My father played farming simulator professionally. He didn’t stream it, he lived it. He would wake up to the ghost of his ex wife, shower, shave, put on pants like everyone else, drive an hour in traffic to get to the office, greet his coworkers, refill his coffee, and sit down at his cubicle. He was a real farmer.

I never really understood his passion for the whole thing. He was in the onion division, on the 13th floor of the Food And Grocer Gathering Offices TM. His control of the drones that plowed the fields two thousand miles away was legendary. As a child, he grew up playing simulator games. Thousands of hours spent tilling digital fields and glitching through wheat. He even learned German so he could get early access to updates. He would mod different agricultural conditions and produce.

After college, majoring in both agricultural studies and computer engineering, he was snipped up by the Food And Grocer Gathering Offices TM. Management had seen his mod work and hours put into the various games and they knew they had a winner. At that time it was a raunchy start up. They were a couple of software geeks who bought a few acres with daddies’ money and enough extra parts to put together what we now consider the cornerstone of modern food supply chain economics.

Back in the day, I learned from a video essay, there was a real fear that automation would take over most of the jobs, but this was during a period where computers and robots weren’t good enough to really do that yet unless actual research and funding by the federal government and private enterprise really wanted it. Of course, they didn’t. They realize with the advent of the shipping container that they could just ship all the product to cheaper countries with labor practices akin to slavery. So they did. There was this huge causal chain from that, a neo feudalism came about based in service industries for the wealthy while third worlders continued their slave wage jobs off the evolved form of capitalist global economics. When no one made anything anymore, these founders found that no one knew how to make anything anymore.

So they programmed a brain and taught it to farm. They scanned and OCR’d thousands of books on agriculture and farming practices into it. It learned quickly. They then built it a fleet of drones to actually do the labor. The neat bit about this was that it didn’t cost much material. A chocker sent electric shocks through the neck into the base of the brain, controlling it and telling the body exactly what to do. These were the drones my father controlled, and boy, did he ride them wild.

My father’s output from what they called the ‘farming simulator simulator’ or ‘Farmulacra’ for short, was renown throughout the thirteenth floor. With every employee of the month sticker he got, they also increased his bot count by a dozen. At this point he controlled roughly 400 bots at once. His macro skills and APM were better than most RTS players combined.

He told me when I was younger that he wanted me to be an onion farmer just like him, but I never had the chance to tell him that I wanted to be a vtuber instead. A few years back the company promoted him to head of the onion division and replaced all of his old division with the same drone technology they use to digitally harvest the fields. Now he’s head of the department and they gave him an apartment, right there on the thirteenth floor. At least now he doesn’t have the hour long commute.