Tears

• But I sometimes relax by playing video games where you tidy and arrange household items in living rooms, kitchens and bathrooms.
• Here are four inventive Australian video games where players perform household tasks that, in real life, are often repetitive or unpleasant.

Moving Out

• In Moving Out (and its sequel, Moving Out 2), you’re a removalist with a time limit to move objects like fridges, beds and sofas out of homes.
• Created by Australian and Swedish studios, Moving Out also involves the team that made the cooking game, Overcooked.
• In Moving Out, players save time by breaking windows and throwing objects instead of using stairs.

Unpacking

• In Unpacking – which describes itself as a “zen puzzle game” – you learn about someone’s life from youth to adulthood by sorting their possessions through a series of removals.
• Unpacking allows us to sort the unseen occupant’s possessions, but their life remains a mystery.

Florence

• In Florence, you have limited storage space for objects like kitchen utensils, clothing and books.
• Like Unpacking, Florence allows us to do familiar, domestic tasks in an unfamiliar setting; the player organises characters’ possessions but has no knowledge of the words the couple exchange in blank speech bubbles.
• Florence (like Unpacking) involves organising people’s used possessions, not new goods.

Rumu

• In an earlier Australian game, Rumu, you’re a robot vacuum cleaner who cleans up food and drink spills and tidies clothing while you investigate the disappearance of the house’s owners.
• The house in Rumu is like a maze; full of gadgets and secrets, this setting is designed like a puzzle that players must solve to navigate from one place to another.

Why are we drawn to games involving mundane tasks?

• These examples are not brand new games, but reflect the growth in popularity of everyday settings in games where you can do banal tasks as entertainment.
• Such games invite us to relate differently to everyday settings and work.
• In these games, everyday tasks involve encounters with robots, aliens and the supernatural.

Lesley Speed does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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• Despite being shaken by quake aftershocks, Ma Sadong kept cooking beef noodles.
• Ma said preparation work of beef noodles can be relatively quick and the noodles suit the tastes of most victims, as it's a daily staple for ethnic groups in Northwest China.
• "After suffering a cold night and power and water outages, quake victims found hot beef noodles to be a great comfort," he said.
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