Living In Sim is our new column on "simulation", whatever that means

Simulation is a huge genre, no two people will agree where it begins or ends. When a game nails "simulator" to the end of its name, like a big plank of wood, the case seems clear cut. Flight Simulator. Gas Station Simulator. Goat Simulator. But then you have all the high-level systemic games which simulate historical nation building or space exploration. Cities Skylines calls itself a simulation, so does Crusader Kings, Rimworld, Mount & Blade, and Dwarf Fortress. Racing sims distinguish themselves from arcade racers. And sports games can veer that way too. Session is a skateboarding sim in a way that Tony Hawk's is not. Football Manager 2026 is a sim, but Rematch? Hmmm.

As I am constantly reminding Jank readers, all taxonomy is folly. Viewed from the firmament, every game is a simulation. But there is often some extra pedantry or detail that pushes a game into being classified a sim. For the purposes of this column, I don't care where that fuzzy border falls, I only care that it exists. A sim is just any videogame that commits hard to the bit.

Why sims, of all genres? Well, we're a PC gaming site, and the PC does sims better than any other playmachine. But more than that, I'm choosing "simulation" precisely because the definition is so broad. I wanted to put a limit on what I'd play, but I didn't want that limit to be so constricting that both author and reader of this column would get sick of looking at the same kind of thing every month. I like PC Gamer's FOV 90 because it visits and revisits first-person shooters, giving them their own space. And the RPG Scrollbars once wandered the realms of  RPGs for musings worth a scribble. If these columns only focused on multiplayer shooters or fantasy RPGS, they would be poorer. For the same reason, a "simulation" can be Arma 3. It can also be Bread Simulator.

Please, do not resist. Yes, when some people hear "sims" they think of military history and grognarding hard about battalions or World War 2 jet engines. But others will think you mean The Sims. This column can be about both. Remain calm. Remain composed.

I could have narrowed the scope down to "job simulators", in which case you'd read a lot of funny stories about me failing to mop up vomit in supermarket aisles, or perhaps driving Jonty deeper into debt in another car mechanic sim. We recently joked about job simulators on an episode of Total Playtime, in which we found it difficult to invent a sim that had not already been done. And this itself proves to me the fertility of the genre at a wider level. If you can think of any obscure vocation you'd like to do for a day, you can probably find some version of that as a videogame. It might not be good. But that's for me to find out, and you to read about. 

So I will include these, without question. I love and hate job sims with the alternating oscillation of a panic-attacked heart hooked up to an electrocardiogram. As someone with a severe phobia of having a single immovable career, I can't help but want to visit another person's boring 9-5.

Yet Steam is full of crappy, half-finished simulations of blue and white collar work, or "dream jobs" given the barest mechanical gamescaffolding. These can be a laugh to write about, all good fun, but there's a limit to how many shonky early access-pools you and I can stomach, believe me. What I'm really after are the jobsworthy, those sims thoroughly designed to be a type of ultimate zen practice. 

Powerwash Simulator is a danger to all those who crave the simple satisfaction of a clean patio. Tower Networking Inc is a grainy and gratifying sim for the type of person who gets a kick out of configuring routers. Hardspace: Shipbreaker is the peak of job simulators, because it is not a real job yet already feels like one, an acutely intelligent sci-fi game that gives you the gratifying task of cutting up spaceships, while satirising corporate control of the working class. Sure, you may be the victim of false consciousness and debilitating debt. But that doesn't mean you don't love lasering carefully around a nuclear fusion engine. It's almost as if work has value outside of its monetary impact. Wild.

But like I say, this column won't be limited to trawling through the bargain bucket for a heavily stickered copy of Wedding Cake Simulator or Pet Crematorium Simulator. With a genre as shifty and fickle as "simulation" this can't happen. Eventually, you're going to see me die horribly and realistically, perhaps in another finicky strategy about orbital physics. Keeping the definition of "sim" wide open is the point.

When you boil it all down, simulation is about one thing: fully inhabiting another world or, sometimes, another body. My hope is that Living In Sim will let me bring you along for the ride into these many realms and meatshells. So come back to Jank soon for the first entry on Truck Mechanic: Dangerous Paths, in which I have already crashed into a river and drowned.

After that, I don't know. You might see me failing to turn a profit in a 1990s video store with all the requisite hijinks or lowjinks that poorly stacking a shelf may bring. Or I might be earnestly trying to fly a MiG-29A in a realistic combat flight simulator. I could be looking down from managerial heights as I bully antlike idiots into building the right kind of refrigeration for all the meat they've been stockpiling for a cold winter. Or I may simply be driving a shitty car.

But whatever I'm doing, you'll be with me, and we'll be living in sim.