Can we make washing the dishes less boring?

A C ERTAIN POINT OF V IEW

As I scrubbed away at dishes that I definitely left too long without giving them the proper attention that they so clearly needed, I boredly wondered if there was any way to improve the experience. The chore of doing the dishes is disliked by both myself and my wife, and there are probably a few others out there that share the sentiment. A thought jumped into my head as I pondered this. There exists an entire genre of entertainment that turns what is normally seen as chores into something that people willingly choose to do, and apparently find fun. Simulation video games.

Oh yes. There is an endless stream of these games that take the seemingly mundane and turn it into an interactive entertainment experience. Some put you in professions like driving an eighteen-wheeler through Europe, setting up a farm in the middle of the most generic countryside one could imagine, or running a grocery store that definitely does not reuse the same five models for your customers over and over. Others will take even more ordinary things like mowing the lawn or power washing buildings and gamify them. Some will just have you watch over your digital people as they do the laundry, wash dishes, pay their bills and all the other chores that you probably should be doing in real life in a video game.

Just from this very surface level description, it seems unlikely that a genre of games focused on doing things that people are likely playing games to avoid would be very popular. But these games actually have quite a following, with titles such as The Sims and Farming Simulator selling millions of copies worldwide.

But how do they do it? How do they take things that people find boring in real life and turn them into an activity that people will not only willingly do, but pay money for the ability to continue to do it for hours on end?

I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but I think that there is an aspect to the activities in these games that turn what normally is difficult to see, or perhaps non-existent, in their real life counterparts. That aspect is progress.

Most of these games have achievable goals that the game either sets for you or that you can easily set for yourself. You have something to work towards, something that you know that if you put in enough time and effort that you are more than likely going to achieve. This gives your seemingly mundane actions a purpose behind them and thus makes doing them much more fun. If you know that if you mow enough lawns that you can earn enough money to buy the best lawn mower available and become the greatest lawn mowing business of all time, it makes the actual act of mowing the lawn easier. And because it’s a game, you know that it is possible…it’s part of the game, after all.

But in real life, such goals either don’t exist or are more difficult to see. There is no progress bar in real life, no check list that tells you that if you do the dishes 10 more times you’ll be rewarded with something. Even if some of these tasks have goals, there is no guarantee that even if you put in a ton of time and effort that you can reach them. I can wash the dishes 10,000 times, but all I will likely ever get out of it is just that my dishes are no longer dirty, which, while very necessary and preferable, is not very exciting. The fact that you know that there will always be more dishes only makes things worse.

So, is there a way to “gamify” real life chores? Probably. Apps like Duolingo have done similar things with learning a language, so I’m sure that there is some way to apply the idea to other tasks. But I’m not smart enough to figure out how, so until someone makes the cool dishwashing app that tracks all your great dishwashing achievements, I guess I’ll just have to muddle through it as normal.

NATHANIEL U NDERWOOD REPORTER

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