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We tested Youtubers Life 2 and it is not just a simulator of content creators, but of trying to be happy

By : ujikiu / On : 15/11/2022

By Adrián Suárez/October 19, 2021
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Video games allow us to be someone else, but who else do we want to be? Gamers' dreams have changed a lot since 2000, and the genre of life and social simulation reminds us of it. The illusion that The Sims sold us is no longer enough. In 2021, children dream of something more than a house, a job and a stable partner.

Being someone else is the most common thing we do in a video game. In Devil May Cry we play Dante, in Dark Souls we play hollow. But in those titles we just play that avatar, we don't change him or twist his life to our will. The fun of social simulation games is exactly that: go from being just an actor or a prompter to embody a character that we create; we modify their way of thinking and being to adapt it to us or to an illusion of ourselves. The great representative of this genre has always been The Sims. Since the year 2000, the video game saga started by the legendary Will Wright has marked the path that others have followed. Game by game, each of its chapters has guided the rest on how to translate vital actions and events into numbers, rewards, and punishments. In The Sims we have been almost anything, and we have experienced everything. We have been fathers and mothers, vampires, famous stars...

The wonderful thing about video games is that genres mix, merge and share ideas. Thanks to this, we have seen pieces of that simulation of The Sims in genres as diverse as JRPG, strategy, or farm games. What would Persona 5 be without its social links, or Stardew Valley without being able to interact with our neighbors and change the protagonist? Many times, the story is produced in reverse, traveling the role-playing systems to the simulation. And not only that, but the kind of person we can be in these games changes. In the first game of The Sims we dreamed of having a house without a mortgage to pay, a more or less nondescript job that would give us money and a partner. At Youtubers Life 2 we dream of being content creators and making a living communicating our ideas to the world through social networks. With a 20-year difference, the essence of both simulators is the same: playing at being older, but from different perspectives.

The story of Youtubers Life 2, which hits stores today, begins right after the completion of the first. It is assumed that you were the first to finish the original and that it was not a game, but a social experiment. That achievement is rewarded with a fantastic house in NewTube, the city of youtubers. You move and start a new life. Your mission will be to become the most famous youtuber in the area, be very aware of the trends that occur around you to turn them into content to post on your networks, meet people, attend events and live. The approach that the video game makes to being an influencer through the generation of video content and photographs is not real at all, it is very sweetened and turned into a video game so that it can be enjoyed. This is noticeable from its staging. Youtubers Life has an artistic direction, some colors and an interface that is reminiscent of Sims Mobile in an adorable version. It wants to be a kind game in which, if you organize yourself well, you will achieve your goals. In other words, this is not a complex video editing and recording simulator, but rather a social life simulator among youtubers. And that is where the game stands out the most, in its part of “Life” and less in that of “Youtuber”.

From dreaming of a house to dreaming of being an influencer

NewTube is a city divided into three neighborhoods. In them there are comic book stores, video game stores, gyms, theaters, nightclubs, beaches, squares, places where events take place... And it is inhabited by both ordinary citizens and singular characters. Time passes organized in days with a cycle of day and night, and everyone has their routines. Stores open and close and things happen that you can miss and that you have to attend. As it happens in real life, or rather on twitter and instagram, there are trends that change every day. On a Monday a video game, cats or some influencer is in fashion. The next day, these trends change. Our character has an energy bar, and as he spends his strength he will have to go through NewTube, capture these trends with his camera, meet people, overcome challenges and collect all of that in the videos he uploads to his channel. Sometimes it will be a good idea to go to the video game store, buy the hot title and do gameplays, but in other times the ideal is to take a picture of yourself in a trending place and then make a video commenting on it. All that consumes energy, and to recover it you will have to eat, sleep and also train in the gym.

There are social simulators that have adopted ideas from role-playing games, and this is the case of Youtubers Life 2As I said at the beginning of the text, there are social simulators that have adopted ideas from role-playing games, and this is the case of Youtubers Life 2. In The Sims we made decisions, but we were never fully in charge of the consequences; in fact, that was the fun and still is so many installments later. Each Sim had their own personality, and could react in very different ways to our actions. This is a house brand. In the original SimCity from 1989, a precursor to The Sims and also the work of Will Wright, Godzilla could even show up unannounced to wreck your town. However, Youtubers Life 2's approach to how we become an influencer, how we live, and how we grow is different. Here we can plan, anticipate problems and interpret the game systems very clearly to predict the future. It has been done by combining two things: RPGs and digital marketing metrics. In Persona 5 we know that if we fight and advance we will be better, "our numbers" will go up. In digital marketing, be it SEO, SEM or social networks, you work for a brand by interpreting what its users do by studying numbers, decisions are made, they are executed and it is expected that these numbers will grow. At the crossroads of those two ideas is Youtubers Life 2. And that also changes that avatar that we get into and incarnate. Because, in reality, we are not role-playing a person, but a brand. Because that's what our hero is becoming: a brand free of chaos. Free from Godzilla.