Minimum-Wage Games = Fun?

Minimum-wage work is the bane of a teenager's existence, yet it is a necessary evil to for him to afford gas, booze, and freedom from being forced to survive under his parents' constant observation and oppression. It's not fun. It's work. How can a game company make a game out of it? They can, apparently, and they do. Here's a partial list I came up with of entirely un-fun jobs that have been converted to game form:

- Order Up! - fast food
- Diner Dash - waitressing
- Cooking Mama - cook
- Harvest Moon - farmer
- Courier Crisis - bike messenger
- Crazy Taxi - cabbie

How do game companies pick their games' subjects? "Hey, working the register at a gas station is accessible enough to be done by a trained monkey... Let's make that into a WiiWare game!" Strangely, even the games that don't over-emphasize the danger and excitement of these menial jobs (like Crazy Taxi's over-the-top presentation and gameplay) still have a large element of fun to them. Harvest Moon is a great example. In it, you are a farmer. You grow crops, trade with townspeople, till your soil... standard farm stuff. Still, thousands of gamers buy the newest installment each time it's released and sink dozens upon dozens of hours into their virtual farm. For what? They are left with no real, tangible carrots to eat, and they don't have the satisfaction of actually cleaning the horse manure out of a stall with a shovel. Is Harvest Moon better than real farming because there's no poop smell? Is it because the virtual progression of crops is so much faster than in reality? Is it because gamers don't get sweaty using a virtual hoe? Maybe.

Today's game market is so over-saturated by "me-too" titles that game developers will look to exploit any untapped subject in an effort to appear innovative. When Wii Fit was released, it was a huge success. It was the type of "game" that hadn't really been tried seriously before, and Nintendo's risky move paid off in a huge way - Wii Fit is now one of the best-selling games of all time, and it's still incredibly difficult to find the game on store shelves. Sure, Order Up is a fast food simulator, but how many times have you seen one of those before? It even embraced it's demographic by including a paper hat and a $20 price tag. It will not be a best seller, ever. But there still exist so many untapped game subjects and gameplay innovations that I, for one, would try anything once. You don't want the only new games in the future to be Madden 2021 and Tony Hawk 19, do you? You'd better not.