All in a day's work: Working-class heroes as videogame protagonists

Crazy Taxi is a 1999 open-world driving game developed by Hitmaker Studios and published by Sega for arcades and then for multiple game consoles. The game enacts picking up customers and delivering them to their destinations as quickly as possible. Players are rewarded with bonuses for engaging in jumps and other automotive tricks and are punished if they go over time by having passengers leave without paying. Passengers loudly voice both their approval and disapproval, complimenting flashy moves and quick service, as well as berating the player-as-driver for collisions, getting lost, and being slow to reach their destination. An in-game arrow points to one's destination, but the player can also take shortcuts across parks and sidewalks, and so forth. Crazy Taxi capitalizes on its 3D, open-world design by encouraging players to drive fast and perform flashy moves, pushing the player to drive quickly with its upbeat soundtrack.

Crazy Taxi players keep passengers happy through offering them the freedom to perform speed and skill – the pleasure of accelerating, jumping off ramps, making pedestrians scatter, or knocking down street signs – all will delight passengers, as long as they reach destinations on time. It reduces the job to a few components: there is no real downtime waiting for fares, vehicles never take damage or need to be serviced, and the player's avatar never needs to stop for rest or food. Driving is the core mechanic, and navigating the map brings success. Players are only berated by passengers if they lack knowledge of where to go or drive too slowly. Drivers do not worry about fulfilling the emotional needs of their passengers and are not able to engage in conversation with them – yet passenger commentary is a core feedback loop of the game. There is no guessing how one is doing. Drivers also never need to refill fuel, eat, or engage in maintenance routines. The “cab lag” discussed by Sharma that today's drivers endure is entirely absent from Crazy Taxi. The game instead focuses on speed and urgency as central experiences.

Neo Cab was developed in 2019 by Chance Agency and published by Fellow Traveller. The player is Lina, one of the “last human drivers-for-hire”. The plot involves trying to find your missing friend Savy (and solve the mystery surrounding her disappearance) while continuing to pick up passengers and “balance your own wellbeing with the needs of your pax as you strive to keep your perfect rating, and your job” (Neo Cab, n.d.).

In contrast to Crazy Taxi, the act of physically driving is gone, and the environment is a 2D comic-noir–style adventure game. Rather than navigating to a destination, the player must instead explore the choices of which passengers to pick up and how to respond to their conversational prompts. The stakes still revolve around customer satisfaction and associated earnings, however. Satisfying passengers requires reading the situation and determining whether to keep cool and stay aloof, or dive into a conversation and take a strong position – customer feedback is rarely as obvious as it is in Crazy Taxi. Instead, doing emotional labour becomes the way to keep one's job (Morton, 2018). Passengers have varying attitudes towards Lina, some seeing her as a fellow worker, and others as a relic of a dangerous practice – human-directed rather than autonomous cars. Here, the game takes up current politics around rideshare services, but fast-forwarding ahead from the taxi–Uber debate to the coming issue of driverless cars. In the game, a new bill is under consideration which would outlaw human-driven cars, named in response to a car crash that killed a dancer. It is also revealed through gameplay that the largest autonomous car company – Capra – is the one pushing the legislation the hardest. Lina is asked by various passengers about her opinion on the bill and the idea, leaving the player in the uncomfortable position of potentially advocating for the erasure of their job.

In Neo Cab, the role of driver-for-hire is still to ferry about passengers from one point to another, but the skills required shift from driving to talking. Neo Cab is also about managing emotions and recognising the leash that service jobs place on self-expression. This happens through the game's “Feelgrid” bracelet that Savy places on Lina's wrist at the start of the game. The bracelet operates as a mood ring, displaying different colours that mirror Lina's emotional state. For example, if Lina starts to anger, the colour red grows in intensity. Along with that change, Lina's potential conversational responses shift. As Lina grows angrier, all the potential responses a player can choose from deal with anger, and she is unable to choose a different emotionally based response. While ostensibly a commentary on how one's emotions lead one to different conversational outcomes, the system also operates as a commentary on the state of precarious, service-based labour and how it can chill free expression. If you, as Lina, get too angry, you risk offending a passenger, and possibly losing your tip or receiving a lower rating. In this occupation, the game seems to say, the customer's mood must take precedence over your own.

