Christmas is the perfect time for comfy sims.

Those of you who have known me for a while will know that I have long been an advocate of the “comfy sim” — a specific type of video game where, generally speaking, the pressure is off and the emphasis is very much on simply enjoying the experience of doing something that you perhaps might not have the opportunity to do on a regular basis.

My appreciation for the comfy sim started right back in the days of the Atari 8-bit and Atari ST, when my Dad introduced me to subLOGIC’s Flight Simulator II, the precursor to what we know today as Microsoft Flight Simulator. There was no “point” to Flight Simulator II — to such a degree that my father refuses to refer to it as a “game” to this day — but there was something compelling about it. The experience of flying a plane, of going on adventures, of making use of supplementary material (books, in the case of FSII) to enhance the experience — all of it was a powerful stimulant to the imagination.

There were, of course, military flight simulators also, and I enjoyed those a lot too — particularly because many of them were considerably easier to fly than the hyper-realistic Flight Simulator II! They also tended to have much more of a “game-like” structure to them, in that you’d have objectives to complete, merits to earn, medals to acquire and all manner of other things. But at their heart, they were still pretty comfy experiences about imagining you were doing something that you don’t get the opportunity to do on a regular basis.

My comfy sims of preference today are SCS’ excellent Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. I’m hard-pressed to tell you which of them is my favourite, because they’re both excellent and have their own distinct appeal elements — but what I do know is that when I want to relax and just not really think about stuff for a while, driving a truck is one of the best things I can possibly do, particularly as I have a nice wheels and pedal setup that really helps with the sense of immersion.

For the unfamiliar, in ETS2 and ATS (as we shall refer to them hereafter), you begin life as an aspiring trucker who owns a run-down old garage in the city of your choice, but who doesn’t have a truck to their name. You begin your adventure by running “quick jobs” for local companies, who provide trucks and trailers for you, and pay any fees you might incur along the way such as road tolls and fuel costs. After a while, though, you’ll crave the freedom that owning your own truck provides — so you can either grind your way up to affording one out of your own pocket (which takes a while) or take out a loan with which to purchase a nice starter truck.

From there, the choice of what you want to do is up to you, within reason — remember that if you took out a loan to pay for your truck, you’ll need to repay that a bit at a time. But if you just want to cruise the roads exploring, you can do that; if you want to take jobs from the companies you stumble across, like a freelance trucker-for-hire, you can do that; if you want to systematically search out the most profitable opportunities in the local area, you can do that; if you want to buy your own trailer and pick up freight directly from the source, you can do that. As you progress, you can even buy and expand more garages, grow your fleet of trucks, expand your empire and be rolling in more money than you know what to do with.

The nice thing, though, is that ETS2 and ATS don’t put any pressure on you to do any of those things that you don’t want to. If the one thing you enjoy is simply driving around, do that — maybe taking the occasional job to cover your daily loan installments. If you enjoy the structured experience of taking jobs, you can focus entirely on that. If you enjoy the management aspect of attempting to build up your company and dominate the entire map with your business empire, you can do that. Or you can do a bit of everything.

There’s no “wrong” approach to ETS2 and ATS, and that’s the core of the comfy sim. It provides a framework and a playground in which you can have fun, but the exact details of that fun are left up to you. It is essentially an imaginative toy in software form — and sometimes it’s just what the doctor ordered.