Field Note Taking Assignment: Drain Simulator

Before beginning the game, I think that one of the most notable things I bring to my pre-game observation is how much prior context of hands-on renovation work and experiences of living in a rainy place I bring. Prince Rupert has some serious rainfall and old infrastructure (my house is from 1916!) so I feel that with a game like DrainSim, I’m in an unusual position as a player as I’ve already lived through a few floods and messy situations. I’m sure I’ll be paying attention to how the game approaches the usage of tools of the trade and how it aligns with or diverges from what I already know.

I’d say that prior to starting the game I was in a genuinely good and optimistic headspace. I am intrigued at the concept of DrainSim as a game and feel that the chaos will be lighthearted, humorous, and low-stakes in comparison to experiencing real disastrous and time consuming situations in real life. There’s something I find a bit funny (but also a natural irony) about choosing a drain simulator for this assignment given where I am in life. Just the other day I came across the City of Prince Rupert putting out a notice for residents to be aware of clogged drainage basins and so something about this choice feels like it fits. I’ve spent enough time over the past few years planning out kitchen and bathroom renovations, working in crawlspaces, laying down perimeter drainage rock and pipe, and dealing with flooded basements that this was a weirdly familiar game that sparked my curiosity.

Despite having some troubles installing steam and running this game in a windows compatibility layer on my Linux Thinkpad setup (I’m using Endeavour OS with Hyprland as a Desktop Environment) I’m in good spirits despite having a slow start.

My instinct going into this game is that there will be subtle statements about: the unglamorous nature of physical labour work, the types of rough-around-the-edges people and humour that come with trades work, as well as other depictions of stereotypical norms (ie. the portrayal of gender roles or apparel) that are stereotypical to the trades. A lot of times it seems that this type of trades work doesn’t get celebrated in the way that other trades do despite being a necessity in everyday life. I’m curious whether the game actually engages with any of this at all, or whether it just gamifies the surface of it.

Since my expectations going into have been primarily shaped by my own experiences (and problems) with plumbing and drainage systems due to living in Prince Rupert, I’m excited to try the game out and see how DrainSim aligns with real world complexities and problems.

The first scene begins with a TV news report setting the story: the town is blocked off by a torrential flood and city workers cannot get to the flooded areas. A middle-aged white guy wearing coveralls holding a plunger leaves his bathroom and walks out his front door looking out onto a flooded street during a storm. The starting home has an American flag hanging outside of it giving the impression that this is somewhere in a residential neighbourhood amongst the lower states in a potential flood zone.

The tone of this story objectively appeared as the kind of disaster situation that would cause real fear and panic for people, city workers, and insurance companies alike, yet one of the first things heard upon starting the game is the flush of a toilet, indicating a kind of lighthearted humour. There’s a deliberate contrast right away portrayed in seeing an abandoned car amongst a flooded road alongside some guy with a plunger attached to his belt.

As previously mentioned, there is no health bar or wellness status for the character, instead there is a water level indicator. This portrays the game not necessarily as a survival game, but rather solely about water mitigation. I had to turn on the “always day” and “always light” in the settings fairly quickly because the darkness was too hard for me to navigate as a beginner. My first task involved finding a rake and heading towards the backed-up storm drain where leaves were clogging it. Even though the gameplay and controls felt similar to games I have experienced (WASD to move, spacebar to jump, click to use your primary tool, etc) I had difficulty remembering how to access the map and change tools. During the first level, there was an arrow on the screen pointing me towards the various drains and objects I was to engage with so it wasn’t too hard to navigate.

There were constant tips popping up on screen: “scrape the storm drains, and keep scraping until you see bubbles or leaves float up. Listen for gurgling.” Which was quite basic at first but very useful in understanding how I was to engage with the game environment. The game’s overall instruction towards what to do and how to do it: “Find the last drain.” “Go to the backyard.” was quite helpful at first in understanding how the game worked, but I found that I grew a bit reliant on it and felt lost in the second level when those tips no longer appeared.

One thing I noticed early on was that after clearing a storm drain, the leaves would come back and clog it again over time. Although it annoyed me a bit, I thought this was interesting as it resembled how drains can get re-clogged in real life.

