Workaholic Simulator
Workholic Simulator
Yufeng Zhu and Siyu Wang, 2025
This Game was developed as part of the final assignment for the course ENG 328 Writing for Games and Narrative Design (Fall 2025), University of Toronto Mississauga. The work was supervised by Professor Bruno R. Véras, Assistant Professor, LTA, Game Studies Program, Department of English and Drama, UTM.
Abstract
Workaholic Simulator is a text-based simulation where you play as an employee at the big corporation EverGrind. Every decision matters, shaping your chances of staying employed or being laid off. Survive as long as you can, and try not to lose your mind in the process!
Authored Design Statement
The idea for this game originated from current events in real society: economic downturn, employment difficulties, and internal inequality and emotional buildup within companies. As Markoff told a story of a young pioneer who was hanged and finally became normal. At the same time, Fullerton argued that any game can start from reality and seek inspiration (ch. 6). Therefore, we started by collecting complaints from youths, workplace stories, and real-life anecdotes from friends around us. Thus, we hope to present the situation of young people struggling to survive in the workplace as a dark-humour game. Although the story is filled with satire and absurdity, its purpose is not to convey despair. It is to prompt players to reflect after the events occur: Is the reality we are accustomed to really like this?
For the mechanics, we developed a text-based adventure game based on branching narratives. Players will have default attributes as in many AVG/RPG games. Once they make different choices, those attributes will increase or decrease, ultimately leading them to multiple endings.
The narratives begin with world-building, a fictional company called EverGrind Company. It integrates an exaggerated workplace with absurd life experiences, creating a worldview that is realistic and dramatic. “EverGrind” symbolizes the pressure large companies exert on individuals. By constructing continuous events to build players’ curiosity, the game allows them to navigate an absurd atmosphere, while occasionally alternating bright, positive events to prevent their emotions from becoming overly depleted and to maintain the narrative's tension. To make the experience immersive, we created a cold-toned UI interface. Players have an employee card with their attributes, and each attribute affects how long they can survive in the company. Starting from their first day, they are merely screws, not human beings. These components draw players into a cold, depressing environment tinged with dark humour.
The game design is inspired by Fullerton’s ideas on challenge difficulty and character experience. Fullerton notes that unbalanced challenges cause players to lose engagement (ch. 4), so we created separate difficulty curves for HP, MP, and GR to make players’ choices feel meaningful across multiple dimensions. She also points out that players naturally choose different roles when they take on characters (ch 4), which influenced our decision to use the HP/MP/GR system so players can role-play as they want. In our game, HP represents the player’s health; it drops from overwork or discomfort and recovers with rest. MP tracks mental condition, decreasing with gaslighting or conflict and recovering with support. GR represents a ratio where structural risks outside the player’s control, like office politics, and if it gets too high, the player may be laid off. By mixing dark humour with a meta-narrative, we aim to show how games can express criticism, letting players immerse themselves and feel the extraordinary absurdity.
During the project, I realized that the game system could be presented and blended with narratives. In detail, those components can become more delicate in satire, not only in narratives but also in systems, such as an employee ID card in a game. In future versions, I hope to continue adding more stories of absurdity, for example, by introducing even more challenging hidden endings to enrich the world-building. Also, there’s an upcoming challenge that we still need to balance in terms of difficulty. We ought to solve this problem by rapid testing and adjusting the event.
Works Cited
Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. 4th ed., CRC P., 2019.
Erard, Michael. “2 Decades Later; Let down by Academia, Game Pioneer Changed Paths (Published 2004).” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 May 2004, web.archive.org/web/20241212124310/https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/technology/2-decades-later-let-down-by-academia-game-pioneer-changed-paths.html.
