Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The first and most important decision you will make: which nozzle should you use? You’re cleaning a filthy shed with a power washer and must choose your tools carefully. Too wide a nozzle and you’ll get a broad spread of water but sacrifice the pressure of the jet. Too narrow and you’ll get a powerful blast, but cover so little surface area that it will take forever to clean a single window.These is the type of high-stakes decision that faces players of PowerWash Simulator, a game that has turned a mundane act of manual labour into a viral sensation. You’ll spend hours hosing realistic grime from vans, statues and fountains, and the likelihood is you’ll love it.There’s an idea among game designers that most titles are fundamentally about cleaning. Call of Duty is about tidying the environment by removing all enemies with your gun. In Super Mario you gather coins messily scattered through the Mushroom Kingdom. Tetris is all about clearing away cluttered lines of blocks. But there are also clean-’em-ups, games that make the notion literal — and they’re surprisingly popular. To some, this might seem strange: a game that hands you a bucket and sponge is hardly fulfilling a power fantasy. So what’s the allure? Why, after a long, tiring day of adulting, are so many gamers switching on their consoles to get scrubbing?The genius of PowerWash Simulator lies in a single observation: that the first-person experience of shooting games is just as much fun even when there are no guns involved. You spray your hose like you would a rifle in Counter-Strike, only the result is a sparkling barbecue rather than a corridor littered with corpses. The same itch is scratched by House Flipper, in which you go into homes in varied stages of dereliction and clean them up before remodelling in a Sims-like build mode. WW2 Rebuilder casts players as a British worker repairing bombed out edifices.What is it about such activities that captivates people? The games come on the heels of social media trends showing painstaking manual labour played out in fast-forward. There’s something satisfying about watching power washing or deep cleaning, especially the all-important before and after shot where you get a real thrill of accomplishment. Cleaning games harness the satisfaction of a newly spruce room with none of the physical exertion, making scouring a filthy bathtub a matter of just a few clicks. They reward patience and meticulousness, but they also pack in mechanics to keep you engaged. Percentage bars track your process, activating lizard-brain pleasure centres as you watch the numbers climb, while progression trees allow you to improve your tools, get new soap or bigger bin bags. Banal upgrades quickly begin to feel genuinely exciting the more you play.Some developers offer a more macabre spin on the genre. Crime Scene Cleaner sends you to a mansion following a bloodbath — the swimming pool has turned red, there is shattered glass everywhere and two bodies float in the shallows. So you take your trusty tools — rubber gloves, sponge, mop — and start tidying. Viscera Cleanup Detail is a sci-fi spin, tasking you with scooping up alien guts after a series of grisly experiments gone wrong. It also includes a hilariously chaotic multiplayer mode.Other titles have spliced the genre into others. Serial Cleaners asks you to destroy evidence after mob assassinations while avoiding the police at the crime scene. Wilmot’s Warehouse is a beautifully designed puzzle game about organising boxes in a warehouse, while A Little to the Left is a relaxing title in which you return objects to the right places. In an age of anxiety, true relaxation cannot always be found by doing nothing — that’s when the intrusive thoughts appear. Instead, performing a mindless task with no time limits or enemies, can be a way to switch off, even enter a Zen-like flow state. The science backs this up — a recent Oxford university study showed that playing PowerWash Simulator improved the mood of 72 per cent of participants. Perhaps it’s not surprising that such activities should be so appealing in the context of today’s political, economic and environmental turbulence. If the idea of restoring order seems increasingly fantastical in the real world, at least we can enjoy it in games.
