Job simulators, as a genre, balance two impulses. They are games about the experience of labour. One impulse is to depict labour as heroic – as something uplifting, as something we can or should take pride in. Job simulators explore the sense of fulfilment that people find in being able to do their job well. The other impulse is to depict labour as exploitative – as demeaning, as a form of theft, where the profits from our labour are collected by somebody else. The specific energy of any given job simulator really comes down to how it balances those two feelings against each other. Stardew Valley, for example, tends towards the heroic. Labour in that game is restorative, healthy, holistic. It’s a fantasy of work based on surplus labour. You goof around in your veggie patch with no financial pressures. Exploitative labour has a presence, in the franchised supermarket JojaMart, but it’s not exploitation that affects you directly, and you can eventually run them out of town in favour of the local grocer. Other games like Viscera Cleanup Detail put you directly under the thumb of an exploitative company. The labour is dehumanizing, and relies on you dehumanizing other people, as you clean up corpses and body parts in the wake of an alien invasion. It’s about the outrage of modern labour, about the way that capitalist systems force us to treat human bodies like trash. It’s silly and surreal and darkly funny. It’s about labour as farce. And yet, as we explored previously, Cleanup Detail attracts players who role-play this kind of blue collar shrug-and-get-on-with-it type. They affect a sense of dignity in the face of their shitty work. It’s not fair, and it’s not good, but hey – that’s life. Players in Cleanup get on with it. They suffer bravely, stoically, finding a sense of heroism in their capacity to deal with dehumanizing conditions. Exploitative working conditions in this game are not set up in opposition to heroic labour: they serve as its foundation.

It’s with those two poles in mind that we turn to Hardspace: Shipbreaker, a 2020 job simulator that sees you scrapping spaceships in a not-so-distant 24th century. There’s a soundtrack built around American folk music with a sci-fi twist – actually, the closest point of reference is probably the space western sound of Firefly. It’s hitting all those key themes of nostalgia and blue collar labour – it’s Stardew Valley in space. The plot, such as it is, features a plucky labour union battling against corporate exploitation. There’s a heavy focus on debt as a tool of oppression; at the start of the game, you’re charged billion-dollar registration fees to go up into space and start working as a shipbreaker. Additional daily fees start at about $400,000 for tool and habitat rental, plus 0.01% in interest, which is still six figures when your initial lump of debt is over a billion dollars. It’s very much a game about controlling the means of production. Lynx, the corporation, owns the tools and materials, so they can charge you through the nose for the privilege of generating their profits. It’s not fair, but it’s the only game in town. You play on their terms or you starve.

Like other job simulators, Hardspace: Shipbreaker contrasts corporate exploitation against the otherwise noble work at hand. The work you do is dangerous and complicated. You’re breaking ships in zero gravity. You’re a scrapper. There are three different types of receptacle, and you have to cut up different ships and put their component parts in the appropriate place. There’s a furnace for hard metals, a processor for plastics, and a barge for complex materials that can be recycled in their current form – things like electronics or storage containers that don’t need to be reformatted. You have to navigate various hazards and break the ship safely – avoiding, for instance, being electrocuted, frozen, exploded, set on fire, irradiated, crushed, or running out of oxygen. You also have to contend with depressurizing different compartments and trying not to blow up the ship’s reactor or fuel lines (likely to kill you, but also a huge loss of potential income). It’s sophisticated work. It’s something you should be able to take pride in, except for the fact that some knobbly corporation is looming over you and ruining your life.

Thus the internal tension of Hardspace: Shipbreaker. On the one hand, it’s a zen game about carefully slicing up spaceships into their component parts. On the other, it’s a game about workers’ rights, about how the condition of your labour is unbearable and unjust. Your work in Shipbreaker is something you should enjoy, but also something you should hate. It’s something you should take pride in, but also something you should resist. The appeal of the core gameplay loop sits in conflict with the overlaid moral evaluation, which makes the game unstable. By the end of the campaign, that tension resolves. You beat the company, most of your debt gets wiped, and the campaign comes to an end with you fixing up an old space-car and flying off into the sunset in search of better work. Personally, I’ve fixed the car, but I haven’t taken that final step. I don’t want to leave. I just want to break ships forever. Financially, I’m not in a bad position. I’ve bought most of my own equipment at this point, so my daily rental payments have dropped from 400,000 plus interest down to a mere 80,000 daily credits. Set that against an average daily income of seven to nine million credits – I’m doing great. This is a good job now. I have three hundred million credits to my name, and I can enjoy cutting up ships without the element of exploitation.

That’s a pretty interesting point for a game to come to. Once the key tension collapses, the narrative is supposed to end with you flying off into the sunset. But the terminus for the narrative is not my ideal point of conclusion. That’s not how I want things to end. If you refuse the idea of enjoying work – if you gravitate to the pole that understands work as a form of exploitation – then you might quite readily end the game and move on with your life. You’d probably find the conclusion aesthetic and fulfilling: work is shit, and one day you’ll escape. But I don’t think that reading captures what’s compelling about job simulators in the first place. Tim Barringer has a book called Men at Work, about representations of labour in art and painting from Victorian times. In one chapter, ‘Blacksmith and Artist’, Barringer discusses the work of James Sharples, an industrial blacksmith who painted and made etchings on steel plate. Sharples’ most famous work is ‘The Forge’ (1859) – you can see a print below, but not the original steel-plate etching, which apparently took him five years to complete. He would work during the day, and in the evenings he would work on his etching.

It’s good to have the print, but you can imagine that the original steel would be the more powerful medium. Barringer writes of the etching that “each line, incised with both force and delicacy, is a visible trace of the work of a man who, with mighty blows of the hammer, also fashioned the components of steam engines.” In certain lights, he says, it “takes on a quality that is both spectral and sculptural, all the more poignant for being forged from the base metal whose transformation is celebrated in the image.” Although the depicted scene looks fairly realistic, Barringer tugs out its nostalgic or idealised aspects, setting them in the context of Sharples’ life – particularly his political struggles over the value of a blacksmith’s labour. Barringer claims that for Sharples, “the aesthetic sphere offered a chance to negotiate, reorder, and interpret the everyday, to remake the world of work.” That’s the power of art for Sharples as an engraver, and it’s the power of art for us as players. We come to these games to negotiate and reorder the meaning of labour in our lives. We reconfigure the meaning of repetition, of humility and patience and the daily routine. There is something utopian in these games. There’s something in them about work made right.