Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

just here.” Am I one of the 55 million Americans living without health insurance? “Be quiet! You won’t get sick.” This went on for several minutes, finally ending in a stalemate when Katie realized warm cookies were suddenly available in the kitchen. However, something struck me about this dialogue: It was uncharacteristic for Katie to be so unwilling to tell harmless lies. If she had been playing with her Barbie Dream House and I asked her why Barbie had four pairs of shoes but only two decent outfits, Katie would have undoubtedly spent the next half hour explaining that Barbie purchased the extra shoes while shopping in Hong Kong with Britney Spears and planned to wear them to a cocktail party in Grandma’s basement. When playing with real-world toys, there’s no limit to the back story Katie will create for anything, animate or inanimate. That’s how little kids are. But somehow it’s different when life is constructed on a sixteen-inch screen; in the world of The Sims, Katie won’t color outside the lines of perception. The rules become fixed. Fabricating a Sim-human’s college experience would be no different than randomly deciding that 90210’s Brenda Walsh got a C+ in tenth-grade biology. Those facts aren’t available to anyone. Clearly, video technology cages imagination; it offers interesting information to use, but it implies that all peripheral information is irrelevant and off-limits. Computers make children advance faster, but they also make them think like computers.

I tried to keep this in mind when I started my new-and-improved fake life upon my own purchase of The Sims. My hypothesis was that the game’s accuracy would be dependent on my willingness to think within the confines of the game’s creators; I had to think like a machine. And it’s quite possible that this initial postulate was right. But I’ll never really know, because I couldn’t do it. As I made my little SimChuck live and work, all I could think about was what I would think about.

What makes The Sims so popular is its dogged adherence to the minutiae of subsistence, and that’s where we’re supposed to feel the realism. But the realism I felt was the worst kind; it was the hopeless realization that I was doomed to live in my own prison, just like the singer from Creed. The Sims makes the unconscious conscious, but not in an existential Zen way; The Sims forces you to think about how even free people are eternally enslaved by the processes of living. Suddenly, I had to remember to go to the bathroom. I had to plan to take a shower. Instead of eating when I was hungry, I had to anticipate an unfelt hunger that was always impending. If I didn’t wake up at least an hour before work, I’d miss my ride and get fired. And though I need to do all those things in reality, the thoughts scarcely cross my mind unless I’m plugged into this game.

After playing The Sims for my first ninety minutes, I paused the action, logged off my computer, and drove to a Chinese restaurant called The Platinum Dragon. I had to pass through some road construction, and it suddenly occurred to me that there would always be road construction—not always on this particular road, but somewhere. There will never be a point in my lifetime when all the highways are fixed. It’s theoretically plausible that my closest friend might someday abandon me for no reason whatsoever, but it’s completely impossible to envision a day where I could drive from New York to California without hitting roadwork somewhere along the way. It will always exist, and there’s nothing I can do about it. And for the first time, that reality made me sad.Chuck Vs. Chuck. Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Why I Don’t Understand Anybody.

There seems to be an inordinate number of movies about mankind going to war with machines (Terminator, A.I., that Stephen King flick with all the AC/DC songs, etc.). That plot device always struck me as something of a cheap shot; as far as I can tell, machines have been nothing but completely civil to us. However, I can assure you that this scenario will never be a problem, even if they completely turn on us. It turns out that computers are the most gutless goddamn cowards you’ll ever meet.

My SimChuck has absolutely no grit. He is constantly bummed out, forever holding his head and whining about how he’s “not comfortable” or “not having fun.” At one point I bought him a pretty respectable wall mirror for $300, and he responded by saying “I’m too depressed to even look at myself.” As an alternative, he sat on the couch and stared at the bathroom door. Quite the drama queen, my SimChuck is.

And why isn’t my SimChuck happy? Because he’s a self-absorbed, materialistic prick. This is perhaps the most disturbing element of The Sims: The happiness of the characters is directly proportional to the shit you elect to buy them. As far as I can tell, acquiring electronic equipment and name-brand furniture is just about the only thing Sims find psychologically satisfying.

