That’s excuse enough for the Idealog team, so we’ve come up with a practical alternative to productivity: testing out some of the internet’s most banal situation simulators.
They’re mostly all dumb as hell, requiring neither cognitive capacity nor emotional intelligence, and given the humidity, that’s just fine.
This is they:
Goat Simulator
Playing Goat Simulator, you’ve got one goal and one goal only: be the most destructive goat you can be. To help you in that task, you’re provided with such tools as rocket packs, a sticky tongue and hyper-flexible physics that let you run rampant in a beautifully rendered world.
It’s been described and “brilliant” and it’s also been described as a “bad, amateurish and boring game” and both of those things are pretty much true.
Play here
Surgeon Simulator
Surgeon Simulator is your opportunity to become Nigel Burke, a wannabe surgeon performing perhaps lifesaving operations on perhaps consenting patients.
Burke is more than happy to take other people’s lives into his own hands, but therein lies the problem: you’re tasked with manipulating said hands via your keyboard and mouse, a task far easier said than done. With limited dexterity and a range of wholly inappropriate tools, you must perform radical open heart surgery, an assignment that gets no easier with practice.
Play here
QWOP
Here’s the deal: Your name is QWOP (after the keys you’ll control your legs with), and you’re the sole representative of an unnamed country competing in the Olympics. All you’ve got to do to win the gold is run, walk or stagger 100 metres to the finish line.
Easy, right? Hell no. It’s almost impossible, and adding insult to inevitable injury, it’s simply the most rage inducing chore you’re ever likely to face.
Check your sanity at the door.
?Play here
Soda Drinker Pro
Attention, soda drinking simulation enthusiasts! Now you can drink soda virtually, at the beach, in the park or even in space, with Soda Drinker Pro.
That’s pretty much it, and it’s really dumb, but it’s now got VR capabilities, making it by far the best real time soda drinking simulator ever invented.
Play here
The Woodcutter Simulator 2013
Many office jockeys comment from time to time about how they’d like to give it all up, get out in the sunshine and earn an honest day’s pay working with their hands #yolo.
If that’s the kind of naive fantasist you are, here is the sim for you.
The Woodcutter Simulator 2013 pits you against a forest of trees. One man. One chainsaw. But that’s not all. Now, you actually get to control the entire lumber mill, clearing logs, producing woodchips for demanding customers, and pretty much doing everything that burly fantasy version of yourself would likely do.
?Dream on here.
