The same thought sprang into my head when I saw the cover of Street Cleaning Simulator. It is a brainworm of the kind you get when you attach a primary fact to something you know nothing else about: “You cost £40,000 a year!” announces my brain - the fact clicks into place like clockwork as soon as my senses detect the hissing contraption. She told me that fact, and now I end up thinking of it every time I see the street cleaning machine shuffle by.
She wrote a report on the local street-sweeping machines, which are exactly the same as the starter vehicle in Street Cleaning Simulator (there are two other big and better vehicles to upgrade to.) The article was about some aspect of street-cleaning deployment, but the only fact she actually came away with was that the tiny, oblong machine cost £40,000 a year to run. A few years ago a friend of mine was working for our local newspaper. Somehow this investigation was not a totally blank slate for me, either. But the idea that there was a simulation of something so obscure and so niche – let alone so unexciting – as Street Cleaning, really did intrigue me. I always take some time to play truck simulators, or crane simulators, farming simulators, or whatever else the simulation industry throws out. There's also some genuine curiosity folded into this particular simulator. The received wisdom that “games are (or must be) fun” has always struck me as a little empty, and when boring simulator games come along and are not fun – and are consequently enormous fun – I have always been unreasonably pleased with the paradox. I've already described it as perverse, and in some ways it is: I am not genuinely interested in the simulation, so much as the fact of a videogamelike experience that is not actually trying to be fun. The existence of banal, municipal or commercial activity simulators delights me in a way that I often struggle to articulate. Read on to find out how I got on with that. It's the kind of non-challenge I relish, and I gleefully set about compiling a diary of the events – or lack thereof – in the life of a simulatory street-cleaner. I knew that it would be deeply boring - it really is – and that I would have to play it extensively for no reason other than to take joy in being quite deliberately boring. Discovering that this game existed was a moment of perverse joy for me.
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