Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

Next to me, my wonderful beau sits playing The Sims 3, a title that has stormed UK and US charts in the past month. A title that is making me reconsider my carefully-budgeted month, forgoing financial sanity in favour of rocking out to the house design music and revelling in Simlish culture. But why is it so addictive? It’s essentially just real life, so why can we never put it down?

Because we’re not in danger.

Playing Bioshock last night with the lights off, I thought about what made games with combat as a major mechanic so intimidating, so scary. Even in a game where a Vita-Chamber will thrust you back into the land of the living within five seconds of your departure from said land, it’s still a daunting prospect to explore Rapture because you’re constantly in danger. Splicers, Big Daddies, the loss of Rapture’s structural integrity… all these obstacles between you and your freedom from this underwater hell will render you dead at the earliest possible opportunity. We shut down. We close off our emotional circuits, and as a result we are able to take on Rapture with a smile and a shotgun.

But with The Sims, bar our sims getting old and finally kicking the proverbial bucket, we have absolutely nothing to fear. Think about it. There’s work, and paying bills, but ultimately, it’s seriously difficult to “lose”. With no difficulty setting made obvious to the player, there’s only the small obstacles that come with you as a player. If you’re bad at making sure he goes to work on time, then by all means create a sim who’s a workaholic and they’ll have the drive to do it themselves. The ability to compensate for your organisational shortcomings as a player as early as character creation is a subtle attempt to make you comfortable. This is not the bipolar hardcore environment of Ikaruga, nor is this the lead healing role in a forty-man raid attempt at three in the morning.

Take, for example, the sims Lex created. If you’re familiar with Grey’s Anatomy, you’re familiar with the lead, Meredith Grey, and her eternal love-source Derek Shepherd (played by the now omnipresent Patrick Dempsey). She created them, appearance, lifetime goal (world-reknowned surgeon) and all, and placed them in the game.

Now, you’d assume this wouldn’t work out, that there would be some obstacle between you and instant fun in a game like this, where by and large you are as involved with everyday problems as it is possible to be, whereas the cast of Grey’s Anatomy are not. They do not take out the trash, make dinner, or mop up spilled water next to the shower. They do not buy new furniture for their houses, and they most certainly do not meet their neighbours. However, it seems with The Sims it becomes possible to expand a TV universe into the real world, to make real their existence as human beings more than characters simply by placing them in the game and playing out the parts of their lives that we don’t see on-screen.

As for danger, there are real dangers, but they can be avoided, not with planning, or skill-trees, but with common sense. Own an oven? Put a fire alarm above it, and you’re never in any real danger of your house being immolated before the fire department arrive on the scene. The amount of problems you can solve is only limited by how many you create. Personally, I’d like to see a clumsy, forgetful, lazy, messy sim be completely balanced out by a maid and a good enough job to pay for the items they break so carelessly.

The only real difficulty stems from keeping them happy. Hunger, bladder, energy, social, hygiene and fun are all bars on the GUI you’ll need to take into careful consideration, as if the sim is in the red, they’ll get angry with you (breaking the fourth wall somewhat, which is terrifying when you think about the sheer number of titles in which that never occurs) and probably end up losing their job due to lack of sleep and a poor mood.

As I write this, a new sim has just managed to set his house on fire because he can’t cook. Off goes the fire alarm, and he stands next to the fire and panics. The fire department do arrive, albeit in a tiny truck that doesn’t seem to have any kind of hose, and there’s a delay as more and more of his house begins to burn. Insurance coughs up 200 simoleans, and for some reason the fireman is hanging out in the bedroom. Sometimes The Sims struggles to make everything work without sacrificing logical events being the only events to occur whilst playing. Sometimes sims with stand and stare at the walls, and sometimes sims with mobile phones will stand in a room with no doors and die simply because they’re not independent enough to realise they could just call the police.

But to see the sims in Rapture? That, my friends, would be an experiment worth conducting. To see them panic as Jack runs past using an Incinerate plasmid to ignite the splicers around him who are simply trying to talk about work and rent. Atlas once speaks about the splicers and states that maybe the reason they all wear masks is because “maybe they remember who they used to be, and they’re ashamed.” Alternatively, they could simply just be masking their anger at the fact The Sims is geared towards people who enjoy everyday life, whilst sucking all desire to do anything but play it out of the person who buys it.

I still want it, and I will have it. But for now, I’m comfortable shooting splicers and saving Little Sisters.

NB: (In other news, I interviewed the CEO of Paradox Interactive (Stalin vs. Martians, etc) for Resolution last week. See it here.