Ex- Bioshock Developers Are Making A Game Inspired By Arabian Nights. Uppercut Games, the Australian studio founded by a trio of former 2. K developers, is taking players to a mysterious new domain in City of Brass, a first- person “rogue- lite” based on famous tales from Middle Eastern folklore. Coming to PC this fall and consoles in 2.

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City of Brass casts players as a thief attempting to reach the heart of the legendary city and the treasure it contains. The thief, armed with a whip and a blade, uses these tools creatively to navigate the ever- changing cityscape.

Rather than simply hacking things to bits, players are encouraged to kill creatively, using their weapons to trip and manipulate enemies into deadly traps. There’s whipping, swinging, jumping, climbing—it almost sounds like a first- person Prince of Persia with a little Castlevania on the side. Uppercut calls the game a rogue- lite as it features permadeath. Should the player stumble in their journey to the heart of the city, they start over with a new procedurally generated city, using what they learned in their previous life to get closer and closer to the prize. Check out the official City of Brass website for more info.

Games That Simulate Boring Jobs. It is as if you were doing work, a new browser game by impish developer Pippin Barr, simulates puttering around inside Windows 9. Depending on your real job, it’s a relaxing desktop toy or a horrifying parody of your waking life. It’s a fine example of the overlooked (and previously unnamed) gaming genre of officecore. While many games explore exciting professions like pilot, city planner, or hitman, officecore focuses on the drudgery of a desk job. The job’s details are usually generic, its fictional results obscured to heighten the potential relatability.

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While the average gamer will never slaughter demons or conquer France, they will probably spend some time, maybe all their time, working at a desk, so here’s a chance to help them reinterpret a familiar environment. As a player, you might use officecore to work out your workplace frustrations. You might find it useful for discreetly passing the time at a dead- end job.

Or you might even learn something about yourself and realize you’re approaching your career all wrong. If the idea of playing a game that looks like your day job is off- putting, that already tells you something. Whatever your chosen profession, we all have something in common: We're trying to do the best.

Desktop sims turn the computing environment into a puzzle or arcade game; office sims explore the workplace as a weaponless first- person shooter, RPG, or adventure; and corporate sims work like top- down simulations such as Sim. City or Roller Coaster Tycoon. Each provides a different commentary on the modern white- collar workplace.

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Desktop Simulation Games. Desktop sims imitate a typical computer interface, with a varying degree of verisimilitude. While in almost any other desktop game, the player’s inputs correspond to some fictional or metaphorical outputs, here they map quite directly; clicking a fictional dialog box is no different than clicking a real one. A desktop simulation’s unique relationship to the surrounding computing environment lets it play with the boundaries and directly provoke the player. It is as if you were doing work.

Despite its retro design, It is as if you were doing work takes place in a post- labor world of “9. Randomized dialog prompts and document headings describe futuristic technologies like biofuels, tricorders, and gene doping, while the documents you “type” give self- help advice.

Stock photos of office work pop up, with headers like “There is joy in work” and “No one ever drowned in sweat.”You are constantly validated and “promoted” for your simple tasks. You feel the condescension from whatever computer handed you this “work,” and you realize you’re neither important nor useful. The only real change you can effect is choosing from four desktop wallpapers and four background MIDI tracks. It’s an interesting preview of a future (and a present) where human work is mere decoration around automated labor. Can’t You See I’m Busy! While many games can be discreetly played inside a real copy of Excel, the 8- year- old game suite Can’t You See I’m Busy! Breakdown is a Breakaway clone inside a Word doc; Leadership is Helicopter inside a line graph.

Crash Planning is a Bejeweled knockoff disguised as a calendar; Cost Cutter is a quirky tile matcher inside an animated bar chart. The idea is that you can play these games at the office without anyone noticing; there’s even a “boss button” to hide the most egregious game elements. The ruse is a bit thin, especially now that the fake software looks ancient. So the faux desktop interface is more stylistic than practical, and it emphasizes the relative monotony of the games themselves. To open a game, you click a button that oscillates between “start game” and “start work,” a winking gesture that feels sadder each time it loops.

These games are designed to make time pass. To play them is to admit that you don’t even need to be entertained, just distracted. To play them is to admit you are wasting your life. The whole genre of games that look like work share a muddy boundary with work that looks like games, a manifestation of crumbling work- life balance and the rise of social networking, the ultimate grey area between work and pleasure. The desktop sim genre has stagnated in the past few years, maybe because the office drone found a better time waster in social media.

There are spreadsheet interfaces for hiding your Twitter and Facebook use, but this isn’t even necessary in the growing number of jobs that include social media management. When work is play and play is work, neither are very satisfying. Looking busy has a bad rap. Sometimes you have to look busy so you can actually work on the things. While the player might advance up the ranks, gameplay never shifts into the top- down style of a god game or a Sim. City. The most common format is first- person. Disable Windows 7 Explorer Auto Arrange Icons. Most tabletop officecore games also play out on this level, focusing on interaction between characters.

The Stanley Parable. The Stanley Parable is a video game about video games, but it’s also about exercising free will and challenging the limitations we unconsciously accept. Before it spirals into Matrix- like ontological absurdism, the game opens in a mundane office, depicting a mundane job. The later game’s mechanics, and even much of its message, could have been mapped onto all kinds of settings. But the modern office ties strongly into those free- will themes.

To imply authority and obedience, the game could have started in a prison or a mental institution, but the office environment projects the same qualities with a subtler horror. It also turns The Stanley Parable into a power fantasy. When Stanley disobeys the narrator, he’s like Office Space’s Peter Gibbons ignoring Lumbergh and dismantling his cubicle. Every office drone has wanted to reject the system like this. Job Simulator (Office Worker level)2. VR game Job Simulator also takes place in a computer- automated post- job world, where museum- goers try out extinct occupations like auto mechanic, gourmet chef, store clerk, and office worker.

The office level particularly highlights the disassociation between workday and product. As a chef, your job is to make a pizza; as an office worker, you have to “make job happen.” As at so many real office jobs, tasks like drinking coffee and chatting up co- workers are as important as doing any actual work. Job Simulator is a fumblecore game where half the fun is struggling with awkward controls. The incompetent feeling of this interface is reinforced by a tutorial bot that treats office rituals like exotic local customs, and who suggests you use “an ancient human technique called . Comfortingly, the robots seem to be just as clueless as you are about how business works, and they congratulate you for banging on your two- button keyboard or assembling a dadaist Power. Dot deck. You can’t really fail at this job. Payroll. Payroll is a first- person adventure game set in a 9.

While one playthrough takes just 2. There’s no heavy satire here, no frame story or fourth wall to step behind. Your goals are typical work goals. You can get fired, or you can do your job and earn retirement. For an office sim, it’s optimistic and peaceful. The bitterest this game gets is a charmingly dreary simulation of an office birthday party. Generic Office Roleplay.

The Generic Office Roleplay Facebook group is more of a sandbox than a game. Australian teen Thomas Oscar created it in 2. Oscar shut out unfunny ideas, striving for realism, rejecting friends who all wanted to play as janitors. Like any good DM, Oscar set boundaries around the roleplaying. But as discussed on Reply All, newer players got much sillier, replacing all the subtle jokes about fonts and social tension with goofs about iguana invasions and golden staplers. Years later, the current content is mostly middling, but this is still a fun destination for casuals. Synergon. Serious office roleplayers should consider Synergon, a loose RPG system presented satirically as a LARP, or live action roleplay.