Is the vanlife spirit dead?

Today, we’re going to talk about vanlife. But first, a quick question: have you ever had the feeling that, all of a sudden, something you’d never noticed before just keeps popping up? That an object, a word, a logo you didn’t know about seems to be omnipresent from one day to the next? You must have experienced this feeling once in your life.

And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a personal example: since my brother started working for MAN, I’ve been seeing MAN trucks everywhere! It’s not that there are more of them on the roads. It’s all the fault of a little cognitive bias with a rather evocative name: the frequency illusion (or Baader-Meinhof phenomenon). Basically, if you notice something for the first time at time X, you will, after said time, tend to notice it more often, and this gives the unfounded impression of higher frequency.

Today, I’m struck by another fact: I see vans everywhere. Since my other half and I finally found that rare pearl to furnish, it’s simple, it’s all I see. Of course, there’s my insta feed, which suggests new ways of furnishing our car every day, but it’s not just a question of algorithms, or else we’re living in a giant simulation. It’s impossible to hit the road without running into vanlifers. A quick drink and Edgar is telling us how his cousin decided to leave everything behind and live in a little house on wheels. I can’t help thinking, “There goes that old Baader-Meinhof again! Except this time, it’s more than just a perception bias. It’s a fact: the market for converted vans has simply exploded. One of the reasons for this is confinement, which has prompted city dwellers to flee the cities, seek the great outdoors and opt for greater freedom: everything that vanlife promises!

Before Covid, {the van segment} accounted for a third of new vehicle sales in France. By 2023, it accounts for 60%.

Antoine Guéret, member of the executive committee of Uni-VDL, the leisure vehicles union, for Le Figaro

The industry can therefore say thanks to the pandemic, at least if it weren’t for a rather unwelcome cynicism. And, as I’m sure you’re aware, there’s another industry that has taken advantage of this very special situation: the video game industry. While this common ground may seem trivial at first glance, it’s far from it. Today, the paths of these two industries are finally crossing. The nomadic madness has also taken hold of the video game world! Yes, our favorite industry didn’t wait for the recently announced Caravan SandWitch to ride the wave of vans of all kinds. For some months now, games of this kind have been appearing one after the other, without necessarily resembling each other. But what lies beneath the hood of this new trend?

Vanlife: the new indie trend?

April 5, 2023. Spanish developer Anabel Sánchez launches her first project on Kickstarter. It’s a call for funding for a little game called Camper Van: Make it Home, created by a team of independent developers under the Malapata Studio banner. The concept is simple: invite players to furnish their own van, all supported by an environmental narrative à la Unpacking. Intriguing, isn’t it? But not necessarily revolutionary at first glance. And yet, the campaign was a runaway success. It took just 16 hours to reach its €15,000 target. With 2,299 contributors, the project even managed to raise nearly €55,000. Surprising? Well, not really. After all, Camper Van: Make it Home was born out of in-depth market research aimed at finding a concept that combines “what the public wants and what we can develop,” explains the studio on its website.

The question now is whether or not Outbound will succeed in creating a similar craze. What is Outbound ? Well, let me tell you. Outbound is another vanlife game which is due to launch its Kickstarter campaign shortly. This time, it’s from the Dutch team at Square Glade Games. We’re keeping the van and the layout principle, but this time we’re coupling it with exploration and crafting mechanics. The aim is to gradually optimize your van to produce and explore more efficiently. While the game concept is a little different, Outbound follows the same vanlife trend. A trend that clearly appeals to gamers, since Outbound has made it into the top 100 most-wanted games on Steam.

While these two examples are particularly noteworthy, they’re not the only ones to breathe new freedom feeling into Steam. Mind you, there have always been vans in video games. From games that let you drive a few, like GTA, to those centred on a house on wheels, like Little Brother Jim. But never before have so many games on this theme been released so quickly. In addition to the two games mentioned above, there are currently a whole host of van simulators in the pipeline (American Camper Simulator, VanLife Simulator, Vanlife Camping Simulator, Camper Renovator…). In life as in games, everything is an excuse to put any building on wheels, and not just mini-homes, but travelling stores too. Coffee Caravan and Tiny Bookshop are good examples. The vanlife spirit at every level? Well, yes and no… Because if there is a trend, it’s not always one that embraces the philosophy of adventurers on wheels.

