I don't play Farming Simulator (though an older copy of it is sitting in my steam library)... I do play American Truck Simulator.
For ATS, there's a certain relaxing of "just driving". You've got a goal, and simple, well defined tasks - go here, pick up the load, go there, deliver the load. The 'go there' part is largely an autopilot of a few decades of driving experience with a bit of "ok, this is different" when dealing with something that has a large trailer.
For the most part, its something I can play without needing to do any deeper problem solving. To that end, the game is relaxing.
With the nature of the game, its also something that one can "do" - there are few impossible tasks unlike what one encounters with a day job. The consequences for not completing something is a few points however they are measured - but rarely game ending (and in many cases, that's resolved with a save file).
It is about getting something 'realistic' done in today's world of ever increasing demands.
(very late edit)
My current gaming binge is Hardspace Ship Breaker - which is a game about being a shipbreaker for space ships. Its got the "this can be routine" (though if you mess up the reactor it can get very interesting very fast).
Ship breaking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_breaking ) is in the category of most dangerous jobs and space ships are obviously not realistic. But it's the game that you can just get into the grove and do. One of the best things about the game (for me) is that it is 15 minute shifts. So you can easily say "I'll play this game for 15 minutes on lunch break" and as long as you stick to one shift, that's 15 minutes. The shift ends and its done.
I feel the same about ATS. In fact, I wish it was even more boring, like real driving is. ATS has an unrealistic amount of curves and shortens the distances between cities that in real life would take many hours to travel between.
It also is devoid of any of the (often catastrophic) downsides of making a mistake in real life. Turns out driving can be relaxing and fun if you remove anxiety involving death, injury, and property damage. Perhaps the same applies to farming sims.
Its obviously not as light on the problem solving, but this is why I keep playing Kerbal Space Program.
I'll admit, I play with the Mechjeb autopilot for doing most maneuvers because they get so repetitive. But it's fun to have an alarm clock full of different missions and switching between the different things you have in progress.
Then I ran out of places to go so I wrote (and eventually handed off) the Kopernicus mod to allow for more planets to be added and the community keeps making more interesting places to go!
One of my favorite things in KSP a while back used to be building whole communications systems to slowly blanket the system with automated rovers and ships. I would program flight computers using mods on them and never actually controlled any of them directly at all. It was pretty easy to program missions where you did standard "take off, go into orbit, transfer to another body, land, detach rover..." etc. I miss that, and perhaps I need to invest in a gaming PC again and sell my console before PS5's are ubiquitous in stores.
Part of the plot background is about unionization.
And you don't need to be blue collar. When I was working tech support, I got in, signed in and that's when I started. At the end of the day, I signed out and that was the end. I worked the "east" shift at SGI in '98. East covered the phones from 5am to 9am with each person taking 2h in that range (mine was 7am to 9am) and then we did callbacks from 9am to 1pm or so (depending on when you started). Central picked up the new calls at 9am and covered the new calls from 9am to 1pm and then west picked up live calls from 1pm to 5pm - I'm not sure how the different teams did their coverage.
Anyways, the thing was at 3pm when I signed out I was done done. I didn't have niggling problems of tech support haunting my mind (compare to being a SDE) or trying to get ahead of the curve of technologies that management will ask about. And the "not worrying about those things" - that was my most productive personal programming time that I've ever had. I have gotten better over the decades at coding - both in the code itself and the use of larger systems... but in terms of quantity and satisfaction of things done, that was the best time.
The only games I want to play nowadays are games that I can relax on, though I'm not really sure what makes a game relaxing. Those games who's primary purpose is to be relaxing look quite boring.
As for driving I been playing dirt rally 2, where I drive at a comfortable pace.
I love dogs. I don't want a dog (yet, I guess). It's a huge commitment. If I get a chance to periodically interact with a dog - just the good parts, especially, such as petting, playing, running around, etc. - then I'm going to take it. It still doesn't mean I want to adopt a dog.
