So I was rather surprised to find myself hooked on a game I’ve been playing for the past  couple of months: Car Mechanic Simulator 2021. It’s on Steam, and it’s one of those games I can in fact play on Linux. Basically you start out with a small garage, you do jobs, earn money, expand, and eventually you start doing things like buying cars, fixing and tuning them and then sell those cars for big profits.

So, great. It’s a video game that’s essentially a watered-down version of… a job. It’s a game sector that’s enjoyed considerable expansion in recent years, basically simulations of common place jobs. The biggest one of these is probably Farmer Simulator, but there are lots around covering everything from driving a bus to lawnmowing and even power-washing (!). They’re usually based on the template that you’re an entrepreneur starting a new service, and you grind your way to making that business a success.

Well, I’ve found that on several occasions by the time I shut down the game I look outside and the sun is coming back up. It’s very addictive — it seems to scratch an itch I haven’t had in a long time — the love of work.

If you asked me if it’s normal to want to work, my instinct is usually to say no. There are so many other ways to occupy one’s time! and yet I find myself constantly telling myself “ok, let’s renovate one more” whenever I play the game. So clearly I can take pleasure in work, in doing repetitive things for “credits” (which in this case do not convert to actual money, sadly.

In a way I’m reminded of a previous job I had as senior technical writer at Actional. I knew my stuff. It was in 2011-2012 and I was working mostly from home. I remember putting in work sometimes until 4am near release time as we had to produce docs for last-minute additions and make sure the online help worked correctly… then the test-and-repeat cycle.

Thing is, I didn’t mind doing this. To me this was part of the job. I and our other writer were producing the documentation, and my job was now to make sure everything worked, and I just did it, even if I was tired. That was work, but it was rewarding work.

And then it was all for nothing as in 2013 the company was sold to a VC firm that stripped everything down, getting rid of me and the other writer — as well as a bunch of other employees — and then, well, that lead to a bunch of other events in my life. And then I could never quite be coaxed into the idea that work (as a concept) was a positive thing, because the moment this started happening for me, the rug was pulled from under my feet like that and I ended up with nothing. I have no idea whether Actional is even a thing anymore, it’s at that level.

So, what makes this silly little sim game seem like what was really the most satisfying work experience in my life? Well, it’s the underlying “meta-mechanics” of the game. This is my “garage”. When I grind I earn credits. And also in-game achievements (I got all 46 of them). There was a progression. More work earns more money.

This is the way work is supposed to work.

So, this is not a very realistic representation of work. I mean, this is a computer simulation of manual work so there’s an obvious limit there. I don’t have to wash the grease from under my fingernails after playing, and I did start with a non-negligible sum of money by default, which starts you out on a fairly easy path. But the point remains. Hard work can be fun as long as it keeps being rewarded. Maybe it would be more realistic if, periodically — say, every year or so — a tornado ripped the whole garage out of the ground, a bit like the tech industry’s yearly spring wave of layoffs, and landed you there with zero credits, zero achievements, and no real way forward.

Which is kind of how I feel right now as someone who’s unemployed in the tech field despite 25+ years of technical documentation experience. And certainly this little note can help explain why I’m playing a mechanic in the first place. Right now I have a lot of time and nothing to do. I want to work hard and earn. But through a mix of job eliminations due to the promise (and not current capabilities) of AI, plus the glut of tens of thousands of tech workers having been recently laid off, it’s extremely difficult to find any job right now. And even if I do find something, how long before the company just “reorganizes” and lays me off as an employee with very little seniority? When is the next rug-pull coming?

So, that’s how it is. Sadly even my enjoyment of this game can best be seen as something driven by negative events and trends. It’s possible to enjoy work, and I have in the past, but it’s not something I’m likely to experience again in my life. And that’s pretty depressing.

What happens in Portal 2 is that a time warp takes place. And it doesn’t take place before Chell gets woken up in The Courtesy Call, it takes place when Wheatley is in charge.

The biggest hint in the game is an obscure achievement called “Ship Overboard”, which is a kind of companion to the “Door Prize” achievement. In Ship Overboard you stumble on a dry dock which is rather oddly located in a salt mine, with a rescue buoy from the ship BOREALIS. This is a reference to Half-Life episode 2 where the Borealis, which bears an Aperture Science banner, and her dry dock go missing. But this is the HL2 timeline, and that takes place some time in the future. So why does the dry dock turn up in the Aperture experiments facility that was built in the 1970s?..

There’s an even better question, though. How did it come to pass that Aperture had scientific testing facilities as far back as the 1950s? If you look at the “official” Aperture Science wiki it states that AS was just a shower curtain company from its foundation in 1953 to Cave Johnson’s death in 1976 (that’s also problematic if you’ve played through the game, but bear with me) and only gets into science at all in the 1980s. Yet in the 1950s test chambers there’s a trophy room touting science awards that Aperture Science Innovators (as they were known then) has won in the 40s and 50s. So clearly something has changed there.

This is also obvious when you consider that in the beginning of the game, through the ruined test chambers, you never see anything about the repulsion, propulsion and portal gels, but they’re a big part of the ending of the game which takes place in the same day as the beginning of the game.

It also goes some ways towards explaining exactly why someone would build a science facility in a closed salt mine in the first place. After you reach the bottom of the mine you have to wonder why and especially how such gargantuan and technically complicated buildings could possibly be built 3 miles underground. Not to mention how a shower curtain company manages to attract test subjects who are also astronauts, war heroes and olympians.

Another hint comes very early in the 1950s testing phase of the game, where you’re informed that you need the portal device in order to complete the test. This was supposedly not invented until the 1980s! And the propulsion and repulsion gels were not invented until the late 1990s, but they show up in the 1950s and 1970s test chambers! And the 1950s chambers were condemned (“vitrified”) back in 1961 (read the signs, folks!). Also the reason stated for the vitrifying of the facilities is cosmic ray contamination, which seems unlikely in a facility that’s 3 miles underground. Unless of course there is some sort of a portal device involved…

There’s clearly a time warp that occurs somewhere and changes the in-game reality. It’s not just the gel or the portal technology, but the “current” Aperture Science facility also becomes hugely more vast than was hinted at in the first Portal game. By orders of magnitude.

As for Cave Johnson, in the first Portal timeline (from the wiki posted above) he dies in 1976 of mercury poisoning, but now he’s made prerecorded messages for chambers that were only built in the 1980s.

One may well then ask, “if Aperture Science had all this technology in the 40s or 50s why didn’t they deploy it all then?” Indeed the gameplay is structured so that the 1950s introduce the repulsion gel, the 70s introduce the propulsion gel, and the portal-surface-making gel shows up in the 80s. Some of that new technology was obviously released then, that’s how ASI was able to fund their fantastically immense facilities, but you have to keep in mind that ASI is not a very good science company — they build giant spheres of asbestos to conduct tests in, test products without knowing what elements they contain (“it’s a lively one and it does not like the human skeleton”) and “throw science at a wall to see what sticks”.  It took them some time to figure out how to replicate the propulsion gel, and their early experiments in gathering moon rocks — a necessary ingredient for the portal-surface-making gel — led to the cosmic ray contamination that caused the shutdown of their 50s facility. They only managed it in the early 80s, with bad consequences for Cave Johnson and his “why not” approach to scientific experimentation.

So, for those of us who think that the Portal 2 game was rather short, this seems to offer the answer that the game is, in fact, not over and that there is more to come. There might be more use for a stalemate associate yet. The game is such a mindfuck it’s brilliant.