House Flipper 2, serenity in the digital order

There is this strange mental process that causes almost all human beings to take a simulation much more seriously than real life. Think about it for a moment. Think about it and don’t forcefully bring up high-sounding terms like gamification, which nowadays is often pronounced a bit inappropriately, even if only to give a tone.

It may have happened to you too, in your long and jagged life as videogamers, to be obsessed with a simulation of some kind. I’m not talking about the game of football. Nor the thrill of driving the Ferrari of your dreams. The reference brings up those games, or rather those software, which in some way reproduce much more modest and often repetitive activities. Most of those who enjoy playing video games would never lead the life of a farmer, and yet Farming Simulator is a saga that attracts its loyal following of fans every year. Few would drive a truck or train for hours on end in the real world. Nonetheless, there is no shortage of much-loved simulations that allow you to simulate long crossings across Europe and beyond.

Play, simulate, pretend toeven when it requires time and forces repetitive actions, it has a charm, an attraction, a magnetic power that the dimension projected on this side of the screen simply does not possess.

Is it a question of fatigue? Of adaptability to contexts that are often uncomfortable and require enormous sacrifices? Of skills that on the one hand are acquired in the space of a few tutorials and on the other in months, years, even decades? Undoubtedly there is this too.

However, there is also something elsesomething that long sessions of House Flipper 2 to which I subjected myself have made it crystal clear, clear, even obvious. A principle as simple and obvious as it is useful. Especially for those who often feel tossed around and lost in the postmodern ocean in which we find ourselves floundering every day.

Clean the room, defeat postmodernism

Recently also released on consoles, after its debut on PC last December, House Flipper 2 puts you in the shoes of an uncharacterized character who, endowed with great patience and a sense of order, is called upon to clean and tidy up not only his own home, but also that of dozens of characters who will require his intervention. Homes that wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of Buried At Homerooms in which rubbish bags act as bizarre furnishings, never-completely-finished moves with boxes that make up unstable towers worthy of the best Jenga games: these will be the “monsters” and “end-of-level bosses” you will have to deal with.

Armed with a few, miraculous and portentous ones instruments, you will have to unravel these tangles made of moldy walls, pizza boxes, slippers thrown into the most remote corners of the house in question. With a cloth and a little detergent, even the most stubborn dirt can be removed. The garbage bag is able to accommodate any type of waste inside. Objects that are of no use, hit by the beam of a futuristic portable device, disappear instantly, also generating a small income.

For those who grew up with the myth of “you can’t get any whiter”only to be betrayed, once an adult, by the intricate alchemy that governs the hidden processes that establish the correct functioning of a washing machine (coloured ones, for example, how colored can they be to stay together with each other?), the unscratchable functionality of this toolset represents the first safe haven offered by House Flipper 2. Everything has its precise functionality. Everything has a well-defined way of use.

There are not dozens of household products to choose from, hoping you have correctly interpreted the writing on the packaging. You don’t have to run to YouTube looking for some tutorial that explains which of the heads supplied with your vacuum cleaner work best on the carpet. You don’t have to rely on urban legends or magical concoctions handed down through generations to get to the bottom of a stain that seems to have become one with your favorite shirt. To do this, you need to do this, using this tool. Stop.

However, in his fight against postmodernisma philosophical and almost political struggle, House Flipper 2 does much more to welcome into its maternal womb the confused and stunned human beings, now unable to orient themselves in a changing and multifaceted society.

Not only does it give you easily usable and readable tools, it delivers equally linear challenges, clear, without surprises. In each room there is a certain number of stains to disappear, objects to sell, rubbish to collect. For your own personal taste, you can also rearrange the furniture, so as to give a more personal touch to the experience and the environment you are restoring, but this is something absolutely optional and left in the hands of the most creative.

Between on-screen indicators that show how much is missing from the objective and the special vision, which can be activated at any time, which highlights what is still out of place, a mime of observation is enough to complete the level of the round.

Whereas in Farming Simulator, entrepreneurial ability and organizational spirit are still necessary to create an agricultural company capable of generating profits; if in Euro Track Simulator it takes its time to successfully complete a transport; House Flipper 2 takes the fight against postmodernism to the extreme by simplifying as much as possible, shortening times, giving modern man back the ability to arrange, to find a place, to catalog the knowledge. The Frozen District production, a bit like Unpacking, with its grids, simple actions, the clarity of the interface, dissects reality, making it intelligible, within human reach. Everything is in front of the user, everything can be entered within the dotted lines, everything can be tamed.

The digital order becomes mental order. Tidying up a room means harnessing social chaos. Completing a level is comparable to defeating postmodernism. A bit like in Farming Simulator, where things are certainly more complicated, but you can do business without the hassle and delays of bureaucracy.

The contemporary human being needs games like House Flipper 2. A bit like when you open the trunk of the car and you are perfectly able to arrange every suitcase, thanks to the training received at a young age with Tetris, clean every stain , rearranging furniture, selling useless objects can help, if not to shed light on the world around us, then to re-establish a bit of calm and mental serenity.

Although in hindsight, with the time spent on House Flipper 2, I could very well have cleaned and tidied up my house too.