Apply this to being a farmer, which is a lot of work, and weigh this against the barrier to entry of being a farmer for just a few hours every so often, vs. doing it digitally.
These games almost never include the really shitty parts, even the "realistic" ones.
Running to the farm & feed store (perhaps an hour round trip, or even more, depending on where you are, and it's getting in the way of getting actual work done) for something or another, mending fences, grading drive-ways and other roads, cleaning yourself and your clothes and boots up after you get covered in mud, cleaning equipment, getting tractors un-stuck, repairing tractors, and so on.
And what they do include is a button press, not a process. Hook up a discer? Back up to it and press the button. No getting out, screwing with chocks and some kind of device or another for raising the tongue into place. No pinching the shit out of your hand because you were careless.
No weed-eating around equipment that's parked outside. No re-painting the barn. No re-sealing some screw holes in the sheet metal roof that've been leaking. No diagnosing and fixing a slipped belt on the combine. No tossing square bales onto a trailer.
No cuts on your arms from corn leaves. No itchiness from handling straw. No hay (ha, ha) fever. No spending an entire morning getting one damn cow or another in the chute for the veterinarian.
These "realistic" simulators still almost always cut out all the worst crap that's the reason people don't have tons and tons of fun doing it in real life. The stuff you do in the game is maybe 5-10% of what you really do.
Not only that. The economics side of it. Not everyone could afford a dog. It is quite a bit of money, from the space required for living to the food and medical care.
Also in farming. I do think there are people who like the hard work and simple life. But as a business it is terrible.
$400 a month in food (two large dogs, both turned out to need specialty diets) gets old fast.
That said, I dearly love my dogs and am trying rather hard to not think about the tens of thousands of dollars I will end up spending just on food alone.
>If I get a chance to periodically interact with a dog - just the good parts, especially, such as petting, playing, running around, etc. - then I'm going to take it.
I had a couple of dogs who died of old age. I couldn't bring myself to get another dog so instead we dog sit! We use the Rover app and it's been pretty awesome. You get to be a "doggy grandparent" for a couple days, spoil the crap out of them and then poof! They go back to their owners and you don't have to deal with all their BS (because let's be honest: almost every dog his it's own BS)
You just described having grandkids vs having your own kid! A niece/nephew is similar as well. Be the cool aunt/uncle, be the grandparent that feeds the kids sugar just before the parents come to collect them, or any of the other ways of enjoying the time with the kiddos but being able to get back for all the times the kid/sibling was an ass to you!
I think a big part of this is that so many video games are based on violence, without many alternatives. And the ones that are non violent tend to be shorter and more story focused. I think a lot of people want a game that is non-violent, more open world, and has some grind. Farming and survival are two ways to do that, but I think something like a cafe-sim would scratch the same itch for many people.
This is true of a lot of main stream video games, but there's a whole genre of games that are much more wholesome, slice-of-life experiences. Consider: Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, Slime Rancher, and Katamari Damacy—all of which are successful game IP without any of the stereotypical violence we see in AAA shooters.
I've found the "cozy" genre on Steam to also be a great way to find games like these, though I suspect there are other terms that can be used to find them: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Cozy
This is the crux of it for me. Don't get me wrong, I like me a shooter from time to time, but as I've gotten older I find myself not often liking the adrenaline-filled games being pitched.
And Sim-type games really scratch that itch. They often have (relatively) deep gameplay mechanics that are easy to learn but hard to master, don't have a lot of time pressure (many are turn-based, or real-time but with no serious deadlines), and most importantly aren't multiplayer.
Allow me to suggest sable for the category of non-violent open world games. It doesn't really have any grinding but the travel in the game forces a zen-like approach to it all. I kinda wish it didn't have fast travel to be honest.
> The popularity of farming simulators points to people’s enduring engagement with farming as a way to understand our relationship with the natural world, not just a system of food production. Farming has been fundamental [...]
This is really overthinking the subject.
