I enjoy job simulator type games and really like the aspect of decorating and taking something and improving it. I’m a sucker for visual progress and I’m comfortable with physical labor in real life, so why can I only do it in games and structured activities?
Because modern life is utterly exhausting and humiliating in a million different ways. Your body knows that and isn’t that interested in gambling a bunch of mental and physical energy on projects that don’t directly help you feel rested and prepared for the next dumb bs you have to deal with. The thing about a video game is there isn’t that risk, there isn’t the blowback either from negative feelings around failure to complete the task or direct real world consequences.
Video games fundamentally are about rewriting the conditions through which we are forced to have a conversation with the environment around us. They allow us to remake our relationship with ideas, projects and other humans into healthier ones that elevate our quality of life. Video games are gifts of agency that serve as sanity checks on how healthy our real world environments actually are.
Understandable, consequences of my actions are pretty demotivating. It does seem easier to blow money on a lamp in a game then decide it doesn’t fit what I was going for anyways than it is to buy anything that doesn’t directly aid my survival. Fear and financial instabilities are probably some big motivators to inactivity, at least for me.
Absolutely, the best response to most real world dangers is often to do nothing, keep your head down and conserve resources both for a prehistoric human and a modern day human. Doing nothing is a lot of times far better than doing something strictly from a survival standpoint. It totally makes sense that our bodies would be wired to react to fear and financial instability this way, but obviously after a certain point this rational defense mechanism can hurt us.