Greg Costikyan plays a game called Cinema Tycoon, a resource management game about running a multiplex, and wonders:
I found myself thinking: Man, this so does not play into my fantasies about what it would be like to run a multiplex. Maximizing profit?
Probably the owner cares about that, but…. What I’d really like to be doing is boffing the chickie in the ticket office, and sneaking out back for a joint with the projectionist between reel changes.Wouldn’t be that hard to do as a game, really; a straightforward resource management game, only you’d be trying to maximize the amount of fun your character is having, rather than profits–without getting fired, of course. In fact, maybe there’s a whole genre of “Slacker” rather than “Tycoon” games here.