In my gaming hours this week, I could have been slaying dragons, shooting Nazis or building a sprawling criminal empire. Instead, I was stacking shelves and checking price tags in a kind of pixelated Poundland. This is the bread and butter of Discounty, in which you travel to a rural town to help your crotchety aunt achieve her dream of running a budget supermarket.
On my first day in the job, I was hit by déjà vu. The past five years have brought a flood of retail simulation games, and I’ve played a lot of them: Supermarket Simulator, Internet Cafe Simulator, Cat Cafe Manager, Weed Shop 3. These days I can manage stock inventories, dispatch tricky customers and cash up the till like a grizzled shop-floor veteran.
You might think it doesn’t sound like much fun. What’s the allure of such games? Why, after a long day of real work, would anyone want to clock in for a shift working for a virtual boss?