When invasive mould is the new way to die in one of the world’s most popular video games, you know the housing crisis has hit the cultural mainstream.
The new For Rent version of the Sims game allows players to role play as tenants at the mercy of killer mushrooms. Fungus sprouts from damp bathrooms, carpets and eventually the avatars’ heads, leading to a horror movie-style death. It is just one example of rent forming the backdrop to popular art and culture, a phenomenon that may spread wider in 2024.
More writers, musicians and TV producers are grappling with the subject in a new wave of rent-inspired art that ranges from the furious to the farcical. A Manchester record label has put out rent-inspired songs including one entitled A Guillotine for My Landlord, novelists are tackling the subject increasingly directly, and with one in five households now renting from a private landlord in England, the theme is likely to be increasingly evident on the cultural scene.
The mouldy new version of Sims may be in response to the reality that more and more gamers are living as renters, but it has proven too much for some. A trailer for the game showed a player retching from multiplying mould in a shower and sprouting luminescent mushrooms impervious to blasts with anti-mould spray, leading one player to ask the game’s creators on social media: “Can we turn off the mould? Sorry, it just grosses me out.”
A spokesperson for the Sims creators said they were “always looking at how we can engage with the more challenging aspects of life” and said the maker has included sewage leaks and electrical failures as issues faced by virtual tenants. Mould is an “entirely opt-in” gameplay feature.
Sims users like to “play out some of the challenges they may be experiencing in the real world as a way to help them process their thoughts and feelings”, they said, adding many “some enjoy experimenting with the challenge”.
There are also signs of a new academic discipline emerging to examine it all among scholars more used to exploring how Victorian writers tackled squalor, overcrowding and precarity among 19th-century tenants.
Dr Ushashi Dasgupta and Dr Matt Ingleby, English Literature tutors at the universities of Oxford and Queen Mary’s London, have established the Rent Cultures Network to explore how, from Netflix to novels, a generation that has come of age renting is, a century and half after Charles Dickens, again making art from precarious living.
Already under their microscope is a new comic novel by Holly Pester, a poet who has lived in tenanted properties her whole life, which will be published in February.
She is fascinated by the narrative possibilities of “the difficult relations between people [renting] but also the sympathies that might be drawn out [from] these awkward contracted relationships”. The Lodgers will focus on a single mother lodging in an Essex town. Pester says she is not alone in being gripped by the theme.
“Because of how the rent crisis is just so pervasive in the middle class and working class, creators are more likely going to be renters,” she said. “We see that in contemporary fiction, with millennials that grew up in quite stable homes and didn’t suffer precarity until adulthood, when they were expecting housing stability [but are living] in house shares well into their 30s dealing with mould. I think that’s why it’s seeping more into the mainstream.”
She gave the example of authors Jo Hamya, whose 2021 novel Three Rooms tackled the connected topics of precarious housing, precarious work and precarious mental health, and Luke Kennard, who has written about trying to rent with a family.
She identified a “pervasive voice” in fiction from that generation of precarity: “It’s just there in the moves that a character can make if they’re in a house share or they can’t pay their rent.”
Musicians are responding too. In Manchester, Justin Watson, who runs the Front and Follow record label, has asked musicians to come up with an alternative soundtrack for an estate agent’s promotional video for a luxury apartment block on Deansgate in the city centre.
The original showed a couple waking in their gleaming high-rise apartment, joining an exercise class, hopping in a whirlpool bath and strolling around the roof garden, all set to upbeat muzak. Composers satirically re-scoring the promo film used discordant synthesiser music suited to a horror film, creepy voiceovers and death metal.
“One of the things we feel strongly about is the inherent unfairness in the system, especially around landlords,” Watson said. “There are social injustices in the stark contrast between these really shiny blocks going up in Manchester, and we see people who are massively struggling. People are absolutely furious, and having a creative response is cathartic personally and it really cuts through.”
His latest compilation is called Rental Yields and involved more than 100 musicians, focusing on concerns about landlords and their passive earnings. One piece, by Yol vs Concrete, features bloodcurdling screams about “luxury flats promising high rental yields”. It is “completely visceral”, said Watson.
“Some people used it as an opportunity to stick two fingers up to landlords and channel their frustration and anger into something creative,” he said. The overall tone of the music tends towards unsettling, edgy and technological.
In nonfiction, Kwajo Tweneboa, the social housing campaigner who has spotlighted squalor, is writing his first book, joining a list of others including Peter Apps, whose Show Me the Bodies explored the Grenfell Tower disaster and won this year’s Orwell prize for political writing.
As the novelist Pester concludes: “Rent culture breeds stories.”
