paranoia under surveillance and confronting player agency through boredom
Ansh Patel
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It’s your first day on your new job as a security guard for a truck agency. You hope you’ll last longer in this job as you try to keep your small dreams alive in a security state built on surveillance and tracking its citizens’ behavior.
Security Guard Simulator is an exploration of the state of a mind living under surveillance while being a critique on the popular and formalist aspects of games that need to be “fun” and to give player “choice and agency” with a definite “victory/goal” and a failure/game over” state.
It attempts to evoke a feeling of living under a heavy state of hidden oppression when under surveillance and robbing player of choice and agency. By doing that, the game also attempts to emphasize on simulating the boredom inherent in the job of a security guard, which often boils down to finding ways to kill time.
In doing so, Security Guard Simulator functions both as a simulation of an experience of boredom in a dystopian world not very different from ours and also as a critique of conventional game aspects like choice, agency and goal and is a pushback against the popular idea that “all games should be fun”.