I’m talking more along the lines of, having simulator games where you work in a supermarket and you get to cause as much mayhem as possible. Not in terms of just simply killing, but more like, being a very disgruntled worker in a very annoyingly noisy environment with shitty customers. That game doesn’t exist to me and I wish it would.
Instead, we get more simulator games where you’re at the service of the people. That’s going backwards, if you ask me.
Also, I don’t remember asking for armchair psychologists to come here and start dropping unasked thoughts about how to best relieve stress. Check those at the door.
I feel like this is what people do with the multiplayer games where they are allowed to be mean to each other
Assassinations aside, Hitman has loads of ways to mess with people.
I want eat the rich the game
Technically the final level of Manhunt 1 counts.
Rich dude lets a criminal on death row on the loose in some “TV sets”, with orders to kill everyone in sight. When the criminal survives the series finale, he fights through the cops and the rich guy’s personal guard, and chops the rich guy to pieces with a chainsaw.
For the record, the science shows that Destruction Therapy is not effective at actually managing anger, and may actually cause more harm long term, as you’re normalizing that behavior in your brain.
But as for why we don’t see more games along those lines, I don’t know. It does seem like a genre that would sell well right now. I remember there was a series of desktop games when I was a kid called Stress Reducer that would give you a set of animated weapons to “destroy” your windows desktop (an image of it).
If you want to shoot Nazis and klan members there are Wolfenstein games.
I bought just for some cathartic relief. Unfortunately the first person camera jostled around too much and gave me too much motion sickness.
Damn. Really needed that.
Here is a cool video from a small time creator about why we don’t get Nazi-killing games anymore.
That’s what casual gaming is about.
I used to dig a large room with stone pickaxes in Minecraft. With “large” meaning I could not see the ends in the long direction.
We do have these, they’re just not super popular or are not intended to be played that way.
Like your first example of causing chaos in a shop? You can do that in Supermarket Simulator. It just isn’t what you’re meant to do unless you’re Josh from Let’s Game it Out. 🤷♂️
Untitled Goose Game is what you are looking for :)
That takes like an hour to beat.
Try Job Simulator on VR
I had similar idea a while ago but admittedly more political than mundane.
You’re a boss in your corporation. game’s objective is to be annoying and mess around with your worker. But somehow through your abuse you also have to keep your corporation alive financially.
It’s a mix of sandbox & tycoon. but the gameplay should be more sandboxed to really allow player create mess, and not very pressured by the goals created by the tycoon aspect.
Fuck the system before the system fucks you.
Love this concept.
Reminds me of why I like driving games so much. Sure it’s nice to be in the driver’s seat on a street or racetrack in a way where it feels like I’m really there taking a hairpin turn in Times Square without any personal risk.
But there’s nothing quite like doing literally what my mind can come up with in a game with arcade physics, keeping just enough realism to give feedback on collision damage without breaking immersion.
Untitled Goose Game?
Goat sim is better.
Shoo! Shoo away from my garden, bird!!! SHOO!
Because Postal already exists.
And postal 2, 3, and 4What’s Postal 3?
Was after Postal 2
No, it was be4 Postal 4.
Naw, thats a blank. Don’t remember that one.
Check out the Youtube channel Let’s Game It Out. Josh is very creative in finding ways to torment the NPCs of various simulator and tycoon games.
Came here to recommend LGIO too. Cracks me up, I’ve seen basically every video.
Some of the best stuff these days is actually on the unofficial youtube channel where they repost segments from the twitch streams, esp. when Josh collabs with other folks. There’s this UK streamer, Lollipop or something (I really need to look her up) and she might be even funnier than him. But they’re great together.
Anyway, the chaos is very cathartic for a longtime gamer.
My feeling, that I’ve learned after many years of doing it wrong, is that ‘taking out’ your stress with violent or aggressive acts, even virtual ones, isn’t a healthy way to deal with it. It reinforces it rather than releasing it. Calming exercises, deep breathing and letting stress go is a much more useful way to deal with it.
In that vein, I recommend Tiny Glade for stress relief. Or any so called ‘cosy’ game.
No, going to disagree here.
We’ve had this discussion many times over about what violent video games does with people. We’ve had it in the form of what the media decides to twist and falsely blame from the actions the individual does when there are other things at play.
Broken people are the ones who take the violence out from the digital realm of video games and apply it to real world. They are the ones who can’t manage their stress and anger levels regardless playing a game or handling a problem in person.
I’m not saying violent video games make you violent. I’m saying if you use those things, and it’s not just video games - punching a pillow, for example - as a way to deal with stress, then that’s going to become a habitual response to stressful situations.
