Lisa Anne Craig knew she was in trouble when the social worker
knocked on her door.
Halfway through her first pregnancy, Craig decided to take a
high-tech approach to parenthood. She bought a copy of The Sims, the
hugely popular computer game that lets you create and direct a household
and a family—building a suburban home, finding jobs for the parents and
scrambling to keep everyone happy and healthy. She fired it up, selecting
a young professional couple with a newborn. Hey, it was a game. How hard
could it be?
Whoops. "You know what? The babies cry a lot in that game," she
says. "So it's crying while I'm trying to juggle everything else, like
getting the parents to work and making sure they clean the house." After
a few hours of domestic chaos, her virtual baby was whisked away by a
digital caseworker. "I was devastated! I was sure that I wouldn't be able
to handle a real baby," Craig says with a laugh. She kept playing though,
and by the time her actual baby arrived, she felt like a pro. "My family
thought I was nuts, but I swear it got me through the pregnancy," she
says.
At first glance, The Sims is an unlikely hit. It doesn't shred your
dendrites with cutting-edge 3-D graphics. You don't blast aliens with
plasma guns, drive high-speed race cars or get to play basketball against
the Knicks. Yet in 2003 it became the best-selling computer game in
history, with more than 29 million fanatic players. It's popular not just
with twitchy teenage boys but among people who typically never touch the
stuff: women, professionals—even forty- and fifty-somethings.
Maybe that's because playing The Sims is almost exactly like coping
with everyday suburban life. To begin, you build a home, choosing details
down to the pattern of tiles on the kitchen floor and the shape of the
backyard pool. Then you help your Sims along as they stumble along
through existence.
Unlike nearly every other game, there's no winning or losing.
You're just trying to keep your Sims happy and entertained. And as Lisa
Anne Craig found out, although you may be the puppet master, the Sims
play by their own rules. Leave a bunch of Sims teenagers unsupervised for
a while as they try to make pizza? They just might burn the house down.
Forget to send them to the bathroom? Eventually, they'll pee on the
floor. Perhaps most eerily, your Sims have emotions: Their "happiness
meter" will drop if they get hungry, or if you don't give them someone to
fall in love with. Neglect them too much? They'll die.
These lifelike stakes give The Sims a genuinely existential edge,
and therein lies the allure of the game. By toying with a virtual version
of ordinary life, you can grapple with a very real question: What makes a
person happy?
To understand the appeal of The Sims, it helps to understand a bit
about Will Wright, the game's creator and co-founder of the game company
Maxis. Wright is widely known as the philosopher king of the
computer-game world, equally at home in the library as in the arcade. His
games may be mass-market hits, but they're based on some very brainy
theories about behavior, economics and humanistic psychology.
Wright's intellectual path is about as eclectic as possible: He
attended three different colleges but never graduated, sampling courses
from computer science, architecture and mechanical engineering to
aviation.
One of the first games he designed, SimAnt, was inspired by
evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson's famous studies of ant colonies.
Wright became fascinated by Wilson's explorations of "emergent
complexity"—the idea that individual creatures operating with very
simple goals can collectively produce incredibly complex behaviors. In
the game, SimAnt players assemble an anthill and then marvel as it seems
to grow a mind of its own. "Each ant is only doing a few simple things,
but when you put tons of them together you suddenly have these really
surprising results," he notes, including unusually complex ways of
gathering and moving resources around.
When Wright began designing The Sims in the late '90s, though, he
faced a more challenging task: How do you get virtual people to act the
way real ones do? Ants are relatively easy to simulate, since their
behavior isn't too complicated. But what are the fundamental building
blocks of human behavior?
Wright boned up on psychologist Abraham Maslow's Motivation and
Personality, including his famous theory of the hierarchy of needs.
Maslow argued in the '40s and '50s that human behavior could best be
explained as a quest to satisfy primal needs such as hunger and safety
before addressing demands such as love or self-actualization. The Sims
are programmed this way, which is why they seem so true to life. For
example, your Sim won't enjoy a movie if she's hungry. Aesthetic
appreciation of a movie is a higher-order pleasure—and she can't do it
if her stomach is growling.
That means that you, the player, must learn and obey the rules that
govern Sim life, many of which are hauntingly familiar. "You want to buy
them a washer-dryer?" Wright asks. "OK, but you might not have enough
money left over for a phone. So what's more important, communication with
your friends, or saving time cleaning?" he laughs. "It lays bare all
these ethics of everyday life. What you shop for implies these moral
choices."
