Jeff Ambrose

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey of nearly 6,000 American workers found that only “half of U.S. workers say they are extremely or very satisfied with their job overall” (Horowitz and Parker). Often, people turn to forms of entertainment to find stress relief and escape the boredom, stress, or frustration of their occupation. Among those entertainment media are videogames, and a seemingly strange trend has exploded in the last few years: job simulator games – everything from Lawn Mowing Simulator (and its sequel) to Bus Driver Simulator (9 out 10 rating with 26,314 reviews in the seventeen months it has been out). In this essay, I will give an overview of why job simulator games have taken off, what dollhouses have to do with the horror genre, and then do a case study of a recent horror game, Dollmare from 2024, to unpack how people becoming dolls in their place of work reflects the anxiety and terror of capitalism.

In a book from MIT Press on using games for learning, Ian Bogost wrote about one of the most popular capitalist games: 2001’s Animal Crossing. At its core, Animal Crossing is a casual, all-ages game about doing simple chores for animal friends while decorating your house and going fishing. However, the framing of the game is that you are in debt to a character named Tom Nook, and your payments toward your house allow him to grow the size of his corner store into a Walmart-esque superstore. Bogost’s reflection on this is worth quoting in full. He acknowledges that while the game is fun,

Animal Crossing is also a game about long-term debt. It is a game about the repetition of mundane work necessary to support contemporary material property ideals. It is a game about the bittersweet consequences of acquiring goods and keeping up with the Joneses. Animal Crossing accomplishes this feat not through moralistic regulation, but by creating a model of commerce and debt in which the player can experience and discover such consequences. (119)

This is important, because as Bogost identifies, “video games are not just stages that facilitate cultural, social, or political practices; they are also media where cultural values themselves can be represented—for critique, satire, education, or commentary” (119). While having fun catching bugs in the game or choosing the color of your wallpaper, the player is also haunted by the specter of capitalism, by the fact that their money only goes to perpetuate a system that keeps others like them in debt—inside the game or out of it. Why, then, do people genuinely enjoy enacting professions when work, and play, can be tedious and repetitive?

Journalist Raven Orteza asks this very question with her aptly named article, “Why is society obsessed with job simulator games?” In it she argues that the lack of real-world consequences can keep players relaxed. “Job simulator games, while mundane, still need to keep it entertaining and relaxed. This means many negative aspects and consequences that happen in real-life jobs are toned down or cut entirely.” Orteza continues:

the simplistic, grounded touch these games have can be a source of relaxation for many after a long day. Do this simple task. Look at your results. Rinse and repeat. These games are easy to turn your brain off to and enjoy the game for what it is. Sometimes a chill, predictable and boring game is what someone needs at the moment instead of a thrilling, epic adventure.

 Alex Wright, writing for Joyfreak, agrees.

In today’s fast-paced world, many people turn to gaming as a way to unwind and escape their daily stresses. Job simulation games provide a unique form of escapism by allowing players to immerse themselves in a different role and environment . . . these games offer a temporary reprieve from reality. The sense of accomplishment and progress within the game can also provide a satisfying counterbalance to the pressures of everyday life.

This is true of many job simulator games, but those same games also often include subtle if not overt commentaries on capitalism. Supermarket Simulator released in June 2025 and holds a “very positive” rating from tens of thousands of users on the gaming application Steam. In it you run a supermarket, and you can do simple things like stock shelves and ring up orders, including giving correct change. However, you also must set prices of all goods, order products on a computer to keep up with supply and demand, and the workers you hire can quit if overworked or not paid enough. Many games have followed suit, including Waterpark Simulator where you must clear wet patches to avoid lawsuits, and even more recently Retro Rewind, where you run a Blockbuster-type video tape rental store. These games are all highly rated by users, but most also ask uncomfortable questions of capitalist culture: Are we okay charging eight dollars for a can of beans even in a video game? Are we a bad person if an employee quits due to our low wages?

This discomfort aspect of job simulator games, I believe, led to the creation of a subgenre of horror-themed job simulator games – games like Kiosk, Happy’s Humble Burger Farm, Home Safety Hotline, and the extremely controversial Horses. Another game in this subgenre is Dollmare, which released in October 2024.

Before I unpack the game, I want to offer one more critical lens on dolls and miniatures – that offered by Roxanne Hoorn’s article for Atlas Obscura on a complex Southern Gothic dollhouse by artist Lauren Banks. Banks’ dollhouse has been constructed over years and contains many stories, most horrific, from the depravity of slavery to the repression of women. Hoorn drew on the expertise of a doctoral student in gothic literature, Kit Bauserman, to help contextualize the horror aspect of Banks’ work. “Horror has historically been used as a tool of critique against the dominant narratives within American culture,” says Bauserman. “It’s very much used as a tool of commentary and resistance. So understanding different undercurrents and power dynamics is something that gothic horror really aids in.” But why use a dollhouse and miniatures to tell these stories? Bauserman offers this perspective: “Choosing a dollhouse as a medium was intentional,” they say, “because a big part of this is exploring why women are so tied to the domestic space, and how that space is both a prison, but also a sanctuary.” The start of the new Barbie film comes to mind, where little girls realize they do not have to play mother to doll-like forms of themselves. Dolls are often stereotyped as childish, for girls, and as offering a form of play that allows them to do tasks that mirror those of reality – offering a bottle to a baby doll, dressing them up, taking them for a walk in a stroller. Dolls, however, also represent a “prison” as Bauserman notes. Confined to repeating domestic tasks in domestic spaces, traditional dolls can serve to perpetuate gendered expectations.