The shopping angle appears to be the part of the game its designers found most compelling, as their catalog of faux products is both massive and detailed. This is the kind of shit that would prompt Tyler Durden to hit somebody in the face. Take the on-screen description of the Soma Plasma TV, for example. Buying this item for $3,500 increases the owner’s fun rating by six full points. And this is what you’d get:

Perfect form…perfect image conformity…perfect entertainment. Soma Consumer Electronics takes the ‘plasma phenomenon’ to a brave new level in this elegant technology statement. With its incredible image quality, unique form and super thin Flatuspective screen, the Soma Plasma TV is the undisputed leader in nanopixel technology.

It would be fun to claim that this kind of Price Is Right product exposition is a treacherous form of unexpected advertising, but that wouldn’t be true, as all the products in The Sims are fake. And it would make me seem as astute as Chip Lambert if I suggested this game is latently attempting to brainwash children into believing that shopping is an important part of life, but I honestly don’t think the wackmobile geeks at Electronic Arts have motives that sinister. It’s basically just weird, and it’s indisputable proof that The Sims is not a strategy game, even though that’s what it calls itself. If this was somehow about strategy, all we’d need to know is that getting the biggest television gets you x number of fun points. But nobody cares about the math. The reason so much effort has been placed in the “promotion” of fake Sims merchandise is so that its real-life players will enjoy the experience of buying them. It’s almost circular logic: If a human playing The Sims somehow enjoys pretending to buy a plasma TV that doesn’t even exist, it stands to reason that my little SimChuck would profoundly enjoy watching said TV if it were somehow real. By this justification, buying high-end electronics really should cure depression.

And what’s even more amazing is that this is kind of true, and—ultimately—it’s what I’ll never understand about human nature (simulated or otherwise). I never enjoy the process of buying anything, but I get the impression that most Americans love it. What The Sims suggests is that buying things makes people happy because it takes their mind off being alive. I would think this would actually make them feel worse, but every woman I’ve ever dated seems to disagree.

To succeed at this game, I am forced to consume like a mofo. Perhaps the greatest chasm between Chuck and SimChuck is that I don’t own a bed and he can’t live without one. I realize it might seem crazy for a thirty- year-old to exist without a bed, but I just can’t get myself to buy one; it never seems worth it, because all I would use it for is sleeping (and once I’m unconscious, what do I care where I’m lying?). I get by fine with my “Sleeping Machine,” sort of a self-styled nest in the corner of my bedroom. Oh, I can’t deny that some overnight visitors to my chamber of slumber have been “disturbed” by my unwillingness to own a traditional bed, but the simple truth is that I don’t need that kind of luxury in my life. My Sleeping Machine provides all the REM I require. I hope I never own a bed. But don’t tell that to SimChuck. Until I got him his $1,000 Napoleon Sleigh Bed ( “made with actual wood and real aromatic cedar”), all he did was cry like a little bitch.I Need Love. Or (Perhaps Less Accurately) Love Is All Around, But Only Around.

Truth be told, my secret motivation for experimenting with The Sims was to see if I could sustain any kind of successful relationship within the scope of the game—essentially “playing” to “get play.” I’m guessing this is a pretty big draw for all Sims obsessives, since it’s hard to imagine how anyone regularly sitting in front of a computer for hours at a time could be having much sex. I realize that’s a stereotype, but the popularity of The Sims almost irrefutably proves it to be true: This game is single-mindedly designed to be a reflection of a normal life that’s filled with normal human interaction. Apparently, that notion is so far removed from gamers that it can only be pursued through a fantasy realm.

Still, there’s something oddly Utopian about The Sims relationship-driven, peacenik theology. Unlike other video games I’ve enjoyed in the past—The Legend of Zelda, Elevator Action, the original Nintendo version of Metal Gear, etc.—The Sims does not require me to kill virtually everyone I meet. As I meet other Sims in the neighborhood, my initial options are to talk with them (understandable), joke with them (also understandable), tickle them (somewhat less understandable), or sneak up behind their back and scare the crap out of them (pretty incomprehensible, but hard to resist). Our interactions are marked by thought bubbles that contain little pictures of the conversation topic; the characters don’t speak with real words. They talk in a goofy pigeon language that has