Eating. Sleeping. Staying hydrated. All things I struggle to achieve in my regular life, and all things that, for some reason, survival games also ask from me.
In real life, I struggle to meet the daily needs of my body. Night time is the best time to write because I have so little distractions, but then I wake up exhausted every day. When I’m in a groove writing, it can hard for me to tear myself away from the page and fucking eat something. And don’t get me started on remembering to have water instead of coffee—someday I will die wondering why I’m so thirsty after drinking nothing but coffee all day.
Part of the escape that video games offer me is relief from these obligations. A video game character does not need to eat, drink, or sleep. They do not need to take their meds every day. They don’t go to the bathroom, or get hair cuts, or trim their nails—all these tiny chores that take up time in my life that I never think about but must complete. So why, why, would I play a video game where doing all these chores is not only necessary, but the point.
Survival games will make you play as a character who gets hungry and who needs sleep. It’s kind of the point, I gather, to simulate the things you’d be facing if you did need to stay alive in, say, the arctic tundra. But video games don’t need to accurately recreate each and every aspect of life to be compelling. Having to pause every now and then to make my character take a sip of water often becomes more distracting than intellectually engaging.
At its worst, having to manage thirst and hunger only reveals how bad of a job I’m doing taking care of my real life body, which absolutely shatters any suspension of disbelief. That in-game body is not a real body—it does not have the urge of hunger. But I do, so when I make my little video game man eat some food I just feel like I’m trying to convince someone my invisible friend is real. You can’t trick me, that’s just some pixels.
Gamifying life has always been interesting to me, but I think survival games do so in a way that’s too close to the functions of life as an individual. I love games that look at human life from just a little bit more of a remove, exploring it as a series of interlocking systems. Even in The Sims, you act as a third party observer, managing Sims’ needs but not acting explicitly as any one character. If you go off to play with another Sim, the Sim you left behind will have autonomy. In Dwarf Fortress, all your dwarves have needs, but your job is simply to make sure the things they need are there when they need them—they will be able to eat and drink and sleep on their own schedules.
Something about managing the needs of a virtual person that are identical to my needs, the needs of a real person, just gives me the ick. Part of it is that it can never go far enough, really. In order to survive, you need more than just food and water. You need to jerk off, or read a book, or look at sunset, or fart really loudly, or figure out how to scratch the inside of your ear. The mechanics of human life are too vast for a video game, and survival games end up feeling like a lackluster imitation.
It's Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
