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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3018 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What are some obscure job tasks that might make for fun video games? We all are aware of the zillions of programming, train-routing, and bridge-design games. But what about parking-lot design? Guide-rail design? Curb-ramp design? House design (as a game with targets to be met, rather than as a goal-free sandbox like The Sims)?

Pretending To Work Simulator.

Bonus points for playing it during work hours.

Romance of the College Instructor: Fifty Shades of Grades. See things that the human mind was not meant to see: sin(x)/x = sin. Or 1 (without a limit as x->0). Repeat ad infinitum. Eventually become a cultist of Cthulhu.

I want to see an oil-refinery sim. Like factorio but with capitalism. And you have to tune the control system so that nothing explodes. I know sim-refinery was prototyped, but it never got released.

Maybe it was the horrible fluid system, but a lot of factorio players used to consider oil refining to be really unpleasant work. Not even just a difficulty barrier for newbies, but something even the big team megabase builders drew straws for having to do.
That said I would absolutely love a refinery sim, so maybe it just takes autism beyond autism.

Weird. I played a few rounds of cooperative Factorio, and I had to actively fight with others for the right to set up the refineries. Maybe that's just because I couldn't bear to have it done by someone who refused to touch the logic circuits rather than because it's inherently a more enjoyable part of the game, but it also didn't ever feel any worse than, say, cooking conveyor belt spaghetti or setting up rail stations or copy-pasting walls & guns.

Wait, what.

Horrible fluid system ? ..what ?

Apart from being a cpu hog, the fluid system is beautiful. Nothing as satisfying as getting an eight stage cycle of fluid refining with lots of flaring off to the side, all in the service of making rocket fuel or turning cellulose into napalm in service of turning the enemy crispy.

The recent rework made it better, but remember when any fluid contamination in a pipe would run through the whole system, and you had to chase down the errant bit of water by tearing up all the pipes? And pipes would automatically join when placed next to each other even if they had different fluids in them?

Yeah, I remember it. Mild annoyance.

Maybe it was the horrible fluid system, but a lot of factorio players used to consider oil refining to be really unpleasant work. Not even just a difficulty barrier for newbies, but something even the big team megabase builders drew straws for having to do.

Really? I looked up a tiling blueprint for the refinery itself, and that taught me everything I needed to know for unlimited scale from that point on. I'd heard newbies complaining it was too complicated, but it's really, really not.

It was much harder before blueprints and bots, IIRC. And that was back in the dark days when belts decompressed from turning corners

Middle management: Command economy edition.

Like one of those supply chain games, except everyone’s always lying about quotas, and you don’t know exactly what’s even possible. A new steel process is invented and factories which roll it out are lagging behind. Is it just growing pains? A flawed process that isn’t actually more efficient? Or perhaps the old numbers were just fake? Make it about trying to cope with this imperfect information.

I've heard that you don't even need to make NPCs who intentionally lie to you to make it happen. Of course, yours would be like the final boss version of this game.

Yo, 5 year plan the board game would be fucking incredible. Secret Hitler like; but everyone knows who Stalin is and he has to hit certain (real) production numbers or he gets killed, some random number of players want him killed, some random number are loyal, with stated production being the only real signal Stalin gets and real production getting totaled at the end.

Could be fun if someone good designed it.

Man, this is actually tough for me. Everything I want to say already has a game. There is already a Something Builder for nearly everything.

Is there a Wii style or VR game for chopping wood yet? Could maybe select various wedges or splitting axes to get the job done. Or different species of wood or knottedness. Could be a fun activity up there with VR boxing simulators and the like.

Oh wait, I have another idea! A commuting simulator, but in a fantastical style. I'm thinking really loose physics and a nearly complete disregard for the law. Start with a relatively simple commute, then add some normal events like school buses stopping constantly, or construction. Escalate to civil unrest and alien invasions. Could be fun to allow the user to choose their own route by basing the map from geographic data. I think it'd also be fun to preserve damage to the terrain and buildings from accidents you caused and/or the chaotic events going on around you.

Crazy Taxi: Commuter Edition

Of course there's a lumberjack simulator already! That second idea is great though, I especially like the idea of retaining damage from previous rounds. What exactly would the player control though?

