Changing places

In our latest dispatch examining the human stories behind the business and financial trends shaping America, we examine the strange allure of "blue-collar" video games. What do they tell us about the future?

Virtual jobs

One reason why video games are so fiendishly addictive is the escape they offer from the usual daily round. A couple of clicks, and you can immerse yourself in any one of thousands of fantasy worlds and become the omnipotent, glamorous, dare-devilish character you always dreamed of being in real life.

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But do we really want to go there? The surging popularity of "blue-collar" video games – which simulate the plodding discipline, monotony and occasional eureka moments of ordinary jobs – suggests that many people are opting for more homespun fantasies. You might, for instance, choose to puzzle the intricacies of crop rotation with Farming Simulator, or perfect your litter collection skills with Street Cleaning Simulator. This isn't niche stuff; it's a big bucks industry. When the latest version of Car Mechanic Simulator was released in April, it was a bestseller in its first week.

What's driving this unusual strand of "virtual job" gaming? Some put it down to the appeal of variety: these games are an antidote to a culture in which we specialise young and see our choices narrow as we age. Blue-collar games are also rewarding because they tend to repay diligence and hard work, which isn't always the case in real life. And many offer the average office wage slave an agreeable sense of rugged autonomy. "Be your own boss!" runs the blurb for Farm Mechanic Simulator 2015. "Do over 80 unique repairs... Prepare yourself for big adventures with big machines. It's better than reality!"

Back to the future

In actual fact, blue-collar games have been around for decades. Indeed, their golden age was arguably in the 1960s and 1970s when, as boardgamegeek.com notes, every local thrift shop stocked a pile of board games exploring different trades: from Timber, described by one aficionado as a "pretty accurate" depiction of life as a logger ("except for the part where all the players got rich at the end"); through Waterworks, which explored the tribulations of plumbers; to the oil-rigger fantasy Oil: The Great Adventure. A favourite for many Brits at the time was the London Cabbie Game, in which players drove through the twisting streets of the capital in search of fares, desperately hoping not to be penalised for going the wrong way round the Aldwych.

People often have fond memories of bonding with family and friends over board games. In the same way, after decades of research into the negative effects, psychologists are belatedly coming round to the view that video gaming isn't the harmful "lonerish" activity it's often painted as. On the contrary, in fact.

As the Dutch researcher Isabela Granic points out in an article in American Psychologist, that clichéd view ignores how much games have changed to become more complex, realistic and interactive in nature. Indeed, she contends that the new generation of more complex, realistic, social games actually boost mental health and well-being, particularly if they involve creativity. Two games often held up as the poster-children of positive gaming are Minecraft, a kind of digital version of Lego in which players construct imaginary worlds, and The Sims, in which you create characters who work and play with others online.

The "geekification" of society

At the heart of this shift is what The Times has dubbed "the geekification of society" – a world in which more and more people are playing (and watching others play) video games. All the stats point to this. Not only is the average gamer now just as likely to be female as male, but they're heading up the age range, too. In 2013, Variety reported that 57% of men aged between 45 and 64 played games; the figure for women (surprisingly, perhaps) was even higher.

Perhaps the most tangible sign of this trend is the rise of a new type of celebrity: the video gamer. A case in point is Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, a twentysomething Swede based in Brighton, England, whose Let's Play videos have notched up a massive 10 billion hits on YouTube. Kjellberg's 40 million-strong family of fans (he calls them his "bros") have made him a cult figure earning $7.4 million last year.

The robot revolution

If we are, as a society, increasingly immersing ourselves in the fantasy world of gaming, it may well stand us in good stead for the future. According to a scary new report by Bank of America Merrill Lynch into the likely effects of "the robot revolution", huge numbers of jobs face being wiped out by machines – up to 35% of all workers in Britain and 47% of those in the US.

If true, that has huge implications for the way we'll live. "I think our best hope going forward is figuring out how to live in an economy of radical abundance, where machines do all the work, and we basically play," noted Calum Chase, author of Surviving AI, in a recent interview. Imagine the nostalgia. It's probably just a matter of time before Weary Office Commuter Simulator becomes an international bestseller.