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 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.