Simulation games often have really tight, addicting game play loops. The player starts with nothing and has to do everything in a grueling, manual fashion. But each iteration of the game loop, the player gets a minor upgrade that makes them slightly more effective and/or adds an additional challenge to consider. After a few hundred iterations, the player has built a gargantuan automata that handles the core gameplay loop, freeing them up to focus on ancillary projects like decorating or collecting.
This is exactly the kind of situation that hammers on the dopamine receptors of a lot of people. Do something challenging, get a reward, then invest that reward to get a better one the next time. It's basically gambling.
Farming happens to be a subject that carries a lot of preconceptions, allowing players to pickup the game concepts a lot more quickly without as many tutorials. But there are plenty of simulation games out there with different subjects but similar game play loops.
I spent like 40 hours playing a game about salvaging space ships. I don't have any particular desire to be in space not do I like space ships or anything. It just happens to be a game that follows this formula, so it's fun.
With so few death cage fighters, why are there so many brawler games? With so few wanting to be soldiers, why are there so many shooters? Pedantic question to pedantic answers.
But my real answer would be that some people are over stimulated at work, and some are over. The understimulated one's I think gravitate to the "grand feats" type of games while those who are overstimulated at work are more looking for either laid back or mundane games to play. All these "_ life sim" games are generally in that mundane category and that's the audience most captive for these forms of entertainment.
Experience the risk without actually taking any risk.
Although, I can offer an anecdote. I really enjoy playing truck simulators, namely American and European Truck Simulator. I had to drive a large box truck recently and I found it super easy - the high up position, looking at the mirrors to back up and parallel park perfectly, and the joy of the open road. Then I realized that truck drivers do this every day for weeks on end as a job. Really appreciate the folks who keep our economy moving.
I think one of the underappreciated issues with the 21st century economy is how many of us do the same thing, day in, day out, hyperoptimized to the point it's economically hard to justify switching tasks. (Or, perhaps more accurately, the 20th century economy, which is still largely with us.)
Do a little of this today, a little of that tomorrow, even a little of this and that within a day, and I feel like we could all tolerate a bit more mundanity (for lack of a better word) in our lives. Cut vegetables, drive a truck, pump sewage, work a factory line, it'd all be easier if we weren't doing the same thing all the time, 40+ hours a week.
Actually I never thought of it this way. When I feel very understimulated at work (most of the time) I tend to have a ton of side projects and/or play the action kinda games. Bringing balance to stimulation is definitely an interesting persepecive.
It can't just be work, given the popularity of video games with kids who don't have jobs yet. I guess you can speculate under or over-stimulation of life in total, but that definitely doesn't comport at least with my personal experience. I played a bunch of sports as a kid and played video games about sports on top of that. When I was a real Soldier in a tank unit, a whole bunch of the tankers played video games involving tank combat. Plenty of infantry played first-person shooters.
Some people just enjoy what they already do and want to do even more of it in a way that doesn't create additional physical hardship and risk.
Generally I get what you're saying, but do keep in mind that there are some life sim games that are extremely high on stimulation.
Endless ATC, Firefighting Simulator: The Squad, Transport Inc., Cold Waters, The Invisible Hand, and 112 / 911 operator, and Tin Can come to mind. There's also "study sims" like DCS World which push you really far into the simulation thing, both in requiring a high degree of competence and in the amount of stimulation you have flying a mission.
I thought age was a factor. In my youth I had way more patience for the likes of Harvest Moon, and enjoyed the roleplay. However, I didn't know what to expect. I wanted to develop and customize the virtual property, pursue virtual relationships. At a certain point you can't help but see the games for what they are. I quickly grew bored with the repetitive menial tasks. I liked the "idea" of a game like that, but not what it amounted to. Now I can say the same for most jrpgs.
Because with virtual farming you don't have to shovel poop. You can also harvest an entire field with one mouse click. Pretty obvious why few people want to actually become farmers. Despite all the mechanization, it's still difficult, dangerous, and dirty.
Right, because when you fail in a game, you just insert another $.25 and continue. When the crops fail for a real farmer, there is no spawn point to start over. It might literally cost them the farm.
