For much of the past few weeks, I have been cleaning. It’s got to the point where it is very difficult not to clean, and even harder to see things dirty. I’ve undertaken these chores in PowerWash Simulator, a video game, exactly what it sounds like, released in 2022 by the small British studio FuturLab.
The game presents the panoramic perspective of a first-person shooter, a sort of Dirty Doom or Caked Quake. But here there is no one to shoot. In fact, there is no one at all, not even my reflection is visible in freshly cleaned glass. I am only my Prime Vista 3000 water-spraying washing machine with, say, 15-degree nozzle, jutting out as my sole appendage. All there is otherwise is dirt on surfaces.
“The game is very unusual,” Dan Chequer, the studio’s design director, told me. “It’s the noun and the verb — you powerwash and you’re a powerwasher.”
As a noun, I’ve verbed the increasingly vast and grimy surfaces of, to name just a few, a van, firetruck, fire station, garden, bungalow, mansion, carousel, Ferris wheel, fishing vessel, ancient monument and UFO. I spent the most hours cleaning a subway station, down to the adverts, maps, air vents, cables and rails. Individually cleaned parts give a satisfying ding, which I now nearly hear in my sleep.
On the face of it, the game, and the real activity it resembles, is incredibly mundane. But my evenings are defined by these dings and the quest for another. As I clean, therefore I ponder a sort of metagame: why can’t I stop cleaning fake dirt off fake objects?
For one, the game is essentially meditative. The repeated left-right swish of the nozzle across a surface is like purposeful breathing, and shining surfaces are like examined thoughts. The transition from dirty to gleaming is remarkably aesthetically pleasing, of course, as is the slow reveal of what lies underneath — this phenomenon has also spawned a genre of YouTube videos and Instagram accounts dedicated to this particular satisfaction. As after a meditation session, you emerge from a powerwashing jag, or a powerwashing-viewing jag, in a pleasant, mild daze. Chequer points out that the game is deeply technical, with its constant double-joystick action and button-pressing. “All that subconscious stuff you’re doing frees your conscious brain to think about other things,” he said.
But PowerWash Simulator is also an important antidote to the poisonous “summarise” and “autocomplete” ethos that drives so much modern, generative “artificially intelligent” technology, and which pollutes our experience with machines today. I couldn’t email Chequer, and you possibly can’t read this article, without a company offering up an unsolicited “summary” of the same. Powerwashing, however, and the simulation thereof, is an inherently completist act. Something is clean or it’s not. You can’t move on to the mansion unless the bungalow is dirtless.
PowerWash Simulator offers a number of dirty objects in question, and all of their literal facets. There is no such thing as summarisation. Each aspect must be cleaned, and from every angle. Just before this magazine went to press, I cleaned the final object of the main campaign: a glowing “pyramidion gem” on top of an island temple (things get slightly strange). Thankfully, PowerWash Simulator 2 is due out later this year.
PowerWash Simulator is not the only ponderous game that serves as antivenom to the AI summarisation plague. My twin game obsession this summer has been contract bridge.
Wildly popular in the mid-century, bridge has since been dying. The simplest explanation for why is its infamously steep learning curve, which includes arcane rules combined with the intertwined and nested conventions of a bidding system, in my case Standard American Yellow Card. (“Opposite an unpassed partner, an opening 3- or 4-level call in a suit tends towards sound at equal or unfavorable vulnerability,” reads its official booklet, and it goes on like that for many pages.)
But within the difficulty lies the appeal. As with powerwashing, there are no shortcuts in bridge, no useful summary of a bidding system or the state of the cards that have been played during a hand. To play well, you must remember every contingency of your system and every card played. As a result, there are no bridge prodigies. The game relies instead on deep experience — anti-summary.
The next stop on my ponderous tour might be one of the so-called 18XX board games that simulate the 19th-century railroad business. If they are well known, it is precisely because they are so complex and time-consuming. I find the videos describing this complexity itself remarkably comforting, despite the fact that I barely understand them.
The late philosopher Bernard Suits, perhaps the one true philosopher of games, argued that games are necessary for “utopia”. One day in the future, he suspected, when all the material needs of humankind are met by advancing technology, games will be all that matter, and so their cultivation now (the 1970s, in his case) is crucial.
Suits’ hero is the grasshopper of Aesop’s fable. Unlike the industrious ant, who spends all his time stockpiling food for the winter, the grasshopper spends his days at play. Aesop intended the grasshopper as a cautionary figure. Suits sees him as a role model.
I would augment Suits’ argument. Often video games simulate the impractical — space combat, civilisation building, monster collection. But to fight the algorithmic urge to summarise, we must engage in ponderous games — completist pursuits that reconnect us to that which we might do in the real world, and that which we don’t understand but can learn, beyond the false précis of large language models.
It doesn’t take much. Chequer rated the fidelity of his game’s cleaning at an “eightish” out of 10, and the realism of the things being cleaned at a four. PowerWash Simulator is not “a simulation about powerwashing — it’s more a dreamlike state of it”, Chequer said. “But it feels kind of authentic in the moment.”
Oliver Roeder is the FT’s US senior data journalist and author of “Seven Games: A Human History” (WW Norton)
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