The Patreon Letter - 30th June, 2018 (Patreon)

Hello friends, it's time for another letter. The doldrums of summer are throwing me into a deep emotional and mental malaise. I'm deeply unsuited to the hot weather and the promise of years to come with winter becoming more of a technicality than a season has me in a way. Will I ever be cold again? This is the thought I cannot let go of when summer feels like an actual furnace. I just want to hunker down and survive the season, which means I'm back in a game playing mood.

So let's talk about House Flipper. 

I had some trepidation about picking up House Flipper initially. I have to admit a certain bias against the shoestring simulator games that proliferate on PC. I don't dislike them, but they are legion and I generally don't like to spend money on games I think I'd play for two hours as a laugh and then never boot again. These often seem like fodder for the big streamers and youtubers of the world, an idea that you can hang a short view series off of which will translate into some quick and easy sales before everyone forgets the whole thing ever existed until someone makes a years-too-late port for Switch or something. 

Goat simulator, shame on you.

Maybe I'm just especially myopic and old fashioned about such things. I suspect I'm cynical beyond what such games deserve because lord knows I've spent money on games I've enjoyed less than people enjoy these sorts of simulators. So when House Flipper kept coming up and I kept thinking about it I decided to actually take advantage of the Steam sale (don't support Steam, I know, I just did, but let's try not to when we can!)

House Flipper is a Fine Game. The cleaning is all right, a nice chill thing to do while listening to podcasts or catching up on a show. The decorating is decent, though there's a real dearth of items. But it's really clarified what I want out of a very specific type of game via how I've felt about the last six months.

If you've been following my life, you know this year I took over our apartment after my father's death. Part of that meant throwing out so much of his stuff and reorganizing to have a living space that was 'ours' and suited us. This meant buying so many things for the house—new pans, rugs, throw pillows, wall art, and so very many bookshelves. This is a surprisingly fun thing to do right up until you look at the bill for any of these things. I feel so so about the teal carpet we have for the living room, but I feel very glad it only cost us $70 when most of the carpets we were looking at were $150. 

The's that joke about The Sims is the perfect escapist fantasy because it's about millennials being able to afford to own and furnish a house. This is one of those painful jokes you laugh at because the other option is to cry forever and stick your head in the oven. Desiring to live, and have shelter, means settling for scraping by on cheap goods and hand me downs, thinking really hard about what kind of housewares you can afford to skimp on in the face of destitution. 

Being able to decorate houses with little to no resistance for money has an obvious appeal.

There are many house decorating games. Animal Crossing finds us with a distilled version of this in the much-maligned-but-actually incredible Happy Home Designer. Stardew Valley and the GBA Pokemon games both leaned into house decorations as a side activity, allowing you to collect props to place in your home around doing the 7000 other things you should be doing in the game. Minecraft created an entire suggestive aesthetic to representing domestic objects through meter-wide blocks, turning us all into abstract artists. And The Sims, of course, looms large over all of this. I should definitely get into The Sims soon.

All of this fulfills a basic need to make and maintain a home without all of the grief and cost and work in doing so. Our kitchen could stand a mopping but in House Flipper it takes three seconds of holding down the mop and it's done. I should probably take that workbench in my father's old room out to the dumpster, but my back already hurts from living and moving furniture is hard! What if I could just point a price gun at it and sell it back for whatever it's worth? Heaven.

These are the dreams of our modern capitalist hellscape. What if I could afford to have a kitchen that didn't depress me? What if it was easy to just install a new sink, instead of having the landlord do it three weeks after I bug them about how we need it? They are simple pleasures, and maybe a bit sad when we think about how we turn to games to offer us that relief. But also what does it say that we judge our desire for efficient and effortless home management in video games when we rarely judge what satisfies us in Destiny or Dark Souls? 

House Flipper isn't the best game in the world. I wish it had more objects. I wish I could build a house from scratch. I wish it had spent a little more time researching American houses, because I've installed more room radiators in the game than I have ever seen in my entire life. But it also is a pleasant, repetitive, safely fulfilling way to nest while I unwind from a long day. It's easy to discount the power of that, but it's very important to remind ourselves that what restores us is good because it restores us, no matter what it is or the strange cultural baggage around it. 

If that's a small, janky European house cleaning sim? So be it. I'll paint more rooms hideous colors and install another towel radiator (what even is this?!?) and dream of a world where these things are possible. 

Because it sure isn't this one.

- Em