9 - Extermination

Full transcript:

A word of caution. In this episode of Venthuffer, I talk about creepy crawly things. If you’re not in a mode to hear that sort of thing right now, maybe come back to this one later.

In the summer of 2023, I put a household dilemma out mind by trying an interesting game, not expecting that it would directly simulate the very problem I had hoped to buy a bit of escapism from.

Not only did it surprise me into seeing my local crisis from a new angle, but it presented me with the keys to its own solution. To defeat the monsters plaguing my home, I had to become the NPC, and hire the hero.

This is Venthuffer, a reverie of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick.

What drew me to try House Flipper, five years after its 2018 release? It’s in the peculiar sub-genre of games that simulate bootstrapping and then growing a business doing something that’s actually rather rote and labor-intensive, a category including games like American Truck Simulator, or even Stardew Valley. As suggested by its title, you succeed in House Flipper by buying homes for cheap and selling them at a profit, but you spend most of your gameplay time cleaning up and remodeling the broken-down, gutted, weed-choked dumps that you acquire before releasing them back into the market. And this is all done by hand through a first-person interface that has you do everything from cleaning out cobwebs to repainting walls to buying and installing new furniture and appliances for every room.

Well, for some time, I had been curious about the potential for a highly specific simulation game like House Flipper to present not exactly a transfer of real-world skill, but of a highly suggestive experience. That the ideal, anyway! The player has to accept that simulating the magnitude of the labor and the logistical complexities of running a real-estate business—to say nothing of its legalities!—must involve significant abstraction, compared to what one sees in a more mechanical and objectively verifiable simulation, such as in a flight simulator.

But I was also drawn to this game’s specific theme because of my parents’ career while I was growing up. Their work predated popular-culture use of the term “house flipping” by decades, but it’s what they did for my whole childhood: we’d all move into some junker of a home, which my parents spent a year or two fixing up as their primary shared project, and then we’d all move on to the next one.

So when the game went on sale while during an extended home-alone period, while my partner was in Chicago for a professional conference, I spent a full evening or two in the world of House Flipper. I could quickly see its appeal to “satisfaction” in the social-media brain-rot definition of the word, giving you a chaotic environment and the tools to make it orderly, step by step, letting the work—and its immediately visible effects—serve as its own reward.

But while I can acknowledge that attraction, I don’t really resonate with it. I could tell that progressing very far into the game’s simulated career path would be a slog, and that I’d lose interest in the game once the novelty passed. But my reasons for trying it remained, and I decided to stick with it until I had the basics down, enough to flip my first house and at least enjoy some sense of the fulfillment promised by the title.

And that’s where I found a point of crossover.

Listener, here I must make a confession of which I’m not proud at all, but my story hinges on sharing it. At this time, our upper west side apartment was experiencing a cockroach infestation. German cockroaches, if you need to know. The little ones.

It started small. We are both experienced urban dwellers and had had our share of unwelcome arthropod incursions plenty of times. So we deployed the usual drugstore tricks and traps and didn’t worry about it too much. But, by the time my partner left for her trip, it was clear that, for the first time, the invaders were outpacing our casual countermeasures.

Look: as far as I can tell, they never got into our food. I have my suspicions about what they were eating, and I’m pretty sure they were taking water from the cats’ dishes as well as our freezers’ ice trays, but they left our food alone. And they never got into our bedroom. But none of this lets me deny how, in the wee hours of every morning, the rest of our small apartment’s floor would roil with cockroach rush hour, streams of skittering commuters fanning out from multiple bases of operations they’d clearly set up in dark places. The only ones I managed to find myself, quite by accident, were the battery compartments of my cats’ automated feeders.

All this was going on while I played around with House Flipper. So when, early on, one of the fixer-upper problems you encounter in the most vile of abandoned squats is roaches, I sat up a little straighter. The game simplifies it, of course, as it simplifies every aspect of refurbishing a home, but it contained two startling kernels of truth. In House Flipper, you play a professional who knows better than to fight a roach infestation by squishing individual bugs, or by merely laying out some store-bought traps and calling it a day. No, the House Flipper player-character heads straight to the nest, and pulls out their vacuum cleaner. That is to say: There are nests, and you can destroy them directly.

House Flipper is, by its nature, a meditative game. I had plenty of time to think as I cleaned up that wreck of a dwelling, sweeping up its broken glass, hauling out its greasy pizza-box stacks, and methodically dismantling all of those… nests. By the time I had finished my virtual labors, I had also sat with the truth of how the game’s predicament overlapped with my own. And that’s the moment when I realized. That strange, almost sweet smell that had been wafting from the strangest places in our apartment over the last couple of months. Oh. That… was the real-life version of the on-screen prompt that tells you to hold the left trigger down, to bring up your toolbox radial menu and select the vacuum cleaner. It had been flashing at me for weeks and I didn’t understand it, at least not until I stumbled upon its digital translation.

And so when I was done with that in-game mission, I powered down my Steam Deck, and I made the inversion. Reaching through the sleeping screen and pulling the game’s reality inside-out like a sock, so that I might take up the role not of the heroic bug buster and avatar of order and cleanliness, but their unseen client. The owner of the shamefully pestilent dwelling, finally making the call.

And two people answered the call. I directed them to the smell. I opened my dishwasher. They saw everything they needed to see, and left. And two others came soon after, laden with equipment and dressed for business. At last I bore witness to at least one facet of the presence being simulated behind the House Flipper game camera, and I deferentially stayed out of the way as they set to work, pulling my refrigerator away from the wall with a directness I recognized, as if it were a mere 3D asset in a wireframe world. But this game wasn’t my story, so I didn’t directly see what they revealed: only that one of them immediately hunkered down and set to work, using both hands to attack something. Her partner struck up a conversation with me about city politics before I became too curious, nudging my unhelpful attention away from the work area: a touch of benign social engineering for which I can only be grateful.

Things continued in this vein for some time, requiring another followup visit or two, before the roaches were seen to and their hideouts made sufficiently uninviting to discourage any rival clans from moving in afterwards. And I haven’t played House Flipper again since then, either; doing so would still feel a little… redundant.

I’m still intrigued by the potential of experience-focused simulation games. I mentioned American Truck Simulator earlier, in part because a dear friend has encouraged me to try it, putting myself—a Manhattanite who rarely gets behind the wheel anymore—into a voluntary highway hypnosis as a pleasant way to relax. I see the appeal of that too!

But I expect that it will be some time before I replicate my experience with House Flipper, where I play only about five percent of a game, and yet end up feeling that I won it… so transcendently.

This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, and find links to the things that I mentioned in this episode, at Venthuffer dot com. And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.

We got rid of that dishwasher, by the way.