You went and got my hopes up, only to dash them! That one is all about using industrial equipment to log trees. Not the manly activity of swinging an axe.

Ah shit, I linked some dlc instead of the main game. Looking into it more though, it's not what I thought it was. I figured that since lumberjacking is an actual sport there would be a strong emphasis on using your chainsaw and axe, maybe a bit of a qwop style mini game for climbing trees, a robust selection of flannels and beards to wear - lumberjack things. But the gameplay sounds more like euro truck sim with a half assed first person log cutting section on top. Here is the blurb from under the heading First-person chainsaw and axe -

The map is an open world, its details numerous and filled with challenges. From high slopes to varying surfaces, there is plenty to look out for, and you need to stay focused in order to deliver your logs to their final destination (and keep your truck intact).

That's right, it's open world! You can chop down a whole forest, assuming you aren't killed by all the varying surfaces out there, varying when you least expect it. And you can tell they are proud of it too, because out of the 32 screenshots on the store page a grand total of two of them feature the first person mode.

You could do some military jobs!

  • Leave Papers, Please: Reviewing and processing leave forms (penalties for approving too many, or approving ones with errors)
  • Sweeping the same 50 square feet for an hour, making sure you look busy the whole time even though you've finished after 10 minutes.
  • Navigating a warship at night through a busy shipping lane, trying to keep your closest point of approach (CPA) greater than 2000 yards for every ship out there so you don't have to wake the Captain, whose standing orders require you to tell him if you're ever going to have a CPA under that.
  • Polishing your dress shoes
  • Mess crank: like Cooking Mama, but you have to cook 10x the quantity, some of the ingredients are rotten, and you can't tell the difference between tablespoons and teaspoons.
  • Leverage an LLM to determine how effective your speech is after telling your division not to get any DUIs over a holiday weekend. Additional levels could be to convince them not to buy a Dodge Charger at 26% APY, and not to send half your paycheck to the Filipino prostitute you met at the last port call.

Man, the one about keeping an eye on CPA was a huge part of my life for about three and a half years. We had a really thin standing orders binder, but the night orders always included the line about CPA and surface contacts.

It sure does stick with you. I haven't had to deal with that for over a decade but I still have strong feelings whenever I think about it.

Reminds me of this: https://www.theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-features-awaiting-o-1819594864

One of the best things the Onion ever did

sweeping the same 50 square feet for an hour

You’ve just reinvented MMOs.

Deep state employee

  • communicating with media companies to strengthen/suppress certain POVs
  • putting together intelligence operations with spooks to create material for above (ie surveillance, blackmail honeypots, piss dossier)
  • analyzing sentiment for important metrics (appreciation for LGBTQ+, racial animosity, officials that need to be bribed)
  • hiring and managing other deep state employees (funny questionnaires to weed out true believers, people too smart to be trusted, retain prospects with blackmailable but manageable flaws)
  • sim component (baby-eating/BDSM orgy/drugs/expensive racecars/virtue signaling... gauge to keep filled up)

I think this is called “The Shadow Government Simulator” on Steam.

I sometimes think that manual machining (lathe/mill) could be interesting as a game. Every time I watch machinists I'm impressed at the parts of the process that aren't in the blueprints: ensuring tolerances in the real world match design specifications requires a lot of attention to detail and order of operations that seems like it'd be a fun mental geometry puzzle.

There are many domains where hidden motives could make for a fun and educational experience.

  • College admissions. You have to craft a student body that maximizes the prestige of the university, using only policies that ostensibly achieve other more laudable goals.
  • Corporate hiring (similar to college admissions).
  • Sims but you're graded on your people's social status. Choices have to have plausible deniability. If your subject doesn't claim to find driving fun, you can't give them a Ferrari without a status penalty for being a phoney or nouveau riche. (I don't play The Sims so for all I know it already works this way.)

There is a lot of opportunity in well trodden game types to introduce new targets or mechanisms.

  • Urban planning. People are unhappy if they live close to much richer people and feel envious every day. You have to minimize the local Gini coefficient across the whole city. Using policies with plausible deniability of course.
  • Traffic design that minimizes envy and resentment. Different modes getting privileges (e.g. a lone bicyclist getting a green light ahead of 50 cars) makes people unhappy.

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