When Edwin talked about Moon Sweepers yesterday he focused on the artisanal approach to space rock cleaning. Like the puritan he is, he wants to wipe away all the dust on the moon using a toothbrush. He says you should take pride in your work, stick one spacesuit-clad middle finger up to the machines and say ‘Fuck off, robots. Let me show you my art!” as you get down on all fours and brush away moon dust.
I’ve taken a different approach.
I mean, sure, when I first created a new game in Moon Sweepers, I painted with my toothbrush:
But then I got down to the serious business of trying to clean up the dusty moon, section by section and all thoughts of art left my head.
When you first begin Moon Sweepers, you’re faced with an entire planetoid broken down into hexagonal tiles, each deep with dust and needing a brushing. The first sectors you’ll clean take an age to clear. The toothbrush only carves a thin groove into the dirt and the tile is comparatively vast. Your backpack fills with hoovered up dust as you clean and when it’s filled you need to head back to base to sell it off. Each kilo sold nets you a single dollar, but with that cash you can buy improved tools, swapping your toothbrush for a hand brush, and eventually for a broom.
It was only after I bought my broom I realised – too late to save myself – that I was playing an incremental game.
If you’ve been spared this genre, the best example for me is Cookie Clicker. It’s not the first, but it lays down the model for so many other incremental games. You start with a giant rotating cookie at the centre of your screen. Click it with your mouse and you earn a single cookie. Keep clicking and you will earn enough cookies to buy an auto clicker. This tool will click the cookie once every second. Buy more of them and your passive income will increase. In time you will afford more powerful outputs: armies of baking grandmas, sweet treat factories, eventually large hadron colliders that rip cookies out of other universes and plonk them into the stockpiles within your own. But, despite your giant increases in output, the cost of the next upgrade is so exponentially larger than the last that you’re forever climbing a mountain.
I have an unhealthy relationship with incremental games. I wish I had a brain that wasn’t so easily massaged by making a number go up or making slight progress against a mammoth task. I often start playing them, realise an hour or two has disappeared, and then have to uninstall the game. I can’t trust myself to boot it up for “a quick 15 minutes” and not lose an entire evening or weekend to an unfulfilling time vacuum. And I do find it unfulfilling; even if it is absorbing. At the end of a long session, it’s not that I’ve nothing to show for it, but what I have to show for it is a giant pile of cookies, or a mountain of paperclips.
Moon Sweepers is an incremental game. There are sectors of dusty moon as far as the eye can see. The tools you start with a small, but they grow in potency, with increasingly large brooms that can be upgraded with wider brush heads and larger backpacks, meaning you can collect moon matter for longer before heading back to base to cash it in. But Moon Sweepers is also an automation game, and it’s only when I clocked that that I realised I was truly done for.
Once you buy a hammer from your base’s shop, you can start building conveyor belts, space dust processing plants, and robot vacuums. Stretch a conveyor out from your base to one of the sectors of the moon you’re clearing and you can dump filled dust canisters on the belt instead of heading home to sell it. The conveyor whisks away the dust-filled tube and sells it for you, letting you spend longer in the fields scrubbing. Pour dust into a processing plant and it will compact it into a more valuable resource, earning you extra cash for your labour. And, well, robot vacuum cleaners look like NASA-branded Roombas. They clear the dust from a wide grid around their docking station.
Moon Sweepers, this incremental game in Satisfactory’s clothing, now has me thinking I can genuinely clean the entire moon. I’ve abandoned Edwin’s artful approach to the task and I am all in on using the robots, conveyor belts, and moon rovers to complete the job. I somehow believe this even though I have only so far cleaned 19 sectors and, according to the handbook, there are 163,842 in total. I believe this despite Steam reviews from players with many more hours under their belts shouting to me that this is a futile task. “We are 10 hours in and we are already maxed out on all the latest tools and vehicles and we are not even 1% done with cleaning,” writes Marten. “20 hours played, just reached 1% of surface cleared,” says Bim Fimberdim. “After 26 Hours I cleared 1.6% of the moon,” writes Amigos_Of_Bako.
I want to know why I’m so susceptible to these simple game loops. Why do I find it so satisfying to run backwards and forwards with a broom, turning a dusty surface clean? There is virtually no difference between the sections; they’re all featureless hexagonal grids. Cleaning them requires no skill, only time, patience, and repetition. Or, to step back and look at other incremental games, why do I find it pleasurable to click a cookie, make paperclips, dig a hole, clean up sludge, destroy 10 million pixels, or feed a larval queen?
Maybe it’s the ease and definition of progress, which is so unlike life. The irony of getting this fixated on Moon Sweepers is that I’m currently doing a lot of DIY in my flat and, despite resembling the manual labour in some of these games, it has none of the simplicity.
I went into this past weekend meaning to end it with a painted living room with some new alive bookshelves. I had to measure the alcove for some shelves, drill the holes for the brackets, cut the shelves to size, clean everything up, and then paint the living room. Yet, at the end of the weekend, I had fewer shelves and less paint on the walls than when I started. Delay after delay, complication after complication, and setback after setback meant that progress was slow and, when it did game, was more like a ship tacking against the wind than a straight line. What could have been a fulfilling, satisfying task, was infuriating and stressful.
Perhaps, right now, I want to clean up the moon because sweeping all of its 163,842 sections somehow feels more attainable and realistic than fitting these bookshelves.