While in Crazy Taxi the player can take the route they prefer – and take as long as they want (albeit while being insulted by passengers) – the worst that can happen is the passenger leaves without paying, possibly to potential game loss. Yet in Neo Cab, where choices are ostensibly based on keeping passengers happy versus being true to oneself, even that ability is stripped away at times, as the player is forced to acquiesce, as the technology “reads their mood” and the system limits their choices. Some passengers treat you as less than human, with one insisting you are a robot. Driving in Neo Cab continues to provide above-average stress, but limits the flexibility not only of location and time with respect to work, but even how to respond to one's passengers and friends.

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Overall, both games do acknowledge the skills involved in seemingly unskilled labour. Crazy Taxi offers the player clear directions for what to do, and a pleasurable experience for developing and displaying requisite skills correctly. While taxi drivers of the 1990s could not crash through towns, they were made promises of eventual financial security (Aliyu, 2020). Neo Cab illustrates how starkly rideshare services have changed the driver-for-hire position, focusing on passenger mood management and self-regulation. Even if the player “plays by those rules” – if they can even figure out how to do so correctly – they still lose at the end. Neo Cab shows the job of driver-for-hire disappearing completely, due to eventual, and inevitable, automation.

Tapper is a 1980s arcade cabinet game, franchised over the years by Root Beer, Budweiser, and Mountain Dew. The player manoeuvres a moustachioed male bartender between four kegs and down the bars in order to deliver drinks, collect glasses, and rush for tips before they disappear. Tapper has a low threshold for failure – if the player either misses serving a drink or catching an empty glass, the game is over.

Typically, bartending is viewed as low-skilled work. This is reflected in Tapper's quick-fire mechanics where you deliver the same drink to an assortment of patrons as quickly as possible. That does not mean that the game itself has a low skill requirement. In fact, playing the emulated version proved difficult, and it was hard to get through a single level without making a mistake, immediately resulting in a “game over”. In terms of representing the job of bartending, the bartender in Tapper has no conversation with the customer, making it a purely transactional relationship. There is no nuance to this form of service labour compared to interactions in V:CAB. Unlike in Tapper, the player in V:CAB has a level of autonomy, as Jill can select drinks based on the customer's desires and tastes. This can be viewed as high-skilled craft labour, feeding into the elements of a profession, rather than the low-skilled occupation bar work inhabits (Fowler, 2017). Extensive knowledge of the ingredients and widely varying drink recipes are key for the player to succeed in satisfying the customer and completing a full day's work with no mistakes.

In addition to the level of skill simulated in these bartending games, the financial precarity associated with working-class labour under capitalistic structures is also present in both the games’ narratives and mechanics. In Tapper, chasing down tips at varying points of the bar rarely pays off, as the player more often than not misses drink orders and catching glasses – even the current world champion leaves tips behind in pursuit of a higher score (Free Play Arcade, 2019). In V:CAB, getting an ambiguous drink order wrong (customers often ask for something “unique” with little indication of what that entails on the vast menu) results in a significant drop in the player's end-of-day bonus and tips. The management behind these bars exist solely as branding or a one-time visit from “corporate”, leaving these bartenders at the mercy of their customers and co-workers.

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VA11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Action Bartender (V:CAB), a cocktail-mixing visual novel set in the gritty cyberpunk dystopia “Glitch City”, features the protagonist Jill, a twenty-something jaded bartender. The player mixes different drinks for clientele, while chatting with them, hearing their life stories, and learning their “usual”. The player has a selection of six ingredients to mix, using a recipe system in order to create them correctly, and must remember particular clients’ usuals in order to score higher tips at the end of each day. Perfecting drink serving also allows players to gain rare interactions and endings with different NPCs (non-player characters).

