T w e n t y S i d e d
A few years ago Playstation Plus released PowerWash Simulator as a “free” monthly release and I tried it out. I didn’t care for it. The controls felt imprecise and the expected completion percentage for each surface and job was too high. I just found it frustrating. So I stopped playing and uninstalled it. That’s what I tend to do a lot with the PSPlus games. I keep paying for it each year because I will never learn. YOU CAN’T MAKE ME.
Well, recently I was extremely manic. Luckily, extreme mania for me just looks like really high anxiety and a struggle with impulsive spending. At least from the outside looking in. But with that mania came a restlessness with the games I was playing. Nothing could hold my attention. For reference, right now my rotation of console games that I switch around through are Ace Combat 7, UFC 5, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, PGA 2K25, and Balatro. Balatro was too frustrating, PGA and UFC were too repetitive, I had marathoned COE33 the night before and wanted something else, and I’m in the end game grind with AC7 so it’s in the small doses of completion phase. TLDR: nothing scratched the itch. So I spent some time looking through my digital library of games that I felt like may have had more milage, and there was PowerWash Simulator. I enjoyed browsing r/powerwashingporn back in the day. It was really satisfying to see the process of cleaning and the end result. Maybe it was worth another shot.
I booted the game up and, after a few moments of reacquainting myself with the controls and mechanics, I felt a feeling of calm take over. Something about the slow progress made by the repetitive but non-identical tasks took my brain and squeezed out the panic. I was powerwashing a wall in the game but it really did feel like my brain was getting a bit of a squeegee too. My previous judgements had stemmed from a mental state that just wasn’t going to allow for a pleasant experience with a new different type of game. That all got me thinking about just how effective video games can be a meditative tool. Not just calming, but truly effective as a measure of mental cleansing.
I’ve said plenty of times in plenty of conversations that video games help me relax. That’s just plain untrue. I do relax while playing games sometimes. I just wrote a paragraph about it, in fact. But the majority of the time I play games I am doing so to enjoy the challenge and the room for creativity. Some of my favorite games of all time are in the Dark Souls series and the only times I’ve ever felt comfortable in those games is when I’ve gotten myself into a position to have nothing to lose. I just don’t gravitate towards cozy stuff. When I do, though, it’s an incredibly potent tool. Mining in Minecraft lulls me to sleep at times. Not because it’s boring but because it’s so soothing. When I’m grinding enemies in an RPG for a rare drop I’m rarely enjoying myself, but I am at peace.
Until now I had never really appreciated that some actions in some games really are a form of meditation. Meditation doesn’t have to be sitting crisscross applesauce and chanting. Finding your inner zen really could just be pressing left click in the same spots over and over. It could be practicing combo strings in training mode in your favorite fighting game. Find your thing and quiet your mind sometimes so you can enjoy yourself instead of forcing yourself to boot up a particular game because it’s just what you do with the boys every Saturday night. My bipolar ass just found out that it’s actually useful, so it’s at least something I plan on doing moving forward.
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Oh, yes – this is why, for the last few weeks, I look at my extensive game library (including Humble Choice sub) and then load Skyrim. I think for me it’s meditative in the sense that I don’t have to learn anything new or have any setbacks when there’s a problem (i.e. quicksave vs DarkSouls) while at the same time it scratches that empowerment itch and achievment of getting things done (even if it is walking from one side of the map to the other to deliver a book).
PS Plus made me learn that I didn’t want to pay for it any more, when it would repeatedly fail to upload my saves. Which was the only reason I got it! So much for being able to play at my mum’s and my own house seamlessly. So I swapped to using a USB stick, which has now failed because the PS4 doesn’t prompt you to sign in again whenever it decides that actually I should be signed out because there is a new update and I’m not allowed to be connected without it. Meaning that now that it is 10+ years old and the internal battery must be dead, some of my save files were dated 01/01/1970. Which then appears to have corrupted the save files in some way including the subsequent save files I created once I updated and re-connected to the internet – when I try to upload them on the other PS4, then I get a generic error code. So playing Jedi Survivor on any other console is now not possible! Anyway, point is that the cloud saves system was terrible in that it wouldn’t actually happen even when set to Automatic upload, and I’d need to do it manually, which didn’t seem worth the money.
And then there is the majority of survival games, where you could:
1. Meditatively grind resources for hours.
2. Fight Monsters and even bosses.
3. Create and decorate your own home/machines.
4. Sometimes manage a whole settlement you created
So they Survival gives you the best mechanics to scratch any itch you are feeling at a moment. Unfortunately almost all of them are narrative dull and the stakes of dying are often to low or much too high.