The Torque Wrench and the Ludic Loop: A Critical Examination of Bike Mechanic Simulator 2023 as Simulation, Pedagogy, and Chore

BMS23 exists in a liminal space. For a novice, it provides anxiety-free exposure: you cannot strip a carbon frame, lose a spring, or overtighten a bolt past the point of recovery. This lowers the barrier to entry, potentially inspiring real-world tinkering.

The 2020s have witnessed a surge in "chore simulators" ( Viscera Cleanup Detail , PowerWash Simulator ) and repair games ( Car Mechanic Simulator , PC Building Simulator ). Bike Mechanic Simulator 2023 , developed by Image Power S.A. and published by PlayWay S.A., follows this formula: strip down, diagnose, replace, and reassemble bicycles. Unlike high-speed racing games that abstract the bicycle as a performance vector, BMS23 centers the bicycle as an object of labor. This paper asks: What kind of knowledge does BMS23 produce? And where does its simulation model break down?

Visual Diagnosis : Faults appear as highlighted red outlines. Real-world diagnosis involves tracing symptoms (e.g., creaking, indexing issues) to likely causes. BMS23 reverses this: the problem is pre-located, and the player merely performs the replacement. This eliminates the probabilistic, hypothesis-driven nature of real repair work.