From anti-consumerism to consumer madness

And yet, one could say that developers are human beings like any others. That they too have experienced confinement, and that a significant proportion of them have opted for vanlife. And that it’s from this new experience that the desire to create games that convey it was born. That’s what I thought before starting this article. But if you’ve been paying any attention at all, you’ll already know that this is not the case for Camper Van: Make it Home.

From time immemorial, wandering souls in search of freedom have taken to the roads and said goodbye to a sedentary lifestyle. Some nomadic communities have even made it a way of life, together, for centuries. But it was in the 60s that a veritable vanlife movement was born. And this movement was built around a rejection of consumer society and its shackles. It must be said that, at the time, this concept of life was in its infancy, driving companies to use every possible means (marketing, production methods, etc.) to encourage individuals to buy more than they needed. Forget the bare minimum, this was a time of opulence and decadence. If today we’re up to our necks in this consumer society, so much so that it’s become the norm, at the time it was new, and it inevitably gave a significant boost to this protest movement advocating freedom and anti-consumerism. As a result, many took to the road, enjoying low-cost vacations, a new-found freedom, a reconnection with nature, and sometimes even large fireside gatherings around shared values. The vanlife became the symbol of a philosophy on the bangs of society, advocated a little later by movements such as the Hippies, with its own identity and imagery. The image of the Volkswagen combi and refurbished school buses was created during this period of cool protest.

As we’ve already said, the title is the fruit of market research, conducted a priori within a pre-incubator – which sounds very start-up nation all the same. In a very caricatured way, we can imagine a team in suits and tailors scrutinizing players’ desires to come up with a game concept with no real soul, designed solely to appeal to a wide audience. If identifying your target audience is an important step in the development of a game, even for independents, making it the source of your concept is a bit rich. Especially since this is clearly not the idea of the “vanlife spirit”. But what is the “vanlife spirit” anyway?

But while the images remain, things have changed. Try buying a small combi and you’ll understand the pain. And even without opting for the Holy Grail of the vanlifer, it’s hard to recapture the spirit of yesteryear. Vanlife has become cool and trendy. And, as we’ve said, a veritable flourishing market has been built around this new fashion. As a result, owning a van today has nothing to do with the early days. It’s expensive, community spirit is totally absent and freedom, while still present, has lost some of its lustre with increasingly restrictive legislation. The van has become a consumer good like any other, and the hippies of the time would probably be horrified at the monster it has become. When you see that the hippie/vanlife aesthetic has even been taken up by NFT, it’s clear that the original spirit has been totally lost along the way.

As you can see, vanlife has become just another trend to exploit… As a result, it’s hardly surprising to see it treated as such on the indie gaming scene. It is, however, almost surprising not to see such a trend invading cinemas. It’s almost as if filmmakers don’t want to measure up to the aura of the Into the Wild behemoth. Of course, there have been other proposals since 2007, such as Nomadland, but that’s not enough to identify a real trend like the one currently affecting the indie game market. In fact, it’s quite interesting that the cinema market is less influenced than the JV market by real-world trends. It would seem that this trend, at the very least, lends itself more to the role of gamer than spectator.

It has to be said that vanlife games allow for great things in terms of gameplay. You don’t just get a few shots of various landscapes along the way. You can feel the freedom, as if you were there, and design your own space… To the question “What explains this trend?”, Coffee Caravan’s developers responded:

“Caravans are a great combination of freedom, a cozy environment, independence and creativity. That’s probably why they’re such a popular theme. As a result, games aren’t just about running a business, they can incorporate travel mechanics, world exploration and an interesting new way of living.”

