Commander games since for whatever reason I can climb the learning curves of those more easily than FPSes)
- Falkon1313 5y ago
  You might like some of the games at matrixgames.com and slitherine.com because they specialize primarily in turn-based strategy/war games and have a ton of them. However, while some of them are 'pick a scenario and play', others are hugely complex with full production, logistics, research, etc. The John Tiller's Campaign Series games and Strategic Command games are pretty playable, Harpoon Ultimate if you like naval, and Field Of Glory if you have interest in the ancient/medieval eras.
- 5y ago

lostgame 5y ago

Shemnue, anyone? I still have nightmares of the forklift simulator.

oneoff786 5y ago
That part was dreadful for me as a child. It stalled me for months in game. Or maybe it was not understanding that I needed money and shouldn’t blow it on collectible figurines and arcade games… in game. As an adult I have revisited it and it was incredibly easy. A complete non issue by all means. An interesting game design challenge for sure.

blaser-waffle 5y ago

Eve Online in a nutshell. Loved that game, but it was more work than my actual job.

krainboltgreene 5y ago
So you didn't read the article.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
  Oh, it's quite relevant. The main difference is that EvE feels like a second job without even trying.
  - krainboltgreene 5y ago
    But that's not the point of the article.
    - 2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
      I guess we interpreted it differently, then. :)
ddoubleU 5y ago
My mind immediately went to EVE when I read the headline. I love it, I really do but it makes you ask yourself weird existential questions about games and jobs. The other thing that made me quit after few years was that the company behind it (CCP Games), with it's current management, really seems to be incompetent.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
  Yeah, EvE is an amazingly immersive game with meta-gameplay on a whole different level compared to most other games. I'm happy CCP screwed up back during the whole pants-scandal; it made me give up on online gaming, and it was incredibly liberating to get out of it.

alisonatwork 5y ago

Another interesting game that depicts work life from Chinese point of view is Another Adventure[0]. Rather than going the Papers Please route of forcing the player to do the boring job ad nauseum, it is more structured like a series of brief narratives along the lines of The Beginner's Guide. It's short, but really made an impact on me, as someone who also worked/is working in the tech industry. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/604450/Another_Adventure/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/604450/Another_Adventure/

Melatonic 5y ago

Sounds like the Chinese version of Harvest Moon + Rollercoaster Tycoon + Paperboy :-D

ISL 5y ago

I disagree with a statement in the article: "As a tech employee, if you can’t bear overtime, you can pivot to other industries. But the social problem is not going to be solved because you quit." Quitting is the most powerful signal a worker can send. It pushes up the price of that work and is the strongest-possible declaration that something is wrong. Source: Have quit from a field that I love deeply because the environment became intolerable. Furthermore, I've now signed on to a new line of work precisely because the environment is so supportive.

joe_the_user 5y ago
I would be curious which line of work you find has such a supportive environment, we hear so much about environments that are unsupportive.
- langsoul-com 5y ago
  I believe those fields are where there's high demand but not enough supply. China tech can treat people like shit because there's always someone to replace them. I think the stats were more engineers graduate from China come out than the entire history of USA engineers each year. When there's high demand, then any place that systematically treats people like shit would not retain workers and die off. Of course, exceptions exist for places that pay shit tons of money.
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  They probably don't want to push down the price of their work
- michaelt 5y ago
  Personally, I've found the western tech industry treats employees extremely well, compared to any other job I've had. Flexible hours and dress code, excellent pay, light supervision, hundreds of employers, air-conditioned offices, great safety record, interesting and meaningful work for those that want it - and it barely needs a college degree. It's not perfect, but it's better than 95% of jobs out there. (Of course, the games programming industry is to be avoided at all costs)

taneq 5y ago

TFA is basically one big spoiler for the game. Admittedly I'd probably never have actually played it but it's still annoying on principle.

_carbyau_ 5y ago

I group anything "[Job name] Simulator" with this. Motorcycle Mechanic Simulator, PC Builder Simulator, Truck Driving Simulator etc etc. There is absolutely a place for them. To learn/perfect a craft or dip a toe into it if you wonder how it all works. Just not for me. It is too worklike. Aside, can we not add "fishing" into every not-water-related game? (Warframe is a prime example...) It seems like 50% of new games now have a fishing minigame in there somewhere. I almost expected Mechwarrior 5 to have slipped in a fishing minigame somewhere....

krainboltgreene 5y ago
But this game is not at all like any of those games, did you even read the article?

tvanantwerp 5y ago

While I really enjoyed Stardew Valley, I had to stop playing it. I wasn't getting a chill country farmer escaping the busy city vibe. I was trying to maximize my actions for every minute of play to get the most rewards in the shortest time. It really felt like work, not play—so I gave it up.

artemisyna 5y ago

A bunch of the comments here seem to be talking about what's in the headline (a game being realistic + feeling like work) without really noticing some of the broader social commentary in the article (the workaholic — and sort of toxic — culture of tech in China). Seems like a potentially good game to train oneself in figuring out how to spend investor money though lol.