I think one reason people like farming games (and games in general really) is that they're fair. You perform a set of actions and get a reward. Sure, some games feel sort of unfair if they're poorly designed. But I think all video games are fair in the sense that they're deterministic. And I know that when I've enjoyed playing farming games, I enjoy the sense of growth that I know is guaranteed to those that learn the rules. Real life is not the same. You can follow all the rules, play fair, and still lose.
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For ATS, there's a certain relaxing of "just driving". You've got a goal, and simple, well defined tasks - go here, pick up the load, go there, deliver the load. The 'go there' part is largely an autopilot of a few decades of driving experience with a bit of "ok, this is different" when dealing with something that has a large trailer.
For the most part, its something I can play without needing to do any deeper problem solving. To that end, the game is relaxing.
With the nature of the game, its also something that one can "do" - there are few impossible tasks unlike what one encounters with a day job. The consequences for not completing something is a few points however they are measured - but rarely game ending (and in many cases, that's resolved with a save file).
It is about getting something 'realistic' done in today's world of ever increasing demands.
(very late edit)
My current gaming binge is Hardspace Ship Breaker - which is a game about being a shipbreaker for space ships. Its got the "this can be routine" (though if you mess up the reactor it can get very interesting very fast).
Ship breaking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_breaking ) is in the category of most dangerous jobs and space ships are obviously not realistic. But it's the game that you can just get into the grove and do. One of the best things about the game (for me) is that it is 15 minute shifts. So you can easily say "I'll play this game for 15 minutes on lunch break" and as long as you stick to one shift, that's 15 minutes. The shift ends and its done.
It also is devoid of any of the (often catastrophic) downsides of making a mistake in real life. Turns out driving can be relaxing and fun if you remove anxiety involving death, injury, and property damage. Perhaps the same applies to farming sims.
A realistic driving simulator from Omaha to Cheyenne would be pretty boring, I'll give you that.
I'll admit, I play with the Mechjeb autopilot for doing most maneuvers because they get so repetitive. But it's fun to have an alarm clock full of different missions and switching between the different things you have in progress.
Then I ran out of places to go so I wrote (and eventually handed off) the Kopernicus mod to allow for more planets to be added and the community keeps making more interesting places to go!
The main good feature of blue-collar work.
And you don't need to be blue collar. When I was working tech support, I got in, signed in and that's when I started. At the end of the day, I signed out and that was the end. I worked the "east" shift at SGI in '98. East covered the phones from 5am to 9am with each person taking 2h in that range (mine was 7am to 9am) and then we did callbacks from 9am to 1pm or so (depending on when you started). Central picked up the new calls at 9am and covered the new calls from 9am to 1pm and then west picked up live calls from 1pm to 5pm - I'm not sure how the different teams did their coverage.
Anyways, the thing was at 3pm when I signed out I was done done. I didn't have niggling problems of tech support haunting my mind (compare to being a SDE) or trying to get ahead of the curve of technologies that management will ask about. And the "not worrying about those things" - that was my most productive personal programming time that I've ever had. I have gotten better over the decades at coding - both in the code itself and the use of larger systems... but in terms of quantity and satisfaction of things done, that was the best time.
As for driving I been playing dirt rally 2, where I drive at a comfortable pace.
Apply this to being a farmer, which is a lot of work, and weigh this against the barrier to entry of being a farmer for just a few hours every so often, vs. doing it digitally.
Running to the farm & feed store (perhaps an hour round trip, or even more, depending on where you are, and it's getting in the way of getting actual work done) for something or another, mending fences, grading drive-ways and other roads, cleaning yourself and your clothes and boots up after you get covered in mud, cleaning equipment, getting tractors un-stuck, repairing tractors, and so on.
And what they do include is a button press, not a process. Hook up a discer? Back up to it and press the button. No getting out, screwing with chocks and some kind of device or another for raising the tongue into place. No pinching the shit out of your hand because you were careless.