And here we touch on an interesting point. While these mechanics obviously appeal to an ever-growing panel of gamers attracted by wholesome games, these games that want to do you good, in the final analysis they are quite faithful to the philosophy of yesteryear. Despite a few feathers being ruffled along the way, the vanlife spirit is not totally dead in the video game industry. What’s more, a few die-hards are still trying to keep it alive beyond the mere trend.

Life on the road

Let’s stay with Coffee Caravan. This game is first and foremost the story of two developers in love with coffee. It’s also the story of a coincidence. After agreeing to develop a coffee-shop management game, they came face to face with a small coffee-shop caravan in the park where they usually hang out. For them, it quickly became obvious: the coffee shop in their game would be in a caravan. In fact, although the two developers don’t yet have their own van, they don’t despair that one day they’ll have the conditions to take to the roads themselves: “We like to travel, and traveling in a caravan must create a certain atmosphere. We like the freedom it implies.” There’s no denying it, at Broccoli Games we’ve got at least a little vanlife spirit.

And the spirit returns the sentiment. In developing the Coffee Caravan concept, Ondra and Alenka discovered a significant advantage: “We realized that the caravan motif could be done in a simple, minimalist way that would speak to the cozy community […] The caravan theme also helps to limit the player’s space and therefore encourages more creative ways of playing.” Isn’t it interesting to find in this concept what was one of the major advantages of vans at the time: widening the field of possibilities with little means?

To go a step further, and if you’ll allow me to digress for a moment, a game like Spilled! also embodies something of the anti-conformism of the time: the desire to reconnect with nature, which today necessarily involves an emphasis on ecology. But what does a game that invites you to clean up the water on board a small boat have to do with our subject? Well, its developer, Lente, hasn’t opted for the cold walls of an apartment to house herself, but rather for the small spaces of a boat, free to sail the waves. Admittedly, here the wheels have been replaced by propellers, but the idea remains in line with that of all vanlifers: to live differently and in a place redesigned by one’s own hands.

This is also what David, developer of Tiny Bookshop, did. Barely out of high school, he and his girlfriend bought and renovated an old van from the 80s. After a number of not-so-smooth jaunts through the heart of France, they were forced to get rid of the car. But David’s moped spirit never left him. So much so, that the day he came across a bookshop on wheels in Christchurch, he was seduced! From burnt-out developer to itinerant bookseller, it’s only a short step. A step that David was almost ready to take before opting instead to create Tiny Bookshop. For him, working around this theme is good for devs:

“Game developers dream of getting away from the screens they’re forced to work on and the cities whose rents they struggle to pay, it doesn’t surprise me.”

In an industry that often makes its employees suffer with crunches, huge targets and redundancies, it’s hardly surprising to see many of them opting for themes that smell of freedom. There’s certainly a cathartic salvation effect. It’s a bit like giving a talk on a travel destination: it gets you out of the daily grind, gives you a change of scenery, clears the head… But while David says that developing Tiny Bookshop has helped him rediscover a certain desire to create, he doesn’t see it as an escape either: “in a way, developing games makes me long for this way of life more and more, and it’s this longing that I put back into my games.”

Longing… That’s what we’re looking for in experiences like the ones we’ve mentioned. It’s also what we find in Trinity’s live videos, or those of other streamers and content creators who document their vanlife experience in images. We dream a little of what our lives would be like if we threw everything away, if we went wandering without worrying about the consequences. We dream of a less urban, freer life. A dream life increasingly incompatible with video gaming. Whether you’re a developer or an itinerant gamer, getting your best set-up on board has never been easier. Once again, a whole business has been built up in recent years. And if you wait too long, maybe you’ll finally take the plunge and hit the road yourself, or, like David, go green in a little cabin in the middle of the forest, far from everything, “away from screens, to tinker, chop wood and be surrounded only by birds, trees and too many mosquitoes.” And if that’s not an option, there are always all those little games to offer you a welcome interlude in this tumultuous world.