Pretty much every single video game ever pits you in the role of an Awesome Person – someone we could aspire to be, or someone with great skills in incredible situations. Who wouldn’t want to be James Bond, or a race car driver, or a blood-crazed murderous psychopath? Video games let you be all those things every day!

But I think there’s a lot of jobs out there that are woefully under-represented in video games, that would make for great experiences! In fact, here’s some examples from gaming history that show that not every game has to be about an amazing vocation:

Newspaper Deliverer: Bugger getting up at 4 in the morning to ride your bike in the dark to the local newsagent so the surly, cigarette-smelling newsagent can throw a pile of newspapers at you and command you to disperse them around the neighborhood for a laugh. Yet somehow Paperboy is a game that works well! It’s got all the right ingredients – angry dogs, potholes in the street, and annoying kids who like to run into you on their crappy little three wheel trike things – it’s all here for you to enjoy while safely inside your own home.

Garbage collector: This is another job that requires you to get up at some ungodly hour in the morning to just to traipse around the suburbs dealing with crap nobody else wants to handle. Trashman was based around the unseen world of being a professional garbologist, and you just walk around the streets and backyards picking up trash to take back to your trash van. Do it successfully and you’re a hero. Do it badly and you die from oncoming traffic. Do it in real life in the middle of the day and you get arrested.

Bartender: A lot of people at my day job say I should be a bartender, since I spend a lot of time listening to other people’s problems and I keep turning up to work drunk. This is why I enjoy Beer Tapper, with its simple but endearing mix of cute characters and simple gameplay.

Factory Worker: I worked in a factory once. It was terrible! You had to stand around a stuffy warehouse all day assembling doo-dads from other doodads and there’s boxes everywhere and nobody’s happy and the radio is always so stupidly loud and not tuned in properly and oh God I’m having flashbacks someone hold me. Anyway! This has not prevented me from finding Night Shift oddly compelling. It’s a Lucasarts game that not many people remember, but you’re a factory worker that assembles robots together for Industrial Might and Logic in a cute platform game. The challenge is to make sure the right pieces get put together by the myriad series of levers, pulleys and conveyor belts that cause you a lot of grief in later stages. Give it a try!

Coal Miner: Australia has recently gone through a mining boom, where they were hiring anyone and everyone with a pair of feet to dig up dirt all day in return for stupid amounts of money. Maybe I should have joined in, but I am way too lazy for things that involve actual hard work. Instead, I played a bit of Manic Miner. Games like that and Mr. Driller, Spelunky, H.E.R.O., Boulder Dash and even Dig Dug show that there’s a world of gameplay opportunity under the ground.

Taxi Driver: I have a family member that is a taxi driver and he doesn’t recommend it. I don’t think it would be much fun. Being stuck in a car all day, dealing with traffic and people (ugh, people) and having to work 16 hour shifts just to make enough money to afford the taxi hire so you can spend another 16 hour shift doing the same thing over again NO THANK YOU. So why is Space Taxi the greatest video game of all time? Why is Crazy Taxi so much fun? Heck, the bit I liked the best about Quarantine was just ferrying people around, I guess there’s something therapeutic about it all.

Short order cook: Now I love burgers. Burgers made me the man I am today – overweight, lethargic, and confounding doctors who think I should have died years ago. But I couldn’t imagine working in a diner making burgers all day, that’s like a real job or something! And I would get hungry, and tired from standing all day, and I would complain a lot, and the other workers there would hate me. The good news is that Burgertime is a much better way to experience the life of a short order cook, and I’m sure it’s 100% accurate to the real thing. I also learned how to make cakes from Parappa The Rapper but nobody likes them.

Plumber: Now I guess being a plumber wouldn’t be all bad, but apparently there’s lots of dirt and mess and crawling underneath cupboards and spiders oh did I mention the spiders there are spiders everywhere in my cupboard this is why I just order burgers every night. Thankfully there is a game called Pipe Dream that lets you live the life of a plumber by matching pipes together before the water reaches the end. It came along when everyone was looking for the next Tetris and while it’s not Tetris good it’s still pretty good and they keep re-releasing it every few years so you can play it on pretty much everything. Oh and there was a game called Super Mario Bros that had plumbers in it? I guess?

Pest Inspector: Every year I get the Pest guy out to the house to take care of the spiders in the cupboard and he tells me how much his job sucks, which begs the question of why he does it every year, but maybe he was inspired to do it because Greenhouse on the Game and Watch was pretty damn awesome. I loved that game! There was also an arcade game called Exterminator where you sprayed bugs in a house that was sort of OK but nothing to change your career choices for.

Chernobyl Manager: I think we can all agree that the guy who was in charge of Chernobyl had a really bad day a couple of decades ago. Man, I would have hated to have to deal with HR the day after that screw-up. So why did they actually make a game that lets you run Chernobyl? And why did I spend a whole weekend playing it one time? Did you know that running a woefully underfunded and overstressed nuclear power plant is actually a difficult task? It was news to me! All I remember from that time was being really worried our cows were going to glow in the dark.

Now let’s take it to the next level. What job do you have, and how could it be a great video game?