Aside from physical demand, a significant aspect of bartending involves the expectation of emotional labour between the customers and the bartender. Grazian (2009: 909) describes bars as “third places”, where patrons feel the bar environment is “inclusive” and a “social leveller”. This, mixed with the inhibition-reducing effects of alcohol, allows customers to feel comfortable being vulnerable in these spaces, discussing emotional issues and using the bartender as a sounding board for advice. This form of emotional labour is present in V:CAB as Jill regularly listens to the ramblings of her clients, offering counsel through the conversations, and rarely conceding information about her own personal struggles until it is forced out of her by a customer-turned-friend. In this way, the bartender can act as the “poor man's therapist”, not necessarily a heroic characteristic, but perhaps in the wake of mental health crises, it can be read as such.

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In sum, due to the precarious nature of their working-class service-industry jobs, the protagonists in these two games do not have the capacity to be a working-class hero in the typical sense. They do, as shown in V:CAB, participate in feminised emotional labour to sometimes support their customers, but this is not reminiscent of the masculine, working-class hero later discussed in games like The Firemen (1994). In this light, they are unable to take care of themselves in the face of financial precarity, and the job takes precedence over their own needs most of the time. The tracking of income (either as points or a tab at the end of the day) sits at the heart of both games’ mechanics, reinforcing the financial precarity felt in typical working-class jobs and trying to make ends meet. Unlike other hero-driven videogames – where the game supports and facilitates the success of the hero – these two games exist as the inverse, with failure being the result of contextual precarity communicated through the games’ stories and mechanics.

Space Quest is a series of comic science-fiction DOS games made by Two Guys from Andromeda and published by Sierra On-Line between 1986 and 1995. To progress, players manually type commands into a text parser to direct Roger, a lazy janitor stationed on a spaceship, to demonstrate the necessary skill and expertise for “cleaning up the galaxy” and saving the day. When the vessel is boarded by hostile aliens, Roger is only spared and involuntarily thrust into a hero's adventure because he took a conveniently timed nap inside a broom closet (The Sarien Encounter). Because Space Quest's situational comedy and humorous storytelling frequently hinges on Roger's “stereotypic ineptitude, immaturity, stupidity, [or] lack of good sense” (Butsch, 2003: 21), he is immediately codified in such a way that he conforms to enduring negative media tropes surrounding working-class men.

Cut-scenes make up much of Space Quest's exposition, precluding players’ influence over major story beats. Resultingly, the player's relationship with Roger is less direct than when role-playing as Neo Cab's Lina or V:CAB's Jill. Instead, the player's role is to do damage control, setting Roger on the correct path and managing his choices to best compensate for his incompetence and lack of motivation. Using trial and error, players input commands for Roger to “look around” environments or “pick up” and “use” objects. While correct choices prompt the narrators to praise Roger's achievements and genius, incorrect choices often trigger humorous lose states which subject him to mockery and derision. Arguably, this way of structuring play reinforces caricatures of the blue-collar working man as one who stumbles into the inciting action and relies on others to solve problems (Butsch, 2017; Kendall, 2011). Combined with interactions with NPCs and set pieces where Roger's classed attributes (such as frugality, limited disposable income, and employment as a “low-skilled” worker) are joked about, Space Quest masks and softens the tensions and moral discomfort of class struggle using comic relief (Deery, 2017).

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Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor was developed by Sundae Month and published by tinyBuild games in 2016. Players assume the role of a “girlbeast” who works as a trash incinerator tasked with cleaning an alien marketplace and saving enough of their meagre income to afford a means of escape (tinyBuild Games, 2016). Echoing the retail-simulation game Cart Life (Hofmeier, 2010), Diaries models the Sisyphean difficulty of earning a living as a member of the working poor while staying fed, affording regular access to (sometimes gender-affirming) medical care, and attaining life goals that are unrelated to work. Diaries brings the performance of janitorial work to the fore. Between moments of downtime in a monotonous and inescapable day–night cycle, players must burn as much trash as possible to maximise the next day's pay. Much like in Tapper (Marvin Glass and Associates, 1983), this involves the execution of repetitive, seemingly “low-skilled” tasks – in this case, picking up objects off the ground and deciding to keep, burn, or attempt to sell at the risk of a reduction in pay.

