PowerWash Simulator and the Yearning to Work

Ever since I can remember, video games have been escapist to the core. Growing up, I spent plenty of hours stomping turtles in Super Mario World with my cousins, and flying snowspeeders over the pixelated wastes of Hoth in Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire at 1 a.m. with my best friend. More recently, while my infant sons snoozed, I logged some time in the postapocalyptic Pacific Northwest of The Last of Us and the war-torn fantasy landscapes of Dark Souls.

A common denominator, of course, is that these games offer experiences unavailable elsewhere—windows into other lives and strange new worlds. And plenty has been written about how the unfolding “crisis of manhood”—many young men’s struggles to enter productive adulthood and form families—is bound up, at least in part, with the ubiquity of video games. After all, modern games offer a very effective feedback-reward loop: as the player progresses further into the game, they overcome challenges and experience a sense of accomplishment. Digital worlds are more realistic, and more compelling, than ever before. But of course, this “progress” is a sham. When the blue glow of the PlayStation fades to black, there’s not much to show for all that time invested—except the player is a little older, and a little sadder, and probably a little lonelier. When the world feels hostile, why not flee into fantasy?

Perhaps, though, this assumption no longer holds. Largely under the public radar, a curious shift has taken place: today, some of the most popular games on the market are the farthest thing from escapist. Rather, they are simulations of real-world blue-collar labor. Last year, PowerWash Simulator, the undisputed king of the genre, reached an astounding 17 million players. (Just to put that figure in perspective, that’s about three times as many as the latest blockbuster Assassin’s Creed release).

To be clear, PowerWash Simulator is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of wielding a gun or a plasma rifle, the player…wields a power washer. The point of the game isn’t to storm a castle or save a princess, but simply to hose down dirty playgrounds, buildings, construction equipment, or other objects. And PowerWash Simulator is far from the only game of its ilk: other recent bestsellers include Lawn Mowing Simulator, Bus Simulator, Farming Simulator and Construction Simulator (a favorite of my excavator-obsessed three-year-old). Earlier this year, Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator—in which the player takes on the role of a 1990s-era video store manager by purchasing and shelving movies, enforcing late fees, and stocking refreshments—topped the sales charts.

Simulation games, of course, are nothing new. Age of Empires famously thrust players into the role of military tactician and economic planner, just as SimCity invited gamers to try their hand at city management (all the way down to plumbing and zoning). But what sets these new titles apart is their relative lack of apparent ambitiousness. There’s something classically aspirational about being a warlord or a mayor; for better or worse, few would say the same about running a power washer or lawn mower. These jobs still exist in the real world, but they don’t pay well or offer much chance of advancement. They are not promoted or rewarded, and are often perceived as drudgery.

What, exactly, is going on here? Why spend one’s days simulating apparently mundane work?

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Increasingly, a modern path to workplace success seems to run through an increasingly narrow channel: get near-perfect grades in high school; attend a top university; survive a gauntlet of credentialing exams, interviews, and status games; work relentlessly, in ever-more-demanding roles, until retirement. Even this, of course, is not enough: one must also be relentlessly entrepreneurial, constantly looking for unseen opportunities to maintain an edge over one’s competition. And even that already-demanding regimen has been intensified still further by the advent of generative AI. Subject-matter expertise and an entrepreneurial spirit are no longer enough; one must now master a technology that ostensibly changes by the day, becoming a symphony conductor for swarms of AI agents to which one’s core cognitive proficiencies have been outsourced.

It has not always been this way. Within living memory, it was possible to obtain a more-or-less well-paying job—with a defined set of competencies—and work at that job for one’s whole career, enjoying a healthy employer-provided pension upon retirement. And, more to the point: today’s hyper-optimized intellectual work, especially when mediated by AI tools, is not always all that satisfying. Much of it approximates what anthropologist David Graeber famously termed “bulls**t jobs”—a sort of “paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

Against that backdrop, one starts to understand the peculiar charm of digital labor simulators. As Graeber writes, “[o]ne must assume that the percentage of nurses, bus drivers, dentists, street cleaners, farmers, music teachers, repairmen, gardeners, firefighters, set designers, plumbers, journalists, safety inspectors, musicians, tailors, and school crossing guards who checked ‘no’ to the question ‘Does your job make any meaningful difference in the world?’ was approximately zero.” Indeed: these are precisely the sorts of jobs that today’s labor-simulation games largely depict—roles in which physical matter is moved about, and chaos turned into order. They are jobs that really matter, in a tangible way, to the health of the lived environment.

And for the most part, these are the kinds of jobs that do not preclude deep reflection in the very midst of labor. A financier or corporate attorney cannot really let his mind drift at work; he is compensated for precisely that cognitive capital. But as Zena Hitz writes, “[d]espite ancient prejudice against it, manual labor leaves the mind free to ruminate and consider in a way that other forms of labor do not. This is why carpentry, or gardening, or housecleaning can be satisfying in a way that ticking boxes, pushing paper, or thinking through complex but trivial problems is not.”

The images of pre-Fall labor we are given in the opening pages of the Book of Genesis evoke this very truth. Adam is placed in Eden “to work it and take care of it.” (Gen. 2:15)—and, so too, to commune with God “in the cool of the day” (Gen. 3:8). His labor does not estrange him from creation, or from consciousness of his relationship to his Creator, but weaves him into it. It is hard to say the same of many of today’s demanding professional roles.

None of this is what one expects from video games. It is certainly not escapist. Indeed, the fact that thousands of young men are spending their free hours pretending to use power washers, or lawnmowers, testifies to a deep yearning to contribute to the business of common life, rather than a desire to escape. But will they get the chance? Of course power washing and lawnmowing jobs still exist, but—unless one owns the business—they are not really the sorts of roles upon which one can fund a stable life or family. Can it really be the case that the only types of jobs that can monetarily provide for the basic prerequisites of a stable life—home and family—will be jobs incapable of bringing meaning or purpose to vast numbers of workers, workers who simply want to bring physical order out of disorder?

In the years ahead, it will not be possible to ignore this question. The number of individuals who can meet all today’s supposed benchmarks—who claim all the academic and professional brass rings, who dynamically innovate in the face of new challenges, and who operate at the cutting edge of technology—is vanishingly small. There will always be many, many persons in a given economic system who will not—or cannot—become the endlessly deconstructible commercial subjects demanded by an ever-faster-paced market system. (By definition, all entrepreneurs obviously cannot succeed.) A public policy that cuts with the grain of created order cannot simply declare that all these people’s labor—all their productive capacity they can offer the world—is simply obsolete and unwanted, or unprofitable.

In the popularity of PowerWash Simulator and the like, we now have empirical evidence that points in a rather unexpected direction. A world without work will not look like a Marxian paradise of art and music and philosophy, of joyous liberation from daily drudgery. Rather, it will look like the sad silence of individuals withdrawing into digital labor simulators, grasping toward some semblance of the meaningful work that reality denies them. After all: it’s simply inefficient for them to do anything else. Nobody might starve—a universal basic income could see to that—but few would truly flourish.

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As anyone who’s been in the workforce longer than a few years knows, there is plenty of unpleasantness about the working world, from petty commuting frustrations to coworker squabbles to ethical morasses. And yet, at its best, we know that work itself is no curse. It is the field in which we satisfy the impulse to bring new from old, to make the tarnished beautiful, to create within the horizon of creation. In countless different ways, we till and tend the garden of our world. And a healthy politics makes space for that yearning rather than trying to optimize it away—or reserve it for a lucky few. 

The young men playing PowerWash Simulator in the wee hours of the morning, whether or not they have the words for it, know this instinctively. But do the rest of us?