No weed-eating around equipment that's parked outside. No re-painting the barn. No re-sealing some screw holes in the sheet metal roof that've been leaking. No diagnosing and fixing a slipped belt on the combine. No tossing square bales onto a trailer.
No cuts on your arms from corn leaves. No itchiness from handling straw. No hay (ha, ha) fever. No spending an entire morning getting one damn cow or another in the chute for the veterinarian.
These "realistic" simulators still almost always cut out all the worst crap that's the reason people don't have tons and tons of fun doing it in real life. The stuff you do in the game is maybe 5-10% of what you really do.
Also in farming. I do think there are people who like the hard work and simple life. But as a business it is terrible.
That said, I dearly love my dogs and am trying rather hard to not think about the tens of thousands of dollars I will end up spending just on food alone.
I had a couple of dogs who died of old age. I couldn't bring myself to get another dog so instead we dog sit! We use the Rover app and it's been pretty awesome. You get to be a "doggy grandparent" for a couple days, spoil the crap out of them and then poof! They go back to their owners and you don't have to deal with all their BS (because let's be honest: almost every dog his it's own BS)
I've found the "cozy" genre on Steam to also be a great way to find games like these, though I suspect there are other terms that can be used to find them: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Cozy
And Sim-type games really scratch that itch. They often have (relatively) deep gameplay mechanics that are easy to learn but hard to master, don't have a lot of time pressure (many are turn-based, or real-time but with no serious deadlines), and most importantly aren't multiplayer.
This is really overthinking the subject.
Simulation games often have really tight, addicting game play loops. The player starts with nothing and has to do everything in a grueling, manual fashion. But each iteration of the game loop, the player gets a minor upgrade that makes them slightly more effective and/or adds an additional challenge to consider. After a few hundred iterations, the player has built a gargantuan automata that handles the core gameplay loop, freeing them up to focus on ancillary projects like decorating or collecting.
This is exactly the kind of situation that hammers on the dopamine receptors of a lot of people. Do something challenging, get a reward, then invest that reward to get a better one the next time. It's basically gambling.
Farming happens to be a subject that carries a lot of preconceptions, allowing players to pickup the game concepts a lot more quickly without as many tutorials. But there are plenty of simulation games out there with different subjects but similar game play loops.
I spent like 40 hours playing a game about salvaging space ships. I don't have any particular desire to be in space not do I like space ships or anything. It just happens to be a game that follows this formula, so it's fun.
But my real answer would be that some people are over stimulated at work, and some are over. The understimulated one's I think gravitate to the "grand feats" type of games while those who are overstimulated at work are more looking for either laid back or mundane games to play. All these "_ life sim" games are generally in that mundane category and that's the audience most captive for these forms of entertainment.
Although, I can offer an anecdote. I really enjoy playing truck simulators, namely American and European Truck Simulator. I had to drive a large box truck recently and I found it super easy - the high up position, looking at the mirrors to back up and parallel park perfectly, and the joy of the open road. Then I realized that truck drivers do this every day for weeks on end as a job. Really appreciate the folks who keep our economy moving.
Do a little of this today, a little of that tomorrow, even a little of this and that within a day, and I feel like we could all tolerate a bit more mundanity (for lack of a better word) in our lives. Cut vegetables, drive a truck, pump sewage, work a factory line, it'd all be easier if we weren't doing the same thing all the time, 40+ hours a week.
Some people just enjoy what they already do and want to do even more of it in a way that doesn't create additional physical hardship and risk.
Endless ATC, Firefighting Simulator: The Squad, Transport Inc., Cold Waters, The Invisible Hand, and 112 / 911 operator, and Tin Can come to mind. There's also "study sims" like DCS World which push you really far into the simulation thing, both in requiring a high degree of competence and in the amount of stimulation you have flying a mission.
In the US, subsidized crop insurance lowers the risk of low yields and provides a nice safety net.
"With so few alien invaders, why are video games about invading aliens so popular?"
"With so few NFL teams, why are video games about managing NFL teams so popular?"