Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

been compared to the teachers in old Peanuts cartoons, although I tend to think it sounds like a combination of French, Ebonics, and the Japanese pop band Pizzicato Five (interestingly, Sims players in different counties sometimes assume that what they are hearing is real dialogue they merely can’t decipher—Electronic Arts has fielded phone calls from Americans who thought they had accidentally purchased the Spanish version, Germans who suspected they had been sent the Italian version, Brazilians who thought they had the Canadian version, etc., etc., etc.).

The first two people I ( “I” being “SimChuck”) meet in “Simburbia” are Mortimer and Bella, a guy with a mustache and a woman wearing a tight red dress. They evidently live nearby. Mortimer is a lot like my real-world friend Dr. Dave in Akron: He’s always up for anything. Bella is a tougher nut to crack; she often glances at her watch when I talk to her. But because Bella’s a woman, I keep talking (and talking, and talking), and I throw a little tickling into the mix, and I talk some more, and in no time at all I am given the opportunity to select the “flirt” option whenever I meet Bella on the street.

I start calling Bella on my SimPhone several times a day, and she always comes over immediately. This SimChuck is one suave bastard. A little pink heart icon appears next to Bella’s on-screen dossier, and she begins defining me as “The Sim I adore.” We smooch hardcore. Yet—for some reason—I can’t come up with a finishing move. It’s not so much that Bella declines to sleep with me; it’s more that I don’t know how to ask. I stand by my bed and call her name, and she runs right over…but then we start talking about skiing. I buy a billiard table in order to impress her (and to set the stage for some, Penthouse Forum, Cybill-Shepherd-in- The Last-Picture-Show- style shagging), but all she does is clap her hands. I mean, I know she’s comfortable with me: She has no qualms about using the toilet while I’m standing right next to her, an experience that’s light-years more intimate than most kinds of oral sex. But SimChuck remains denied.

And you know why SimChuck gets no nookie? Because Bella was lying to me all along. At the height of our relationship, I invite Bella over for a game of pool (and “maybe more”), and she says, “Sure, I’d love to come over. Can I bring a friend?” I reluctantly agree, but guess who shows up: Mortimer! It turns out he and Bella are married. Upon watching Bella’s hello embrace, Mortimer immediately slaps me, and we kind of scuffle. I try to call him the next morning to apologize, but he tells me to get bent. In a matter of simulated hours, I’ve managed to lose my only male acquaintance by not having sex with his wife. This is unprecedented. Even Chuck can’t compete with the problems of SimChuck. I had no choice but to buy a Zimantz component hi-fi stereo system ($650).God’s God. Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Will Wright.

After seventy-two hours of Simming I had grown so despondent over the sexless, consumer-obsessed state of my fake life that I called directory assistance and got the number of Electronic Arts in Redwood, California, demanding to speak to Sims creator Will Wright. They directed me to their satellite division Maxis, and I used the Maxis company directory to leave a message with Mr. Wright, assuming he was working on the prototype for Sim- Soul and would most likely never call me back. However, I was wrong: He returned my call in just a few hours and tried to help me understand how I’ve managed to destroy my life twice.

“If there’s any core question with The Sims, it’s got be, ‘What is the purpose of life?’ Is it to be loved? Is it to be rich? Is it to be successful? They’re the same questions you could ask if you never knew the game existed,” Wright told me. “But it does seem like some people come to these interesting conclusions about themselves when they play. And if a game changes your perception of the world around you, it’s successful.”

By that definition, The Sims would, in fact, be classified as art (and art in the truest sense of the word). Wright clearly sees it as such, and he makes a good argument. A forty-two-year-old who never graduated from college (though he did log time at Louisiana State, Louisiana Tech, and the New School in New York City), Wright fell into programming and gaming as an extension of his interest in robotics, a mentality that’s readily noticed in Sim behavior.

I explained the conditions of my dilemma to Wright, and—perhaps predictably—he seemed to have heard every one of my questions before. I told him what had happened with Bella. “Yeah, Bella’s kind of a slut,” he snickered. He explained that his larger vision with The Sims was to show how day-to-day living is—in and of itself —an ongoing strategy problem, which is why so much of The Sims is built around time constraints and the oblique pressure of responsibility. We even had a friendly chat about Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which probably wouldn’t have happened if I had called the creator of Donkey Kong.

However, Wright bristled when I suggested that The Sims is mostly a glorification of consumerism that ultimately suggests happiness is available at the mall. He didn’t necessarily seem annoyed by this accusation, but he remains baffled that everyone who plays The Sims seems to come to that same conclusion.

“Materialism is the red herring of the game,” he says. “Nobody seems to pick up on that. The more you play, the more you realize that all the stuff you buy eventually breaks down and creates all these little explosions in your life. If you play long enough, you start to realize that those things won’t really make you happy.”

When Wright told me this, I immediately asked if what SimChuck needed was a midlife crisis. Maybe if I kept playing, he’d eventually reach a point where he’d be self-actualized, even if I took away his $1,800 pinball machine. Once again, Wright bristled; he asked if I was talking about the little person in my computer or the little person in my own mind. I told him that it was hard to tell the difference, because we both seemed to be doing the same shit and neither one of us knew why.

“Well, life doesn’t have a score,” Wright said. “I’ve noticed that whenever people play The Sims for the first time, they do all these little experiments. They want to see what their power will do, so they lock a character in a room for five days and watch them starve to death. They’ll try to make somebody electrocute themselves. But at some point, that power is meaningless. It stops being interesting. You need to have somebody pushing back.”

That reminded me of something. Or (perhaps more accurately), that reminded me of someone.

I hung up the phone and went back to my computer, opening The Sims and revisiting the place I had been when I started this essay. My SimChuck was still there, frozen in space, hungry and tired and gesturing like a madman, covered in piss. Up until my discussion with Wright, I had assumed individual Sims could not be killed; I thought they were like doomed vampires from Anne Rice novels, forced to exist eternally in a world they did not create. In truth, my Sim was just a confused little guy, still waiting for a reason to live.

I clicked on the “options” key and directed my cursor to the button that said “Free Will.” I deployed actualization, and SimChuck was emancipated. I watched him take a shower and crawl into his Sleeping Machine, where he slept for the next fourteen hours. And then I did the same.

(reality interlude)

“I don’t know how I feel about MTV’s The Real World,” he said. “I mean, is it really real? How real is it, really? Is it a depiction of reality, or is it a reflection of what we perceive to be reality? They advertise this as ‘reality programming,’ but isn’t anything programmed inherently fabricated? How real is real, you know?”

She said nothing. She continued smoking a menthol cigarette. Twenty seconds passed.

“Well, what do you think?” he finally asked.

“About what,” she asked, exhaling through her teeth.

“About The Real World,” he repeated. “Do you think it’s real?”

“Compared to what?”

“Well… to… I guess compared to things that are completely real.”

Twenty more seconds passed.

“Is the show taped or edited in the Fourth Dimension?” she asked.

“No.”

“Are the characters robots?”

“No.”

“Can the episodic plotlines only be perceived by people who have ingested mind-expanding hallucinogens, such as lysergic acid diethylamide, mescaline, phencyclidine, ketamine, or psychedelic mushrooms?”

“No.”