It’s So Hard Playing Famous

Alex Pappademas, whose “tolerance for Kardashian-related bullshit is pretty much limitless,” describes playing the mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. “If this game were a person it would be a horrible sociopath,” he concludes, explaining that gameplay led him to question notions of work ethic:

Although she recorded voice-overs for her avatar (“Bible — I love that on you!”), it’s unclear how involved Kim Kardashian was with the conceptualization of this game. But the gameplay itself is an extension of the compensatory mythology of hard work that the Ks have created around their body of industrious nonwork. About once per Keeping Up With the Kardashians episode, you will hear one of the Ks use the word “work” to describe activities (having their photograph taken, drinking iced coffee while walking around a potential retail space, looking at pictures of bathing suits and saying “super cute”) that no one who actually works at a job, even an easy job, would refer to as such. I love the Kardashians and I believe they’ve sustained themselves as famous people through resourcefulness and even personal sacrifice, but them saying the word “work” is always, always funny to me. They need to come up with another word to describe what they do, like “gork.” A hypothetical Khloe quote from a world where this is the case: “I’ve just really been trying to focus on gork.”

So the Kardashian game isn’t just about providing you and me with the opportunity to vicariously live the life of a professional celebrity.

It’s propaganda designed to remind us at every turn that the life of a professional celebrity isn’t easy. That it takes gork. The most important resource in the Kardashian game isn’t fake money or the sparkly “K” stars you accumulate for successfully completing a mission; it’s “energy,” represented by little Gatorade-blue lightning bolts. Every task you do in a professional context in the game takes energy, even “Grab a drink,” which, strictly speaking, isn’t even a task.

Jessica Winter is on board:

That is the genius of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood: It perfectly captures the hollow-eyed compliant monotony of the very lifestyle it’s espousing. You absorb its value system into your bloodstream on contact.

The first big dilemma my avatar faced was deciding whether or not to spend precious Adderall-bolts of energy flirting with a D-list social worker at an overlit and underpopulated party (I didn’t, and shall therefore never know if he was the nephew of a TV executive). Her first major regret was leaving a big tip for a bartender on the hunch that he had “information” (he did not, because he was just a lowly bartender). After a few hours of play, you start to understand how, if you’d been forged in this crucible like Kim and her sisters, you, too, might have turned out just like these sad, tiny people inside your phone. In miniaturizing and cartoon-izing Kim Kardashian and her brethren, KK:H renders them as less cartoonish and more empathetic than they seem in real life. Making millions to stand around doing nothing, saying nothing, thinking nothing—it’s harder than it looks.