The Dash column explores art and its social contexts. The dash separates and the dash joins, it pauses and it moves along. The dash is where the viewer comes to terms with what they’ve seen. Here, Eliza Levinson describes her travels through the world of trucking simulator livestreams during lockdown, a liminal kind of labor somewhere between the essential and the non.

Screenshot of Alex Navarro’s livestream, “We Be Truckin’!,” featuring Euro Truck Simulator 2 (SCS Software, 2012), May 26, 2020. © Giant Bomb, 2020.

It’s a Tuesday in late May, and Alex Navarro is still driving. Through the windshield, we watch the scenery rush by, beautiful and nondescript: blue sky dotted with white clouds, clusters of lush green trees run through with telephone wires, the distant polygons of an approaching city. Upbeat Russian pop music plays quietly as Alex guides us, swerving slightly, along the endless roads. “We’ve got a lot of driving to do, folks. A lot of driving,” he tells us, visible in black T-shirt and chunky headphones from a square in the screen’s corner.

This is “We Be Truckin’!,” part of a series called “Lockdown 2020” on the Giant Bomb gaming website where Alex works. In total, there are about twenty livestreams of “Truckin’!,” totaling just under forty hours (an average work week!) of Alex, us, and the open road. The streams generally follow a reliable structure: Alex picks his truck and game of choice (usually American Truck Simulator or Euro Truck Simulator 2). He shuffles through internet radio stations, often settling for the Slavic kitsch vibes of AutoLife Azerbaijan, before clicking through a long menu of available trucking gigs: schlepping concrete beams from St. Petersburg to Bucharest, or used plastic from Prague to Linz, or cars from one part of New Mexico to another. It doesn’t matter—you’ll never see goods loaded or unloaded, nor will you ever exit the truck. A destination appears on Alex’s GPS, and he starts driving.

Alex is transparent about the reason for his weekly return to Truck Simulator: it’s relaxing. More than once in each video, with a contented sigh, he’ll describe the peace driving brings him. The commenters on Alex’s livestreams are similarly satisfied. Under a late April video, @beard_of_zeus comments, “There is just something about slowly hauling lumber through the wilderness that really chilled me out.” A few weeks later, @Stamp writes, “I am with you listening to country music on the highway is my calm place.” Many thank Alex for his work—for transporting them—like @Baconmonk, who says, “Alex’s truck streams are exactly the kind of chill European adventure I need right now.”

I was first shown “We Be Truckin’!” during the summer of 2020, months after Alex’s first stream. Having never indulged in livestreams or even video games before, a lot about the series fascinated me. It was hypnotic: watching Alex zoom through nominally foreign highways felt like a chatty screensaver. There was something satisfying in his laidback labor-as-trucker, its infinitude, its simplicity. In a time when so much felt uncertain—especially the prospect of easily available work—it felt good to slip into a place where money was racked up by the second, to watch someone else do the (admittedly minimal) work of racking it up for me to see. The world of Truck Simulator is dominated, first and foremost, by its ease, which makes the points (money) earned from gameplay feel disposable and irrelevant. The game’s economy is much like its cities: a husk of a familiar thing, something and nothing at the same time.

“Lockdown 2020” logo. © Giant Bomb, 2020.

Still, the livestreams nagged at me. It felt like I was going out of my way to unplug my mind, to waste my time. I couldn’t understand why the very same monotony that had grown so existentially tiresome in the temporally-unbound days of the pandemic was, in this virtual context, exactly what I wanted. My time has value, I kept reminding myself, but watching the stream—two simultaneous performances of labor: the simulation of a menial job, played by someone paid to do so—felt like confirmation of the opposite.

In 2005, Julian Kücklich coined the term “playbor” to name unpaid work performed by individuals for fun, yet that ultimately serves the aims of a larger industry. At the time, he was writing about modifications gamers develop for popular video games, but his idea has been used to describe trends across platform capitalism. Today, critics of “gamification” point to instances when labor is made to mirror gameplay. They reference open-source software, whereby users improve existing programs without pay, and app-based employment offering rewards for logging as many hours on the clock as possible (as in the case of Uber). In the logic of playbor, and of Marxism, this is what is referred to as “exploitation”: a fundamentally unequal exchange wherein the value produced by workers (a company’s net revenue, a boss’s salary) exceeds that of the laborers’ compensation. The insidious nature of playbor encourages workers to forget their exploitation, blurring the line between on-the-clock production and off-the-clock diversion. The term playbor has also been used (incorrectly, some argue) to refer to games that reenact forms of labor, resembling a glorified series of errands.