I decided to venture into the basement where I found the water main was leaking and flooding the area. I was instructed to turn off the power at the breaker panel first, while standing in the flooded basement, which I thought was a bit questionable from a safety standpoint. After that I was directed to pick up a pipe wrench and tighten the leaking water main pipes. The game had a visual indicator of a crescent wrench moving in the direction of which to turn the pipe, “righty tighty lefty loosey,” which was a nice touch.

What the player was able to carry at one time was worth noting as the game only allowed for the player to hold one primary tool at a time. This meant that in order to pick up a shovel, I had to drop the pipe wrench. This gameplay logic created a back-and-forth that felt realistic in a tedious sort of way.

In the backyard, I was directed to dig a path for the water so that it could flow to my neighbour’s backyard and away from my own home. Throughout the first level, tools would magically appear in convenient areas when needed, as if I had a secret labourer doing the hard work for me. A generator appeared in the backyard out of nowhere, a submersible pump and extension cord appeared in the basement when I needed them. This happened frequently in the first level, though when I reached the second level the tools were scattered around my pickup truck where I spawned, which felt more like how things actually are on a jobsite. For cleaning up the flooded basement, I had to place the submersible pump in the deepest part of the water and run the drain hose up to the backyard. I then had to grab the generator, move it to the entrance of the basement, connect the power cable to the generator, and turn it on. That sequence felt satisfying once it worked. It is worth noting that I did accidentally turn the generator on and connect a live cable to the pump while it was still underwater, which in real life wouldn’t have been very fun.

When I was done with the basement and backyard flooding, I was instructed to find the big squeegee and push the remaining water towards the storm drains on the street. When the tutorial ended and I moved onto the second level, “Midtown Market,” I felt a bit lost when I was no longer being spoon-fed what to do and was on my own.

I probably spent a good two hours trying to figure out how to rake leaves out of a storm drain. Some of the frustration was primarily due to not being able to see objects as clearly as I needed to due to the lower graphics rendering capabilities of my laptop. Discovering that the water level kept gradually rising if I did not fully complete a task added to that challenge, and there were stretches where I genuinely did not know if I was making progress or just moving water around in circles.

Some satisfying moments came when a task was complete: tightening a pipe, watching the water flow to my neighbour’s backyard, and seeing the level complete screen once I managed to eventually “git’r done.” By the end of the first level I felt fairly worn out, and moving into the second level without any guidance made that feeling worse before it got better.

It seems that the core problem in each of the levels is always the same: there is water where it should not be, and it is the player’s job to move it somewhere else. When I finally made it to the second level, I felt that even though I had gone through the process of learning how to use the tools in the first level, I was not really sure where to start when left on my own. This made me think that the objective was not really to problem solve, but to follow a patterned way of using tools to mitigate groundwater. In considering this, it seems that the prescribed sequencing of gameplay removes a layer of player agency that a more realistic simulation might have had.

In each of the tasks, the water level acts as a kind of clock through how it regenerated over time. Having an area reflood if the player is not fast enough creates a sense of urgency and makes it so that the player must be efficient in their movements and decisions.

While I found that the heavy scaffolding in the first level was effective for the initial onboarding of the game, it left me feeling underprepared for the second level when the instruction I had been relying on disappeared and I had to figure out the order of operations on my own.

The protagonist of the game, being a middle-aged white working-class man, combined with the subtle display of an American flag on his house, the suburban setting, and the disaster scenario, gives the game a fairly specific “lone hero” archetype vibe.

In addition to this, I found the framing of what was or was not considered dangerous to be worth noting. The character operates electrical equipment while standing in standing water with no PPE and no acknowledgment of real hazards. For a game otherwise trying to simulate trades work in hostile conditions, the absence of any safety framing is a telling omission.

Another point worth bringing up is the task of redirecting water onto your neighbour’s property. While it is presented as just another objective, the fact that the game casually glosses over the civic reality of proper drainage solutions is telling of what kind of game this is and the silly workarounds that will be required in order to accomplish various goals.

Overall, I think the regeneration of debris overtop of the clogged drains was one of my favourite design choices of the game as it showcases the true reality of drainage problems and flowing water: drainage work and drains do not always stay fixed.

