Does the simulation belong to the larger encompassment of a role-playing experience, or does role-playing just serve to be a contained part of a sort of simulation? What different meanings can be derived from a game when considered in one of these ways versus the other; do these differences even matter in the overall consideration of the work?
I find it interesting how many of the initial thoughts and feelings associated with games in the mundane simulation category serve as a sort of partial bridge between a real world event and some limited version of that event. When you operate the power wash in Powerwash Simulator, you can do a lot of things with the tool that match pretty cleanly onto actual uses of it, like turning it on, aiming it, or changing the nozzle type. You can not, however, do literally every act within the realm of imagination with this object offered within the real world; you can not use the power wash nozzle to draw smiley faces in the dirt or spray water in the air to feel it come back down on yourself as makeshift rain. Although you can not do all these non-operative actions with the tool within the game, many players still have evoked feelings of the tool in a similar way to an actual one. Thoughts resembling how it can be used to clean a particularly grimy wall or how it feels fun to hear the water hit surfaces with so much force are very real in the way they would be with an actual object.
When you look at this experience being a simulation within a greater role-playing one, it feels as though your purpose is more tied to micromanaging a set of parameters concerning your own ability to powerwash to and increasingly growing but never satisfied level of perfection. Alternatively treating the more immediate as a role-playing one in a greater simulation instead keeps your primary motives and goals more grounded to the job you have as one that power washes. It is more like working to whatever extent or goal is desirable for you as the player, not some insatiable desire to keep going endlessly. It is harder to fall into the endless trap of washing to earn more resources that are only spent on more washing material and upgrades in an endless loop because you begin to ask yourself the question of “what comes next?’ Why are you trying to powerwash so much and so well in the first place? The purpose of your actions gets placed in a greater more existential scope that makes it more difficult to just endlessly press forwards with the most immediate goal that is placed in front of the player.
On the Pursuit of Satisfaction in Simulations