In a meta-twist, livestreaming video game play is also arguably a form of playbor. Individual streamers, paid or otherwise, generate revenue for giant tech platforms like Twitch and YouTube as well as indie sites like Giant Bomb. Within the context of livestreaming, the tradeoffs to building a successful streaming career can be exhausting—and, in more than one case, fatal. In order to build up a presence as even a middling Twitch streamer, writes Joe Marino, his average day was eight hours, though many creators aim for more: ten, twelve, sixteen, twenty-four hour shifts. Streamer Little Siha admits that her chosen job takes a toll on her physical and mental health, but downplays this with an excuse central to the dangers of playbor: “At the end of a long day, I have to remind myself that my job is to play video games,” she says, “and that it could be so much worse.” Of course, Alex’s livestream comes via his work at Giant Bomb. He’s not trying to make it as an indie, which means that his “We Be Truckin’!” sessions are just two hours, never twenty-four.

Screenshot of Alex Navarro’s livestream, “We Be Truckin’!,” May 5, 2020. © Giant Bomb, 2020.

“If you look at games,” writes Daniel Joseph for Real Life, “capitalism stares back at you.” This is a fairly common thread in critiques of gamification, and the Truck Simulator franchise is no exception. The games offer the veneer of placidity and meditation, underpinned by capitalist dogma. Perform badly and be penalized: a clang and a flash on the dashboard will indicate that you’ve been fined for disobeying the rules of the road. Perform well and you’ll be able to buy new and better trucks—even, in some cases, a whole fleet, outsourcing your trucking to be performed by virtual laborers.

But Alex’s streams aren’t about work—not to him, even though he’s literally working—and not to his faithful viewers, who chat with him as he drives. Alex’s streams are about going somewhere; about freedom; about exhaustion; about escape; about longing. Or maybe they’re about nothing at all. In a recent essay for the New York Times Magazine, Kyle Chayka contemplates Americans’ insatiable hunger for numbness—what he calls “nothingness”—predating the pandemic but exacerbated by it. For nonessential workers in lockdown, most experience (work, leisure, socializing, and romance) comes through our glowing screens. The effect is anesthetizing. The desensitization we experience working and living through lockdown is accentuated by the rising popularity of recreational depressants and bingeing lightweight TV shows seemingly created to half-watch while simultaneously scrolling on our phones.

So much of this feels true about the “We Be Truckin’!” streams: the exuberant passage through distant lands, international exodus made feasible through colorful pixels and the savvy gameplay of a stranger. “We Be Truckin’!” offered some respite from the emotional rollercoaster of the pandemic and subsequent political upheavals. It felt like disassociation. It felt good. For Alex, the appeal seems to be similar, and in one video, he says as much. On a long drive from San Francisco to somewhere in Washington state, Alex is upbeat, turn signal clicking as he waits at a virtual red light. “There’s a number of stretches along this road that are just a whole bunch of nothing,” he remarks happily. “Beautiful nothing, but nothing nonetheless.”

Screenshot of Alex Navarro’s livestream, “We Be Truckin’!,” featuring American Truck Simulator (SCS Software, 2016), July 28, 2020. © Giant Bomb, 2020.

At some point, the tragic perpetuity of lockdown seems to have run “We Be Truckin’!” out of existence. Maybe the series’s obliquely hopeful quest toward adventure succumbed to the very boredom it tried to escape. Maybe it got too hard to keep going nowhere. After uploading videos close to weekly for five months, “We Be Truckin’!” became more sporadic. Alex streamed once on September 1, 2020, and then again on November 17, because American Truck Simulator had added a new state. In the final stream, Alex doesn’t mention the pandemic, the election, or the lockdown—at least not in the same wide-eyed way he does in earlier installments. In that sense, the bulk of the series is timestamped, detritus from a time when “all this” felt surprising; when numbness was something we sought, instead of something we felt. x

Eliza Levinson is a writer and artist based in Berlin. Her work has been featured in publications including The Nation, The New Inquiry, Artforum, Hyperallergic, and Arts of the Working Class.