But ANYWAY…I eventually created a Chuck in my own image and dropped him into 6 Sim Lane, a $15,000 home on the outskirts of an underdeveloped suburb of SimCity, a relic from an earlier incarnation of this particular game. SimCity was the first “simulated reality” game to capture people’s imagination, although SimCity seemed (at least retrospectively) oddly innocuous: The object of that game was to design a vibrant community (transportation systems, hospitals, animal shelters, etc.). It was really just a game for amateur city planners, which is actually less boring than it sounds. SimCity led to SimEarth, where players could exorcise their jones to be an Old Testament God—you took a dead planet and you created a breathable atmosphere and you caused volcanoes and you tried to spawn a few dinosaurs. This was a little more psychologically akimbo, but still not perverse; SimEarth was almost like an eighth-grade science project. However, The Sims broke new ground for electronic pathos. It’s not a game about managing life (like SimCity) or even creating life (like SimEarth); it’s a game about experiencing life, and experiencing it in the most mundane fashion possible. Whenever unimaginative TV critics tried to explain the subtle, subversive genius of Seinfeld, they always went back to the hack argument that “It was about nothing.” But that sentiment was always a little wrong. Seinfeld was about nothing, but its underlying message was that nothingness still has a weight and a mass and a conflict. What seemed so new about Seinfeld was that it didn’t need a story to have a plot: Nothing was still something. The Sims forces that aesthetic even further: Nothing is everything.My Life As a Sim. Or (Perhaps More Accurately) My Life As My Life.
As I had long suspected, my six-year-old niece Katie is not the former lead singer of the Talking Heads. This had been somewhat obvious for a long time, but never more so than the first time I saw a copy of The Sims, which I happened to find at her parents’ house in rural North Dakota.
Since I had been fascinated by news stories about this game, I immediately tried to play The Sims when I noticed it was on the hard drive of my sister-in-law’s computer. For about fifteen minutes, my seminal pre-Chuck wandered about the empty residential lots of Sim Village, trying to start conversations with inanimate objects. Young Katie couldn’t help but notice my ineptitude and immediately tried to show me how the game was played (and—inadvertently—how existence works, although I doubt she would have explained it that way).
Katie displayed amazing dexterity at The Sims, effortlessly building a home and furnishing it with a cornucopia of household goods she could never operate in reality. She then instructed me to find a job and to make friends with other Sim citizens, especially the female ones (this is somewhat predictable, as Katie profoundly enjoys asking me if I have a girlfriend). However, I immediately had dozens of questions for young Katie about my new life: If I don’t yet have a job, how could I afford this residence? Who put all that food in my fridge? Elves, perhaps? Can I trust them? Why don’t I need a car? Where did I go to college? Don’t I have any old friends I could call for moral support? This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. Well, how did I get here?
Unlike David Byrne, these questions did not interest Katie. “You just live here,” she said. “That’s the way it is.” But where did I get all this money? “You just have money.” But where did I come from? “Nobody knows. You’re 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.