• Mundane tasks can become engaging side content in some games, serving as backdrops for immersive open worlds and providing tangible benefits.

• In some games, household chores are the focal point, with entire campaigns and careers built around seemingly mundane tasks like cleaning or organizing.

• Don’t be surprised to find yourself involved in these mechanics, as the developers are great at incentivizing and rewarding engagement in their world.

Growing up, taking on real-world responsibilities and menial tasks often felt like an interruption to my precious play time. Now that I’m older, my taste for real-life chores has barely changed, but I find myself drawn to virtual work during my gaming sessions.

Daily Activities Create Great Secondary Content

Many video games feature trivial tasks that may be repetitive and menial as a form of optional side content. These can range from activities such as preparing meals and potions for money or upgrades to cleaning houses and even managing crops and plants through farming or gardening.

THE Yakuza And Grand Theft Auto The games are known for their unrelated mini-games in which players do a wide range of things, from household chores to collecting trivial items.

Most of the time, these can yield in-game currency or arcade-style high score mechanics that encourage you to give them a chance even if they have nothing to do with the main content. Sometimes they can even increase character stats or net exclusive items based on your dedication, making them interesting pieces of side content.

Trivial tasks flesh out open worlds

Performing chores and trivial tasks in open-world games can be a great way to make worlds feel more alive as the player engages in things that make sense for the given context.

Rockstar Games titles are great examples of this, like Red Dead Redemption 2′s open world is known for being particularly immersive and realistic. In it, you can brush your horse, clean around the camp, gather food and resources, and even groom yourself while battling your fellow NPCs.

These tasks are far from necessary to play the gameand while they yield some minor rewards, they’re mainly there because they make sense in an immersive open world. Players are already expected to return to camp and engage regularly. Since these tasks are so easily accessible, it’s easy and seamless to find yourself doing them.

Another Rockstar game, Bully, is equally immersive because not only does it reward you for attending your classes on time, but you end up completing in-game tasks as punishment for breaking the rules. While these can sometimes be a little less optional than usual, they still feature fun high score mechanics and make perfect sense for the setting.

Sometimes housework is all the fun

There are also examples where housework is the main draw of a game and a reason to jump into it in the first place. Many games have taken the concept of a virtual chore and fleshed out an entire game around it, with varying levels of intensity.

Games like Powerwash simulator, Unboxing, And Agricultural simulator focus only on one or a few specific “tasks”, building the whole game around them with unique gadgets that make them entertaining.

In the meantime, Animal crossing And Valley of Stars focus on tasks like farming, furniture arranging, and item collecting, all of which are highly simplified within an original and unique game world. Although these games are inherently repetitive and low stakes, the appeal comes from the simplicity of the taskssoundtracks and gradual progression in the world at large.

Usually, players can never properly “beat” these games because they continue endlessly as long as the player is satisfied with the return on their time. The Sims features very little instant action, but asks players to manage their daily tasks consistently in exchange for immediate rewards and feedback.

Tactile feedback goes a long way

A large part of the reason gamers may enjoy performing seemingly trivial tasks or playing entire games built around them is that they are often accompanied by tactile or audio feedback that makes them engaging.

Doing the same tasks in real life is often tedious and requires a certain degree of personal motivation. Video games, on the other hand, provide physical sensations, sound effects, and other feedback that make them almost addictive in some cases.

Pressure washing simulator is known for its satisfying visuals, as players can watch levels get progressively cleaner, one line at a time, followed by a gratifying “ding” sound when each one is completed. The combination of these elements and the in-game monetary rewards for completing each item provides a perfect blend of thrills that keep players coming back.

It’s easy to get tricked into doing them anyway

Even if you don’t like doing repetitive tasks in your games, it’s not difficult to engage in them anyway, even if it’s just for quality of life reasons.

Survival games, while not inherently tedious in many cases, often contain many items, crafting resources, and other tasks that you must complete to progress. While farming, mining, and other activities are usually relegated to simple button presses, they can also fill up your inventory over time, requiring you to sort through it later.

No matter how you play, you’re likely to run into a full inventory at some point in games like Minecraft, in which you may need to create an in-game storage space and spend a lot of time organizing it so that your items can be stored easily.

It’s not a requirement to play the way you want, but the more time you spend on it, the more likely you are to end up with full inventories and cluttered storage. At some point, it will usually be a good idea to spend time managing your inventory and arranging items in a way that is easy to identify.

You might find yourself doing these things without even thinking about it, as you have the ability to create unique and creative structures and methods for storage in the game. In survival games like Minecraft, you might find yourself doing these things anyway, and as you get stronger, it becomes easier to deal with endgame content.

Chores are a part of life whether you like it or not, but video games are opening up a whole new avenue for making them fun and engaging. Not only can they be directly beneficial, but they can even be the main draw of a game, drawing players in by turning menial tasks into satisfying, full-fledged experiences.

Now if only someone could translate the motivation I feel into a game like Unpacking in the real world…