Pressure Washing is Not a Game (or is it?)

Recently, we set up a profile on BlueSky, one of the latest social media apps vying to become the next Twitter (now known as X). I started searching around the site for other pressure washing companies to see what they’re doing on the app but didn’t find many, which makes sense because BlueSky hasn’t been around all that long. What I did find were a lot of mentions of Power Wash Simulator – a video game where – as you might guess by the title – the sole goal of the game is to clean things with a pressure washer.

I had heard of the game when it first came out a couple years ago. But I’m a few years older than most folks who play video games and we keep pretty busy pressure washing in the real world, so I haven’t really had the time or desire to play with it. In the meantime, it seems to have become rather popular in the gaming world.  New York Times Magazine and Vice have published articles about it. And since things slow down around here as the cold sets in outside, I figured the time has come to set up an account on Steam to give it a try.

The first thing I noticed is that there’s no water runoff. You can spray as much as you want and things get clean – but the dirty water magically vanishes and never goes anywhere. If you were washing a van like this in a garage, you’d soon have a muddy mess all over the floor. In the real world, you need to make sure your runoff water isn’t going somewhere that will create an issue or run down a storm drain when it shouldn’t. The game doesn’t address any of that.

While we’re talking about what happens when water goes where it shouldn’t, there’s the issue of what happens when you spray things that shouldn’t be sprayed. In the game, you can aim your high pressure water stream at the lightbulb in the ceiling or at an uncovered electric outlet with no negative repercussions whatsoever.  Try that in the real world and you’ll find out quickly why that’s a bad idea. In Muckingham, apparently there is some magic that only allows water to do anything to objects that have dirt on them.

But the thing that made me give up on the game pretty quickly is the lack of serious repercussions that come from using the wrong pressure tip or chemical. In the game, changing the tips or chemicals only really adjusts how deeply or quickly things get clean. In the real world, using too narrow of a stream at too high pressure, or using the wrong chemical for type of mess you are trying to remove from the type of surface that the mess is on – and you can cause real damage that will make things much worse — and much more expensive — than the original mess you were trying to clean up.

Don’t get me wrong. I realize that this is just a game and the whole point is to unwind and have some fun. In that way, Power Wash Simulator reminds me a lot of Guitar Hero.  When it was released 20 years ago, I jumped onto the band wagon and spent countless hours playing with the toy controller with the 5 colored buttons on the fret bar and the rock switch strummer. It was the only game I could beat my kids at.  But it had very little relationship to being a real musician. Just like being good at Madden won’t make you a football star and Call of Duty doesn’t match the real world danger of being a soldier.

Power Wash Simulator is just fine for what it is and a lot of people find it to a be a great way to relax and unwind from the stress of the day. In fact, a study found that it can be good for your mental health. There’s something about watching things get clean that some people really enjoy. While I didn’t get too far into the gameplay myself, I understand that really starts to get interesting in the higher levels when you encounter more otherwordly objects to clean. But actually cleaning real things in the real world can be much more stressful and complicated.  A lot of things need to be considered to the job correctly, efficiently – and most importantly – SAFELY.