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The Secret Life of Sims
Mar. 30th, 2008 | 12:07 pm
I have one and only one computer game that I play regularly, and that is The Sims. On most evenings at about 10:00 pm I enter the suburban neighborhood of Gossypia and for the next hour supervise the lives of one of my three Sim families. It is currently 1901 there. President McKinley has just been inaugurated and that very unpopular war in the Philippines is drawing to a close. Meanwhile, at Kittyhawk, two bicycle repairman experiment with a glider…
My three households all intersect in various ways at various times and will do so for the next 107 years. Currently the Ballards are old money and the women in the family are very intellectual. The sharp-tongued Cordners are nouveau riche. The Wilseys are a mixed race couple, so they keep themselves to themselves and live across the river from everybody else. Felix B. Wilsey (born a slave to the southern Ballard family) is, however, a single-minded and widely respected reconstruction-era artist, so they are very well off.
Playing this game an hour before bedtime helps me to sleep. I turn off the light thinking about the troubles of all these wholly imaginary people. Will Mrs. Wilsey have that affair with the serpentine Mr. Cordner that she’s been fantasizing about? Are the Cordner twins truly as dimwitted as they seem? And is Arthur Ballard Jr. going to develop any ambition other than spending the family fortune? It’s peaceful and meaningless. I don’t suddenly jerk into wakefulness, eyes staring into the darkness as I sometimes do when I think about reality and questions pop into my head like “Did I really turn off all the sound equipment before I left the library?” or “Will George W. bomb Iran on his way out of the White House” or “How’s M’s cholesterol level these days? Maybe I should wake him up and ask him…”
Recently, however, there has been a disturbing development. I’ve come to suspect that my Sims are carrying on without me.
( Read more )
My three households all intersect in various ways at various times and will do so for the next 107 years. Currently the Ballards are old money and the women in the family are very intellectual. The sharp-tongued Cordners are nouveau riche. The Wilseys are a mixed race couple, so they keep themselves to themselves and live across the river from everybody else. Felix B. Wilsey (born a slave to the southern Ballard family) is, however, a single-minded and widely respected reconstruction-era artist, so they are very well off.
Playing this game an hour before bedtime helps me to sleep. I turn off the light thinking about the troubles of all these wholly imaginary people. Will Mrs. Wilsey have that affair with the serpentine Mr. Cordner that she’s been fantasizing about? Are the Cordner twins truly as dimwitted as they seem? And is Arthur Ballard Jr. going to develop any ambition other than spending the family fortune? It’s peaceful and meaningless. I don’t suddenly jerk into wakefulness, eyes staring into the darkness as I sometimes do when I think about reality and questions pop into my head like “Did I really turn off all the sound equipment before I left the library?” or “Will George W. bomb Iran on his way out of the White House” or “How’s M’s cholesterol level these days? Maybe I should wake him up and ask him…”
Recently, however, there has been a disturbing development. I’ve come to suspect that my Sims are carrying on without me.
( Read more )