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VIDEOPixel Perfect: The Sims Offers Escape From Reality
EA knows getting a second life is easier than dealing with the one you've got.
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Pixels live much more exciting lives than you do.
In my youth, I was a keen player of SimCity, the architectural wonderland preceding The Sims (Sims is short for “simulated”). Will Wright, who designed both games, called The Sims "a digital dollhouse." Perhaps because of some underlying misanthropy (or megalomania), I was less interested in creating people and managing their affairs than I was in erecting the pillars of civic life in SimCity.
Others obviously felt differently. The Sims, released in February of 2000, became an instant success, launching a venerable franchise. The Sims 2 followed in 2004. The whole franchise, with the game, its sequels, and all the attendant expansion packs, has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. No other PC game even comes close.
Five years after the second version, a new edition of The Sims is set to arrive, ready to create a virtual reality as closely similar to the real reality as technology will allow. Accompanying the launch is a veritable juggernaut of cross-branding and promotion, from iPhone (AAPL) ads to pre-release tie-ins with Twitter, MTV (VIA), and Google (GOOG).
In the new Sims, players will still choose characters and shape their lives, from when they sleep to what their bathroom looks like. (If John Thain were a Sims player, I bet he’d have the most lavish bathroom of anyone.) Previously, players could choose what their Sims looked like. Sims 3 won’t stop there - players can choose their personality traits too.
“What they want from life is determined by their personality traits,” Benjamin Bell, the game’s executive producer, tells the Times. “We really felt like the ability to create human beings, to give them a soul if you will, was really exciting, so we wanted to come up with some ways that people could define the personalities of their character.”
Since its launch, The Sims has been a reflection of our society, rather than a harbinger of the future. For instance, characters lived in a single household in earlier versions, an isolated suburban dream home shielded from outside problems. Now, the characters live in a town, alongside other characters - this is, in a way, a shift toward the kind of community living so many people now long for.
In the original version, adult Sims never aged (or died of old age); in the world of the game, there were no weekends. Adult Sims went to work every single day. This was clearly a Baby Boomer's overachieving vision.
In the new version, players can conceal their characters' imperfections: According to the Times, it will be the first time players can minutely adjust features like the squareness of an avatar’s chin, the depth of its eyes, or its body weight. Depending on how you craft them, the character's interactions will elicit a different response from others in the world of the game. Each player is his or her own Dr. Frankenstein, creating little monsters in his or her own image.
At its base, the mass appeal of a game like The Sims -- or a virtual platform like Second Life -- lies in the lure of escapism. Shaping the traits of a Sim is a neat distraction; wrestling with one's own flaws in reality is a near-insurmountable burden.
But it might be a better use of our time to build community in our own towns - rather than on our PCs.
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