Will our future lives be like a video game?

A few years ago, the software company Owlchemy Labs released a computer game called Job Simulator. Its premise was simple. Players find themselves in a future world, roughly 30 years from now, in which super-efficient robots have snaffled up all the jobs. No longer needed for work, humans entertain themselves instead by donning virtual reality headsets and reenacting ‘the glory days’ — simulating what it was once like to be an office clerk, chef, or shopkeeper. The gameplay, therefore, consists entirely of, well, yeah… carrying out endless mundane tasks: virtual photocopying, virtual cooking, virtual newspaper sales.

Job Simulator is pretty tongue-in-cheek, crammed full of dry, self-referential jokes. In the game, our robot overlords turn out to be comically literal-minded (one of the chef’s ways of ‘succeeding’ is to bribe food critics). Players are goaded by floating screens boasting about the failed human uprising of 2027, and given the option to hurl doughnuts back in protest.