Sometimes you want to feel an adrenaline rush. Sometimes you just want to tend a garden or walk a forest.
I do both of these things a fair amount IRL, I'm not trying to single you out I just want to understand motivations for playing these games, is there a reason you do these activities in a game as opposed to IRL?
No spiderwebs on your face. No biting and/or disease-carrying insects. No oppressive humidity. No getting soaked by a sudden rainstorm. No sunburns. No twisting an ankle and having a horrible time getting back out. No taking a wrong turn and ending up having to go much farther than you'd counted on, to get back.
Much or all of the game world may be crafted to be interesting. Even very nice natural areas have boring bits, and you can't fast-travel past them.
You can do it even if you're injured, or tired.
If the game has tasks, they usually have far faster reward loops than their real-life equivalents. The real-life versions might have more clean-up or mess. You have to actually physically do a bunch of stuff where the game might have a button press. You also have to know how to do it, and have the tools (if any) to do it. This is why obsessive players of games that feature gardening or farming usually don't become avid hobby-gardeners in real-life.
I don't want to become like the girl in the latest blade runner who only lives in her room.
Video games have faster feedback loop compared to real life. You progress and get rewards much faster. For example, I could finish an entire growing season in one long evening of playing. And it's not just scaling time. The tasks themselves are simplified to balance complexity, difficulty, and fun. You only have a handful of tools that never break. You don't have to worry about plant diseses, pests, droughts, floodings, or freezing temperatures in spring. The only thing you need to manage is watering (which you have an infinite supply of) and crows (which are repelled with a scarecrow).
The barriers of entry are lower too. There are games that let you drive a truck of fly a plane; things which would be prohibitively expensive in real life.
You can do the activity when there's free time (like at night) with no real planning.
You can put the task down for months on end without negative results because time is constrained to the game world. Or put another way, constant upkeep tasks and their results can be perfectly saved.
Game worlds can be tightly controlled if you wish it. Reality is uncontrollable.
After a very brief taste of Elder Scrolls Online I realized I really, really dislike when game time rules seep too much into real life and start contaminating my schedule.
Nowadays I can't stand even the simplest habit-forming daily rewards loop of mobile games.
I won’t make moralistic judgements on which is better, but I will say all else equal, a lot of people prefer physical passivity.
On the other hand, it only takes about five minutes to boot a game and be walking the PNW.
And that's where Rust comes in. You're tending your garden, keeping your base in order and then people come with rockets and C4.
Even if you just dig ditches, at least you can say “hey I dig these ditches that I now see” at the end of the day. This is very satisfying to our brains.
I predict a lot of future recreation will look like “visual evidence of accomplishment without needing the tedious labor required to do the same thing in the physical world.”
You can kind of see why Zuck cares so much about the meta verse from that angle, it’s just too bad that he’s so nuerodivergant he’s getting the details wrong.
She, like the people in this article, really loves this style of game because there is no direct competition. Sure there are tasks to complete and achieve but there is no clock, no angry mobs of people yelling obscenities at you, and no enemies getting in your way while you try and do your thing.
These games are good to veg out with, they give you some of the satisfaction of doing a good job, while keeping you from doing all the hard work.
No it's not my kind of game, but House Flipper is now one of my top three games played on steam (for game time) because my partner uses my steam account for gaming.