(carnivore interlude)
I designed the perfect girlfriend once. She was a friend of a friend, and—from the moment I never met her—I decided she was the seamless combination of intellect, wit, and altruistic sincerity (she was also supposedly an English major). My love for this girl was spawned before I ever laid eyes on her; her physical appearance was merely described to me by other people, and I quite suddenly convinced myself that this woman was my soul mate. I’m not sure why I did this; maybe it just seemed like an interesting decision to make in advance. I do this sort of thing quite often (sometimes I buy records and pick which song is my favorite before I actually play them, and I find that I am right almost half the time).
Since I had never spoken to this woman (her name was Annette) and had only an anecdotal understanding of what she looked like, my best avenue for cementing our future passion was to send her a letter, which is what I did. And since David Letterman was very popular at the time (and since I am not creative, and since I was nineteen), I sent her a comically agile Top 10 List, which I titled “The Top 10 Reasons Annette Should Fall In Love with Chuck Klosterman.” My assumption was that we would share our first kiss forty-eight to seventy-two hours after she received this missive, particularly because of the cleverness of reason number 4, which was as follows:
4) I am almost a carnivore.
Unfortunately, Annette wasn’t my soul mate. She also was not an English major, a fact that became abundantly clear when our mutual friend told me he talked to her on the telephone and asked her about my letter, to which she replied, “Why would I possibly want to date someone who eats other humans?” And the thing that broke my heart wasn’t that she didn’t know the definition of the word carnivore; I could live with that. What killed me was that she thought I had claimed to be “almost a cannibal,” and that didn’t work, either.
2 Billy Sim 0:12
I am not a benevolent God.
I am watching myself writhe in a puddle of my own urine, and I offer no response. I have not slept or eaten for days. My cries go unrecognized and my loneliness is ignored. I am watching myself endure a torture worse than death, yet I decline every opportunity to end this self-imposed nightmare. Darkness…imprisoning me…all that I see, absolute horror. I cannot live, I cannot die, trapped in myself; my body is my holding cell.
I am the master, and I am the puppet. And I am not the type of person who still plays video games.
I realize there is a whole generation of adults born in the seventies who currently play Sega and Nintendo as much as they banged away on their Atari 5200 and their George Plimpton–endorsed Intellivision in 1982. I am not one of them. I agree with Media Virus author Douglas Rushkoff’s theory that home video game consoles were the reason kids raised in the 1980s so naturally embraced the virtual mentality—we never thought it seemed strange to be able to manually manipulate what we saw on a video screen—but I’ll never accept pixels killing other pixels as an art form (or a sport, or even a pastime). A homeless man once told me that dancing to rap music is the cultural equivalent of masturbating, and I’d sort of feel the same way about playing John Madden Football immediately after filing my income tax: It’s fun, but—somehow—vaguely pathetic.
However, some things are just too enchanting (and just too weird) to ignore. Those were my thoughts when I first read about The Sims, arguably the most wholly postmodern piece of entertainment ever created. Much like the TV show Survivor, the Pokémon phenomenon, and Parliament Funkadelic, The Sims is a keenly constructed product that seems hopelessly absurd to anyone unfamiliar with it but completely clear to anyone who’s experienced it even once. Developed by Electronic Arts, The Sims is a video game where you do all the things you would do in real life if you weren’t playing a video game. You create a human character, and it exists. That’s it. Your character does things like read the newspaper. He takes naps, plays pinball, and empties the garbage. Your character invites friends over to his house, and they have discussions about money and sailboats. You buy oak bookcases and you get pizza from Domino’s. This is the whole game, and there is no way to win, except to keep yourself from becoming depressed. The Sims is an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are, which is why I thought this game was made precisely for me.Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me?
The Sims is the only video game I have ever purchased. My goal—and probably the initial goal of most people who buy The Sims—was to create a perfect replica of the life I already have. I would build a character who looked just like me, and I would name him “Chuck Klosterman.” I would design his home exactly like my own, and I would have him do all the things I do every day. Perhaps I unconsciously assumed I would learn something about myself through this process, although I have no idea what that could possibly be. Maybe it was just the desire to watch myself live. Pundits like to claim that a game like The Sims taps into the human preoccupation with voyeurism, but it’s really the complete opposite. I don’t care about peeping into anyone else’s keyhole; I only want to see into Chuck’s.
I designed my digital self as accurately as possible: pasty skin, thick glasses, uncommitted haircut, ill-fated trousers. Outlining my character’s personality traits was a little more complicated, because nobody (myself included) truly knows how they act. I’ve never met anyone I’d classify as self-aware: It’s been my experience that most extroverted people think they’re introverts, and many introverted people make a similarly wrong-headed juxtaposition about being extroverts. Maybe that’s why extroverts won’t shut up (because they always fear they’re not talking enough) while introverts just sit on the couch and do nothing (because they assume everybody is waiting for them to be quiet). People just have no clue about their genuine nature. I have countless friends who describe themselves as “cynical,” and they’re all wrong. True cynics would never classify themselves as such, because it would mean that they know their view of the world is unjustly negative; despite their best efforts at being grumpy, a self-described cynic is secretly optimistic about normal human nature. Individuals who are truly cynical will always insist they’re pragmatic. The same goes for anyone who claims to be “creative.” If you define your personality as creative, it only means you understand what is perceived to be creative by the world at large, so you’re really just following a rote creative template. That’s the opposite of creativity. Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.