A great deal of joy has been had by many people in the creation of scale models. I built model planes with my dad when I was younger and later moved into wargames. The process of assembling a model from its component parts and carefully painting it until it resembles its full-scale counterpart is thoroughly rewarding, and deeply unfun.
The joy of the hobby does not come from the processes it involves. Snipping plastic bits from sprues, cleaning them up and fitting them together is not enjoyable, it is repetitive and tiring. Carefully shading recessed panel lines, smoothly applying paint from a pot that had to be shaken to the point of RSI, frowning when you make a mistake that must now be corrected, is all slow and painful. Decals that need – well, the less said about the uniquely tense and stressful process of fixing decals, the better.
No, the joy of building models comes from the finished product, from seeing all your hard work and effort and suffering manifest as a figurine that you can observe with pride and a genuine sense of achievement. The joy of building models comes from the skills you develop, that feeling that you have grown as a hobbyist since you started the project, that you have learned so much and the excitement you now have for the next kit sitting safely in its box.
Assembly, painting, even applying decals, are all slow, tedious processes, but they are satisfying, they each get you a tiny step closer to finishing the project. They are far from exhilarating, but neither are they miserable, and can often be therapeutic when you hit your flow and your focus crystallises on the singular task before you. Hours can fly by when you hit your painting stride, and at the end of the last hour you would not say you “had fun” but you might feel very happy with your accomplishments.
Most of all, it is the tactility of model building that brings the most joy. The physical aspects of holding the thing in your hands, of manipulating it as dexterously as you might with your sausagey fingers, blending colours together on your palette, feeling and hearing that click of the snippers as you cut through a sprue gate to release the next component from the sprue, then sighing deeply as it pings into the darkest corner of the room behind the TV and you already know there isn’t a spare.
Fortunately, Model Builder, a new game on Steam, manages to deliver all of the tedium of model building, plus some new, as-yet unexperienced tedium in the form of a clunky interface. As you struggle to align parts with clumsy mouse controls, you can look forward to the sheer joylessness of painting the assembled model with a single click of the “fill” tool. You must still cut the virtual parts from their virtual sprues, but the need for careful concentration is gone as you can simply drag the knife tool across the attachment points, incapable of harming the part itself and turning the whole process into a barely-elevated box-ticking exercise. “Drag the mouse cursor over each sprue gate until they’re all cut” is an in-game instruction with all the ludological promise of “Please scroll to the bottom of the end-user licence agreement before clicking ‘Accept’.”
Most user input in Model Builder is predetermined, with parts snapping together in only one way – to the best of my knowledge, it is not possible to accidentally attach a plane’s wings upside down, though it is possible to experience the same feeling of hopelessness by simply counting the parts in any given kit and realising how much time you will have to spend wrestling with the inane swapping of parts to and from the workbench that the game seems to believe is somehow helpful but is, in reality, as convenient as my partner returning the jar of peanut butter back to the cupboard when I’ve not even put any on my sandwich yet because “I leave things out all the time,” and she “just assumed I was finished with it.”
Painting models involves either completely filling the piece in a single colour or applying colour to specific areas with all the grace and care you could possibly muster with a painting tool that is literally just MS Paint. It may be that Model Builder is at its best when combined with a graphics tablet but the game doesn’t suggest using one and so I reviewed it exactly as the creators presumably intended – clumsily dragging my mouse around to try and colour in small protrusions before ragefully throwing said mouse across the room when I inevitably stray and the detail brush I’m supposedly using “oversprays” onto a completely different part of the component several inches away. A note to the layperson: no matter how finely crafted, paint brushes do not project project paint in an infinite linear beam along their axis like a laser.
Decals are something special, managing to be exactly as difficult to line up with precision as in real life, but also completely lacking any of the satisfaction of a job well done if, through some manner of dark witchcraft, you manage to get them roughly correct. Indeed, it’s actually easier at times to apply real-life decals as you often have the benefit of sliding them around on the model for final positioning, a luxury I found to be lacking here.
But by far the grimmest aspect of the whole experience is that no matter your toil, your strife, your agony of fiddling with an awkward interface, the end result is ugly. Finished models are all either too shiny, too matt, or a mix of both, and any depth of colour, even when completed to a high standard. Even at their most beautiful (which none of them are), they’re just 3D meshes stored on your harddrive, and I felt no sense of connection to any of the models I created even when I felt I had suffered enough to produce them.
This leaves Model Builder in the unenviable position of being deeply, brutally unfun to “play”, much like real model building, but lacking any of the meditative qualities. Neither does it leave you feeling as though you have learned anything new, besides the peculiar idiosyncrasies of its interface. And should you persevere, at the end of it all you have nothing to show for your time and effort beyond some hideous homunculi sitting in a virtual cabinet which can, and did at least twice for me, vanish should the game decide to lose your save data.