There aren’t many people you can have a chat to when you’re stuck in the middle of a motorway at 3a.m.  Maybe there’s the odd way-out-of-their-territory drunken crazy.  You can obviously talk to other motorists, if they’re not feeling too cranky.  A more certain bet, though, would be the humble petrol station attendant.  You’re guaranteed some level of jovial interaction – they’re paid, in part, to be sociable with you.  Hooray!

What do they get up to when we’re not harassing them for dodgy-looking sandwiches, super-strength coffee and bags of M&M’s, though? Surely there’s more to their employed lives than this? Might they too be worthy of their own little traipse into the land of video games? Well, if a game called City Bus Simulator exists, sure they are.

Now, most of the time in our fair British Isles you’ll do the petrol-filling with your own two hands.  Alas, that is not the case everywhere – imagine, the station attendant might do it for you! You may remember a ludicrous part of Microsoft’s Natal announcement trailer wherein an all-too-perfect family played a racing game, pulled their car into a pit stop and pretended to change tyres.  Gag.  That’s exactly the right sort of path for this, though.  As the station attendant you can mime re-fuelling cars like a berk to your heart’s content from the comfort of your living room.  Along the same track you will have to give a few windscreens a quick wipe, or otherwise spruce up the visitors’ vehicles.  Wax on, wax off!

Oh yes, Natal will play a key role in this indeed.  A petrol station is a dangerous place to be, so it is important that you keep the area clean to minimise the risk of fire or other mishap.  Using its magical room-tracking abilities, Natal will constantly monitor your play area and convert its curves and shapes into objects more appropriate to a petrol station on-screen.  Then it will demand you clean everything thoroughly as it watches and whinge incessantly if anything moves out of place or is left on the floor.  Can’t have any hazards in the fuelling area, can we?

Back to the start, however, as we must address the task we first mentioned: customer interaction.  Take your place behind the counter (Natal may require you to throw a few spare boxes in front of you for that one), affix a genial smile to your face and greet a vast succession of visitors to your kingdom.  Each person will be using technology borrowed from Peter Molyneux’s baby Milo and Kate to ensure the best artificial intelligence possible.  They’ll discuss the same boring subjects over and over, such as the weather or the noisy road, and each time you’ll have to come back with some witty retort to keep them happy.  Stealing other Milo-esque tricks, they’ll throw money for purchases at you to catch, and you’ll have to write out receipts and hold them up to the camera so that they can take them.  Failure to carry out these tasks will result in a telling off from your increasingly clever customers.  Beware the regulars who begin to get to know you in scary levels of detail…somehow.

There’s always got to be a bit of action inserted into these games to liven them up a little.  No difference here: It comes courtesy of a common fear for anybody working in retail alone in a remote location.  Armed robbery! Occasionally your customers will not be quite as they seem and pull some kind of weapon on you.  Use your instincts to deal with them.  You could try to sneakily hit a panic button to call the police.  You might choose to fight, if they only have a bat or something similar, and start bouncing around your room punching.  Or you could give in to their demands and start heaving anything that isn’t nailed down into a pile in front of Natal for the thief to ‘steal’ so that they leave you alone.

Perhaps this Disregarded Demographics has opened your eyes to the exciting lives that petrol station attendants lead.  More than anything, I hope it’s given you a feel for Natal’s future potential, since we’re going to have to get used to it sooner or later whether it takes off or not.  Who knows, maybe this is the sort of idea that inspired its inception in the first place…

Images: RonboSoldier, DayLife, Wikimedia