Nobody played all the video games. Not even the experts. In arrearsthe Digital Trends gaming team revisits important games they’ve never played to see what makes them so special… Or not.
The Sims it first came out in February 2000, when I was a freshman in high school. I grew up obsessed SimCity games by designer Will Wright, elaborate simulations of everything from an ant colony to an entire planetary biosphere (the latter, SimLifeis my personal favorite). The Sims she brought that focus to a more familiar scale: one, everyday human life.
More specifically, a single consumer life. You manage an individual or family of Sims, balancing their physical and emotional needs to keep their spirits up as they move through the daily conveyor belt and gradually advance their hopes and dreams, whether it’s building a career, falling in love, or filling a mansion with the most expensive things. Wright often spoke of his desire to create toys more than games. Through that lens, The Sims is the ultimate virtual dollhouse — a playhouse where you can play out any domestic fantasy of late capitalism.
Image used with permission of the copyright holder
In high school, my Sims were speculative exercises, projections of the adult life I might want, an escape from the rhythm of teenage life. Coming back decades later at age 32, with a career and rent, medical bills to pay and a dog to take care of, is a different experience. Playing The Sims as an adult, it is less an act of escape from one’s own life than a meditation on it. I set out to replicate my own life in microcosm, learn from it, and hopefully create an idealized version of it freed from the yoke of bureaucracy and boredom.
What I found instead was a distillation of known problems, recursively self-inflicted on my own avatar. Watching myself endure achievement-driven runs in The Sims has seen mundane life drained of wonder in a way that feels all too familiar.
SimUlacra and SimUlation
For this exercise I played The Sims 3 (2009), for no other reason than I happened to have it on my Origin account, purchased at some point in the last decade at a deep discount. I only had the base game and therefore couldn’t fully replicate my life, dog and all, because publisher EA still finds it necessary to charge $20 for an individual The Sims 3 extensions, with Sims 4 (2014) which is already deep into its DLC and brand tie-in lifecycle, and that’s an insane price to respect.
“Playing The Sims as an adult it is less an act of escape from one’s own life than a meditation on it.”
After replicating my layout, I chose the traits that would define SimWill’s AI. First and probably most importantly for what followed I chose Absent-Minded. Imaginative and sensible from an early age, managing my focus has never been my strong suit. I chose Bookish, Computer Wiz, and Artistic to reflect the nerdy polymath of a theater maker turned games writer. Because of his ambition in life, instead of the reasonable goal of making a stable living from writing, I decided on a more monastic dream of mastering writing and art. True to my alma mater, I have always valued ideas over practicalities, and my material life has always suffered accordingly.
Personality in place, I released Will into Spartan, starting with the adjustment I had prepared for him. First I found a job. Paper Boy, an entry-level journalism position, pays a whopping $38 an hour (the SimMedia world isn’t in crisis, I guess). The Sims however, it starts on the weekend, so work done, SimWill settled in for a blissful afternoon of painting. Relaxed, well-fed and creatively productive, he (and I) felt optimistic going into the week.
What am I, some kind of wizard?
The known problems reared their heads immediately on Monday morning. You can queue up actions for your Sims, but left to their own devices, they’ll follow their instincts. SimWill slept until an hour before work, then grabbed a book from the nightstand and read until his carpool arrived. Without breakfast or a shower, SimWill grew hungry and grumpy throughout the day until he got home and his dinner burned, as his cooking skills started all over again.
SimWill’s creative ambitions were quickly drowned in a sea of logistics that he could never keep his head on. Remembering to eat and bathe on a regular schedule was bad enough, but throwing yourself into cleaning and household repairs, newspapers piling up, and now someone wants him to teach art class this week… It was just too much. On top of that, all work and no play made SimWill a grumpy boy, so he would sometimes have to relax, often resulting in staying up late playing video games, starting the vicious cycle all over again.
Cleaning, household repairs, piling up newspapers, and someone wants to teach art… It was too much
Sims with more fastidious traits tend to handle a lot of basic life maintenance automatically, but SimWill needed a little more active guidance to keep his life on track. He was just starting out in life, so I have about a decade head start on him, and in that time I’ve gotten a little better at dealing with life’s juggling act, but not that much better. To be honest, a lot of my current togetherness comes from living with a partner who is much more on the ball.
A big part of what I’ve always loved about Sim games is the sandbox element. I create a system from above, then sit back and watch the resulting chaos, tinkering as it grows. This time I had to constantly push SimWill to do everything he needed to do. Wake up. Click. To shower. Click. Eat breakfast. Click. Go to work. Click. Click. Click. CLICK. It felt like a real job to keep SimWill’s life together, in the game of my life that I played… for my job. It was a tiresome ouroboros that filled me with compassion for every parent, loved one, co-worker, and authority figure who had to deal with my reticence to do anything that didn’t intellectually challenge and interest me.
Wherever you go, you are there
This throws into sharp relief the irony that many of the games I prefer involve a similar kind of layout challenge. Survival games like Don’t starve take The Sims‘ basic premise of building a life from scratch, and heighten the challenge by removing the useful support framework of the surrounding society. Early love for Dungeon Keeper since then it has turned into a fascination with management type games like Oxygen is not included and RimWorld, where you design and maintain the daily routines of entire small companies. My brain spins excitedly at the possibility of systematic puzzles in abstraction, of finding personal expression through the creative task of building an engine, but I fail to use that enthusiasm to solve my own life.
The Sims 3 official trailer
Modern games have this insidious way of keeping you hooked with a drip of goals, micro and macro, that push you from one task to the next, chasing that dopamine rush of the next reward. However, the pursuit of these rewards tends to crowd out the actual content of the game in the hearts of players, complicating the relationship between time and value and creating all sorts of strange incentives, such as wanting to get through the game as efficiently as possible, instead of enjoying it. SimWill’s eyes were on the overall prize, but he was often a wreck from moment to moment.
While the escapist style provides a sense of structure and tangible achievement that many people lack in their daily lives, the idea that “gamification” can actually improve our lives has gained a lot of traction in the last decade. Countless TED talks explain how games will make us smarter, more creative, more productive and generally better. The Sims takes the ethos of gamification to its reductive conclusion, distilling modern life into a literal game.
In doing so, he reveals how hollow such a lifestyle can become. It’s all form, but no substance. SimWill doesn’t write to actually create something, but to improve his writing skills. He eats, not to enjoy food, but to avoid hunger. The Sims it represents a daily routine stripped of all the essential, immeasurable aspects of life that make life worthwhile, replacing it with an endless treadmill of personal achievement. Within a week, SimWill began to have some semblance of functional life, but in order to achieve this, we both had to submit our wills to the machine’s merciless logic or risk being chewed up and left in the dust for refusing to play along. When being a good citizen is in direct opposition to the goal of being a good man, the whole enterprise seems dubious.
After a long, real day of struggling to make ends meet in virtual life, I turned off my computer and threw a ball for my dog. I didn’t achieve anything, but I felt better.
Editor’s recommendations
Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn