There is a goat rampaging through a city. Its tongue is lolling out of its mouth, giving it an unhinged appearance, and it’s destroying everything it comes across, headbutting people, cars, walls, fences and lampposts. It’s so out of control that it has even managed to attach a rocket launcher to its back and is firing missiles at buildings. The goat is chaos manifest. The goat is a fantasy. The goat is you. You are the goat.

This is the world of Goat Simulator, one of the wildest video games ever released. Developed by Swedish studio Coffee Stain, the game was initially envisaged as a joke, but quickly became a runaway success, selling millions of copies and spawning a sequel, Goat Simulator 3 (there is, at this time, no Goat Simulator 2).

But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum – the 2010s were filled with strange, unusual and niche simulators. There was Surgeon Simulator, a gory and notoriously difficult game where you performed surgeries on people. Granny Simulator allowed you to play out the daily life of an elderly woman. And Rock Simulator placed you in the heart of mother nature, allowing players to become “what you have always imagined, a rock with no responsibilities, no debt, and no worries”.

Now, in 2023, there are countless niche and absurd simulators, including some, like PowerWash Simulator, that are even published by AAA studios like Square Enix. Dive into the Steam store and you’ll find a simulator for pretty much everything.

Still, many of these games are often shrugged off as mindless fun and dismissed as “YouTube-bait”. People say they’re designed specifically with viral marketing in mind so that they’ll be streamed by popular content creators for the lolz.

However, some, like Bossa Studio’s Surgeon Simulator, weren’t. Neither, allegedly, was their follow-up, 2014’s I Am Bread, where you play as a slice of bread. “At the end of the day your game has to be good,” Bossa game designer Luke Williams told Eurogamer. “You can’t go, ‘I’m going to make this game for YouTube’. You have to be like, ‘how am I going to make a good, interesting and unique game?’”

That was a question that British game developer Auroch Digital considered while they were developing Brewmaster: Beer Brewing Simulator. “Simulation games can be some of the most mechanically deep games available, and I think mucking about with systems and how they interact is often a huge driver of interest,” explains Peter Willington, Production Director at Auroch and the lead producer on Brewmaster. “It’s about understanding what your specific audience wants.”

In the case of Brewmaster, which allows plays to fulfil the fantasy of craft brewing your own beers, accuracy was key, with the developer partnering with a local craft beer company so that they could “understand more about the science and culture of brewing and ensure it felt authentic” in the game. “We knew that we couldn’t ‘fake it’ – craft beer and homebrewing fans know their hobby too well to pull the wool over their eyes,” adds Willington.

Of course, as games like Goat Simulator prove, not everyone wants to play something that mimics real life. Szymon Przybyszewski is a producer and designer at Polish-based publisher Frozen District, who have released a number of sims including House Flipper, a popular home improvement simulator that turns the player into “a one-man renovation crew”. For him, the fun factor is more important than being true to life.

“We won’t get players engaged when we include tedious and time-consuming gameplay,” he says. “We need to balance the difficulty and task complexity to provide the satisfaction the player gets for their action and the good feeling from the final result.”

Przybyszewski, Willington and Crow all feel the success of simulators like House Flipper and Brewmaster stems, in part, because they are relaxing. “Simulators are often very methodical or require a deal of patience, which slows their pace right down,” says Willington. “Loads of games are great at being intense, but sometimes you just want to chill the fuck out.”

Nevertheless, there are simulators that incorporate the more menial aspects of day-to-day life. Some, such as farming simulator Stardew Valley and life sim Animal Crossing, are infamous for humdrum tasks, while a game like My Summer Car, in which you play as a teenager building their first car, have tedium built into the gameplay.

“The mundane realism of the simulator helps it more readily bleed back into our daily lives,” suggests Robert Yang, an artist and the developer behind a number of queer simulators such as Hard Lads, “a British masculinity simulator” based on the viral video ‘British Lads Hit Each Other With Chair’, and The Tea Room, a sex simulator about cottaging and police surveillance. “Playing a train simulator or a flight simulator becomes a very relatable experience. Meanwhile, if you feel that something like Call of Duty is directly relevant to your life, then you might need to go to therapy.”

For Yang, the point of simulators is finding the joy in mundane things. “If a menial task lets me embody a role or a fantasy, then it becomes a performance,” he says. But also “simulators are trying to understand the other 99 per cent of human experience that doesn’t involve shooting people”.

“Simulators are often very methodical or require a deal of patience, which slows their pace right down... Loads of games are great at being intense, but sometimes you just want to chill the fuck out” – Peter Willington

Of course, the empathic response someone has to a video game is difficult to gauge. “With any type of media, the best we can hope for is that someone engages with it, resonates with it and then is inspired to go away and do more reading or thinking,” says Christopher Leech, a gamer, podcast host and PhD student at Edge Hill University whose research focuses on video games and mental health. “I would say that to experience something else generally, if you as a person have the ability to engage with that in an empathetic way, you might be able to gain some understanding of it.”

Does that mean that playing as a rock or a chaotic goat means that you’ll suddenly gain experiential multitudes and start acting like that? Perhaps not. “Final Fantasy VII is one of my favourite games and you play as an eco-terrorist. Am I also anti-establishment? Yes, because I’m from Liverpool. But have I also played games like Theme Hospital where I manage a hospital for money? Yes. Does that make me a ruthless capitalist? No,” says Leech.

Looking at the popularity of Goat Simulator, House Flipper and the wildly successful Euro Truck series, where you play as a trucker delivering important cargo, the niche simulator isn’t going anywhere – and people will keep on playing them. “People want to experience things that they can't otherwise experience,” adds Leech. “I love Islands and Trains because I love feeling like Bob Ross building a happy little island, putting a steam train on it and watching it go choo choo. It fills my heart with joy. So if being a rock and watching the sun go down makes you happy, that’s great. Do that.”

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