The precarity of the spaceport janitor's work is emphasised by embedding players’ labour in tangible institutions and systems: one's ability to save funds is at the mercy of fluctuating market prices, inconsistent pay rates, corrupt law enforcement, restrictions on the tools and hours available for doing work, the unreliability of vendors’ stocks and prices, gender dysphoria, and even favour with the deities. Evidently, janitorial work in Diaries models the consequences of low wages and part-time employment brought on by the feminisation of the service industry under neoliberalism (Sherman, 2009). In part, this is because the janitor's job is municipally subsidised, and so the game acknowledges what consequences workers face when governments operate as a business, for example by taking steps to keep overhead costs – including employees’ salaries – as low as possible rather than providing a living wage.

Second, this is because of how Diaries handles emotional labour, which is only expected from the spaceport janitor insofar as they are dealing with gendered street harassment or snide put-downs from vendors selling prohibitively expensive goods. However, unlike the protagonists in Neo Cab and V:CAB – who regularly interface with customers whose evaluation directly impacts how much they are paid – the spaceport janitor is alienated from the adventurers and merchants who frequent the marketplace, tending to be ignored completely unless the interaction involves a quest, sale, or trade. The janitor is also alienated from other sanitation workers (there are none) and from the value of their own labour (as evidenced by the random pay rate). It follows that Diaries reflects actual struggles currently associated with increasingly invisible and isolated low-wage cleaning work (Soni-Sinha & Yates, 2013).

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Analysing these games as a pair shows that each protagonist embodies particular orientations to neoliberal ideals such as free-market competition, personal responsibility, and meritocracy, or the idea that the successes and value of an individual are fair, equitable, and direct products of their own hard work. Roger's inability to “officially” cease being a janitor is routinely used as a punchline – one centred around subverting audience expectations by relegating a heroic, cisgender, able-bodied white man to “low-skilled” and unglamorous work that (perhaps not coincidentally) is historically associated with women and the domestic sphere. However, Roger's mistakes are presented as temporary comedic setbacks, while his successes are integrated into the story, which frames his progress as a product of his own efforts and merits despite players actively pushing for him to fail upward into hero status. So, while stereotypes of working-class men as buffoons or bunglers are rooted in emasculation (Butsch, 2017), Roger's masculinity is reasserted by naturalising his aptitude for adventuring and his propensity for heroics. The result is a character arc that is deeply informed by privilege, in particular, ease of upward mobility.

It is difficult to compare a comedy game with one that provides an intentionally uncomfortable critique of capitalism at work. Yet, this analysis has generated some insight into the variety of ways cleaning work has been contemplated and codified into games. Truly, Roger's job-title as “janitor” becomes increasingly symbolic as the series progresses and, by the end of the third instalment – The Pirates of Pestulon (1989) – his status as an action hero is firmly cemented. Rejecting the humble connotations associated with janitors keeping the universe clean, Roger assumes a sort of patriarchal responsibility as its brave, space-wandering custodian – a job he is repeatedly appreciated and rewarded for succeeding at despite his minimal efforts. By way of his privilege, Roger is easily swept up into a life of heroics that the spaceport janitor aspires to have but is systemically (and systematically) excluded from.

Diaries contrasts this by simulating an anti-adventure wherein the protagonist is actively punished for pursuing adventure and denied any opportunity to accomplish feats of heroism. By integrating the performance of labour into the structures and institutions of an unforgiving world, it expresses how progress and stability are affected by a host of external forces and oppressive conditions that are beyond any individual's control. Like Lina and Jill, the spaceport janitor does need to employ specific skills in order to survive (for example, time management). However, these centre more around managing the impact of exploitative and unsafe working conditions on the janitor's well-being than the management of relationships with clients and customers. Finally, by incorporating the preservation of one's welfare under capitalism into the act of doing labour in a fantastical science-fiction videogame setting, Diaries produces a sort of metatextual critique of traditional progress narratives in games. The spaceport janitor's journey tells us that hard work is not always enough to earn an upgrade or move on to the next level.