Getting a handle on this game was less about learning the mechanics and more about learning to read the environment well enough to know what needed doing next. The most important skill of this game turned out to be sequencing and knowing what order to tackle the problems in.

I watched a Twitch VOD of someone else playing Drain Simulator. There was no real narration focused on the game itself, but there was a live chat transcript from when it was originally streamed, and the streamer did occasionally call out actions out loud: “pick up the bucket,” “pick up the pump.” Simple and action-oriented, not analytical.

The night mode they played in, which I had turned off entirely because I could not navigate in the dark, actually looked great. There were reflections of rain, lightning, and street lamps amongst the flooded street in a way that really aligned with the disaster-styled storyline of the game. I feel that this context matters because a lot of my struggle in playing was probably less about the game itself and more about not being able to see what was happening clearly enough to make decisions.

What took me about 2.5 hours in the tutorial, this player completed in under 15 minutes. They sprinted everywhere where I had only ever walked. They checked the tablet map with fluency, switched tools without hesitation, and combined tool usage in ways I had not figured out, like squeegeeing water toward the submersible pump rather than trying to push it all the way to the drain by hand. In the second level, they were also able to find a drain I had never located, this one clogged by garbage rather than leaves.

In Midtown Market, they worked through the sequence of unclogging the street drains first, then set up the generator outside the flooded cafe, placed the submersible pump inside, and pumped the water out to the now-unclogged drain. In hindsight that seems like the obvious move, but when I was playing my mind went straight to the cafe without realizing I needed to unclog the street drains first.

One mistake I watched the streamer make was while vacuuming the cafe they had been moving too fast and carelessly dumped the contents of the vacuum back onto the floor after vacuuming it up. They expressed frustration by stating “Oh my god!” which I found to be humanizing after watching them move so fluidly throughout the level up to that point.

After completing level two, they went magnet fishing in the canal, a point I had never reached when I played. They pulled up a scooter, a safe with an old camera inside, a lunch box, a shopping cart, audio equipment, an ashtray, and a screwdriver. The live chat was entertaining throughout, with someone joking “man, this guy lifts” when they pulled up the safe. The money earned from the level and the fishing was used to shop for new tools from a garage between levels.

The narration and chat throughout were not really about the game. It was more about the streamer’s community checking in, talking about Women’s Day, asking how people were doing. The game was almost secondary to the social context of the stream itself.

Watching another person play the game was a mixture of different feelings for me. There was something humbling about watching someone finish the first two levels so fluently in such a short period of time compared to how I stumbled through the same tasks, though it felt clarifying more than anything knowing it could be done that easily. It made it obvious that a lot of the difficulties I experienced were not about the game itself being hard, but rather about me not knowing how to play the game efficiently.

Even when the streamer made little errors, there was a kind of rhythm to how they moved throughout the game, using the same tools and the same process over and over to clear the flooded areas. When they did show frustration it was only briefly before they moved on. Watching the moments where their experience overlapped with mine made it clear that some frustrations are just built into the game itself, regardless of skill level, and that nothing is ever perfect. I was watching this person navigate and engage with this world in a genuinely different way from what I had done during my own playthrough, making me think about how differently the same game can be for different players depending on context and familiarity.

One of the most obvious things that came from watching this session was how much the graphics shaped the entire experience of the game, not just aesthetically but functionally. The water levels, flooded zones, and drain locations were all significantly more visible and easier to engage with at higher settings. A lot of what I experienced as confusion or difficulty was compounded by the fact that I genuinely could not see the environment clearly enough to navigate it, which is worth noting as a real limitation of my own playthrough.

Beyond that, the streamer’s fluency came from what I would describe as their own working memory within the game. They remembered what tools they had, where they were on the map, and what the correct sequence of operations needed to be. I kept forgetting I had access to certain tools, where I had put something, or what I had or had not already done. Their approach was also more playful and improvisational, where I was much more methodical and cautious, which seemed to slow everything down considerably.

Watching a more skilled player made it clear that a lot of what I experienced as the game’s difficulty was actually a combination of hardware limitations and unfamiliarity with modern game mechanics and the underlying logic. It also revealed that this player’s fluency came less from understanding the simulation deeply and more from knowing how to move through a game environment efficiently, which is its own kind of literacy entirely.