In an article for Vulture, Gwynne Watkins compiled a list of uses of dollhouses in television and film. She categorized them from inoffensive to “vaguely unsettling” all the way to “downright sinister.” Before exploring her examples, Watkins offers, “Dollhouses — those handy miniature metaphors for either childhood wonder or the corruption of innocence.” Like job simulator games, dollhouses and dolls can be both fun and scary. I think of the staged scene, made by the young daughter of a homicide detective, of a rape using dolls in an episode of the first season of True Detective on HBO. Watkins recounts a similar example from the Twilight Zone episode, “Miniature.” Wakins writes of the episode, “introvert Charley Parkes (young Robert Duvall) becomes smitten with a beautiful doll in a museum display. After hours of gazing at the antique dollhouse, Charley discovers that his beloved is in an abusive relationship, and he breaks the glass on the display to stop a mustachioed male doll from raping her.” Dolls are not simply toys for play; they have been used often, as Watkins explores, as vehicles of representation of the worst of humanity. All this brings us to Dollmare, a horror job simulator game about working in quality control at a doll factory for the company Sweet Cheeks.

Dollmare uses a similar frame to that of Animal Crossing. The opening text screen of the game reads, “With rent and bills piling up, I took a part-time job at an old toy factory. People whisper about its shady reputation, but I don’t care—I just need the money.” The lack of caring in Dollmare comes from both ends as you quickly find your boss cannot care any less about you as an individual. According to the Pew poll referenced earlier, one in five workers shared their employer cares about them only a little if at all. In the game, one of the first lines your boss says is, “I hope you don’t fail as miserably as the previous guy.” And a typed memo from your boss on the third day begins, “New employee [Employee’s Name].” Yikes, what a motivator! Speaking of motivation, where some workplaces have posters with positive phrases, one poster in the main workroom reads, “Don’t blink too often.” In the game, the only way to spend money you earn is by purchasing items for your worktable. We have no idea what our player character’s home life is like, and so each day you must choose whether to spend nothing and assume the money can be used on desirable things outside of work. Or, as seen in the figure below, you can choose to buy things for work such as an inspirational sign. It arrives the next day only to display the text, “Success comes to those who don’t ask for a break.”

While working for the doll factory, you are made to feel expendable and lifeless like the dolls you examine all day. Even if you correctly sort all dolls that day, your boss will say things like “At least you managed not to screw up today.” Any compliment is backhanded. As an employee, you feel worthless even if you excel in your position. No company pride can be felt as you are kept at more than arm’s length by your boss and seem to be the only employee in the entire factory.

The game takes place over only six days. Each day working at the factory grows more unsettling, as you can find hidden notes from a previous employee, “K.” These notes begin ominously with lines like, “No delivery trucks. No raw materials. How this place even work?” Such notes hint at the fact that the dolls are in fact previous employees who have been trapped inside of dolls. Notes found in later days leave no room for doubt. “That doll … looked like me.” “Something is changing in me. I don’t feel right. My reflection in the mirror… it doesn’t look like me anymore.” In one of the final notes you can find, K laments, “These dolls aren’t being sold anywhere. Sweet Cheeks. Is this place even real?” As it turns out, the factory, even if real, is built atop a prison as seen in the figure below.

If you do not destroy the voodoo doll via which the boss keeps K trapped, then you are doomed to the bad ending of the game. As seen in the screenshot below, right to the end the boss does not know your name nor care about you other than what you provide him and the company: another doll to do labor and then become the product itself.

Following this dialogue, you are knocked out by gas. When you come to, you are on the conveyor belt entering the room where you worked, now a doll yourself, about to be sorted by the new anonymous employee seeking enough money to survive the absurdity of a capitalist society.

Dollmare serves as a commentary on the soulless nature of those without capital slaving away while those in power do not even care enough to learn your name nor care about the quality of the work environment. The product, the bottom line, the quota is all that matters in Dollmare. Interviewed by Atlas Obscura about the use of miniatures in her MFA thesis, in which she created ultra-realistic depictions of hoarding, artist Amanda Kelly was asked why she chose a miniature scale. Kelly replied, “That’s the intrigue of miniatures: It’s almost like you’re in a godlike position, where you’re looking down on the scene and analyzing it. If I had [made] this work life-size, it would tell a different story.” That is the double interest of Dollmare for me. In the game, you are constantly observed and criticized by the silhouette of your boss, safe in his office looking down at the dolls of the factory – both human and plastic. At the same time, in playing the game, the player can observe and recognize the critiques of capitalist culture in miniature form. Though some may feel Dollmare is a low-stakes situation as a fictional reality, players can take a step back and find connections between the character they play, or the boss who does not care, and their own experiences with labor. Have we allowed ourselves to become a doll in a workplace dollhouse, only to come home and play at being a doll in another form in a job simulator game?

 

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Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. “The Rhetoric of Video Games.” The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, edited by Katie Salen, MIT Press, 2008, pp. 117–140.         doi:10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.117.

Bus Driving Simulator. Apex Logics. PC, 2024.

Coletti, Andrew. “What Secrets Are Behind the Magic of Miniatures? AO Wants to Know.” Atlas     Obscura, 3 April 2025.

Dollmare. Almost Done Games. PC, 2024.

Hoorn, Roxanne. “Explore the Insidious Secrets of This Haunted Dollhouse.” Atlas Obscura, 31 October 2023.

Horowitz, Juliana Mensace, and Kim Parker. “How Americans View Their Jobs.” Pew Research Center, 30 March 2023.

Orteza, Raven. “Why Is Society Obsessed with Job Simulator Games?” The Courier, 25 February 2025.

Supermarket Simulator. Nokta Games. PC, 2025.

Watkins, Gwynne. “A Guide to the Most Delightful – and Sinister – Dollhouses in Pop Culture.” Vulture, 19 July 2018.

Wright, Alex. “Why Job Simulation Games Have So Many Players.” Joyfreak, 10 September 2024.