Hate your job? Try running a virtual supermarket

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":6.3,"text":"In my gaming hours this week, I could have been slaying dragons, shooting Nazis or building a sprawling criminal empire. Instead, I was stacking shelves and checking price tags in a kind of pixelated Poundland. This is the bread and butter of Discounty, in which you travel to a rural town to help your crotchety aunt achieve her dream of running a budget supermarket."}],[{"start":31.59,"text":"On my first day in the job, I was hit by déjà vu. The past five years have brought a flood of retail simulation games, and I’ve played a lot of them: Supermarket Simulator, Internet Cafe Simulator, Cat Cafe Manager, Weed Shop 3. These days I can manage stock inventories, dispatch tricky customers and cash up the till like a grizzled shop-floor veteran."}],[{"start":59.18,"text":"You might think it doesn’t sound like much fun. What’s the allure of such games? Why, after a long day of real work, would anyone want to clock in for a shift working for a virtual boss?"}],[{"start":71.46,"text":"I have found some answers playing Discounty. The experience of entering somebody else’s working life is curiously pleasurable. When the routine is not my own, I enjoy its soothing rhythms. I arrive at the store every morning and enter a flow state, organising groceries and juggling receipts. As my business expands, there is a satisfying sense of progression. I make deals with local providers to supply cheese and fish fingers. There’s a strategy to arranging my aisles and a satisfying tension to manning the cash register — you want to be fast enough to prevent long queues, but rush and you might overcharge a customer."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":115.78999999999999,"text":"The joy of the management sim is not a new phenomenon. In 1989, Will Wright’s SimCity showed the pleasure of town planning, while in the 1990s Theme Park and RollerCoaster Tycoon turned the business of fun into a compelling pursuit. (Designing rides was all well and good, but my most memorable — and Machiavellian — accomplishment was increasing the salt quantity on my french fries to drive up drinks sales.) Sports enthusiasts love the complexity of Football Manager, but it has always seemed to me more like an elaborate spreadsheet masquerading as a video game. Today, the market is overrun with retail sims, ranging from the banal — Clothing Store Simulator, Grocery Store Simulator — to the bizarre — Megaquarium, Graveyard Keeper, Prison Architect. There’s even the meta Game Dev Story, in which you run a game development studio."}],[{"start":178.64,"text":"Why is the genre so popular? As with many games, it’s partly wish fulfilment. Self-made success is one of the founding myths of contemporary capitalism. In retail sims, you can open your own business and live out your work fantasies without any actual risk."}],[{"start":198.51999999999998,"text":"And while some sims are exacting in their verisimilitude, it’s how they differ from real jobs that is most telling. Virtual careers are fair, satisfying and predictable. You have freedom to decide how your company is run, every failure is recoverable, and if you play your cards right you’re guaranteed to rise to the top and succeed. By contrast, real jobs are often unrewarding and exhausting. You spend a lot of time doing what you’re told, even if it doesn’t make sense. Worst of all: you have to work, whether you like it or not. If your virtual job becomes unrewarding, you can simply stop and do something else — perhaps simulate a different career."}],[{"start":245.14999999999998,"text":"Discounty is part of a popular sub-category of retail sims that cross over with “cosy games” in the wake of farming sensation Stardew Valley. New release Tiny Bookshop asks players to move to the seaside town of Bookstonbury and open a store stocked with real-world novels. In Dave the Diver, you play a deep-sea fisherman who moonlights as a sushi chef, balancing each big catch with a fast-paced restaurant simulation. This week saw the release of Strange Antiquities, in which you run a shop specialising in occult objects. While the familiar rhythms of building a business provide a framework for upgrades and progression in such games, the town settings are often beautifully realised, offering charming surroundings populated by intriguing locals."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":298.09999999999997,"text":"When you strip away these narrative trappings, you’re left with another popular sub-genre: factory sims. This is a hard-nosed world of resource extraction, production chains and logistics. The two giants are Factorio and Satisfactory, which resemble complex puzzles, offering creative problem solving and a constant drip of dopamine as you debug your systems, solve bottlenecks in the supply chain and receive upgrades. It may sound unglamorous, but these games can take over people’s lives. Devotees report literally dreaming about new conveyor belt set-ups or jotting down optimisation ideas while at their real day jobs."}],[{"start":343.84,"text":"It’s not just retail sims that mimic the flow of real work. In fact, almost every game is like a job. They all ask players to perform tasks in exchange for rewards. By locating satisfaction in training, strategy and mastery, they reveal pleasures that we might also find in our real working lives. But there is something discomforting about the ease with which work bleeds into leisure. As Theodor Adorno once wrote: “Free time is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labour.”"}],[{"start":380.92999999999995,"text":"The German philosopher’s words leave me a bit unsettled as I stack the virtual shelves in Discounty, reflecting on how capitalism has colonised play to the extent that I now relax by simulating the very grind I’m trying to escape. But then I get a mop upgrade, meaning that I can clean the shop floors twice as fast, and the thought flits away once more."}],[{"start":407.2099999999999,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":426.1499999999999,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftmailbox.cn/album/a_1758874308_1351.mp3"}