You literally just drive your truck around. It is, simply and with no garnish, a game about being a truck driver.
I wouldn’t even say that the driving is particularly great in Euro Truck Simulator 2 it’s by no means bad, but there’s no damage modeling or top notch driving physics. There’s no clever mechanic like Spintires’ realistic mud physics to fool anyone into thinking that the game’s not really about working a job. For Euro Truck Simulator 2, the hook of doing work, in this case driving all over Europe dropping off various cargo for cash, is far purer than in Spintires. It came out of nowhere in 2012 to big time critical and commercial success.
The same worker’s eye level experience is also available in the other big labor simulation, Euro Truck Simulator 2. There’s something tense about hauling freight at the level of the worker, as opposed to that of management or “god”. A colleague referred to the game as “stressful”, and it is, after a fashion. You drive your truck to go pick up logs, which you take back to a camp for drop-off. Underpinning the muck and dirt of Spintires, and absent from most of the writing on the game, is the simple premise that you’re working. And make no mistake, the mud and rocks are really impressive. Its primary selling point is its realistic mud physics, meant to provide a new challenge to fans of driving games. In it, players drive old Soviet era work vehicles around expansive, dark forests. Witness the sudden success of Spintires, which recently topped the Steam charts as a new, undiscounted game just prior to the Steam summer sale. When they do occasionally breakthrough, though, they sell a lot of copies and make a lot of noise.
Work sims are still niche in the sense that there’s not a massive movement in gaming culture clamoring for them, as you see with RPGs, turn-based strategy games, and the like. These are the facts which should preface any examination. More interesting, and in stark contrast to their predecessors, the current crop is inextricably tied up in notions of work. It’s happened well after the golden age of flight and train sims, when those games moved staggering numbers of copies. Which is why the sudden return of the vehicle simulation, particularly the European strain, is so strange. The notion of the games as being representative of real world jobs never really felt like it was concrete, if it was acknowledged at all. The hobbyist simulations tended to shave off the connections to work involved with piloting big vehicles in favor of focusing exclusively on their mechanical workings. Go to any model train store and you’ll see the same sort of dynamic: men and women who love everything about trains buying up things having to do with the focus of their adoration. Despite their popularity, the strain of simulation represented by the trains and planes games were still fairly niche.