The Firemen is a single-player action-adventure game published in 1994 by Human Entertainment for the Super Famicom. Pete Grey is the protagonist, the lead member of a futuristic fire-service team tasked with quelling a raging fire inside the Metrotech industrial office complex. Controlling Pete alongside his novice partner Danny, players navigate the engulfed Metrotech building, putting out fires and rescuing civilians. Despite the firefighting theme, the title bears much in common with the “shoot ’em up” videogame genre. Players can spray their firehose in eight directions and switch between two firing modes – a powerful jet stream and a wide burst of water – echoing weapon types featured in games such as Contra. The titular firemen also have access to “extinguishing bombs” (essentially grenades) that disperse flames over a large area and must strafe and military-crawl to progress past certain obstacles. Recalling Cooper's (1995) metaphorisation of fire as a tangible foe, The Firemen simulates firefighting as a battle against numerous anthropomorphised blazes, invoking military themes while carrying none of the moral baggage that often accompanies them.

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Class tensions arise in The Firemen in two key ways. First, the Metrotech complex – which strongly resembles a white-collar office building – is imposed as a key antagonist throughout the game. Portions of the building collapse and contract, transforming office desks and computers into a dangerous labyrinth for the firefighters to navigate. Second, Metrotech architect Frank Weller is introduced mid-way through the gameplay and, despite being presented as an ally, becomes an immediate target of the firefighters’ derision. Accusing Frank of being out of touch, Pete interrogates the architect's credentials and his design of the building, angering and flustering the white-collar worker. This tension is not fully resolved until the end scene of the game where Frank begrudgingly defers to Pete's expertise, acknowledging that he “learnt a lot” through his guidance and asks Pete to “remind me not to make the same mistakes again”. Humbled by Pete's heroism, Frank assumes a subordinate role to the firefighter's courage and know-how.

These class tensions also arise in Real Heroes: Firefighter, a first-person shooter-style game developed by Epicenter Studios and published for the Wii in 2009. Unlike The Firemen, where players control a veteran of the fire service, Real Heroes: Firefighter's protagonist is a probationary firefighter completing his first missions. The opening scene introduces the “probie” to a wide array of firefighting tools: the firehose, an extinguisher, a crowbar-like Halligan tool, a fire axe, hydraulic spreaders, and a rotary saw. Other firefighters directly state that proficiency with these tools is crucial to performing the job properly, reinforcing commonly cited blue-collar values of occupational competence and technical mastery (Thurnell-Read & Parker, 2008). Where both The Firemen and Real Heroes: Firefighter rely primarily on shooter mechanics, Real Heroes also simulates real-life firefighting tools as skill challenges by leveraging the Wii's motion controls. Whether prying open a jammed door with a crowbar or tearing off a car door with the “jaws of life”, the player must continuously demonstrate their technical expertise.

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Despite a transition into 3D, the objectives of both of these firefighting titles are roughly the same: players must progress through several flaming locales, putting out fires and rescuing civilians. The first level of the game parallels many aspects of The Firemen's Metrotech tower, but the white-collar workers take on a different role. Instead of berating a building architect over the radio, as with Frank Weller, Real Heroes: Firefighter fosters further ridicule by requiring you to rescue a pair of building managers during the opening mission. Panicky and helpless, the managers spout their regrets over “cost-cutting measures”, with the firefighters even referring to them as “jerks” before guiding them to safety. As their workplace crumbles around them, these characters juxtapose the hands-on expertise of the firefighter with the perceived softness and haplessness of white-collar workers. Unlike the protagonists in Neo Cab, V:CAB, and Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor – who find themselves somewhat at the whim of the capitalist structures around them – these depictions of firefighters are fully empowered. Their heroic stature and expertise seem to eclipse class, positioning them as self-sufficient and powerful, even though they ostensibly exist in the same neoliberal environment as other working-class professions. In both The Firemen and Real Heroes: Firefighter, the firefighter emerges triumphant over both out-of-control flames and the follies of out-of-touch managers and professionals.