The Sims: Suburban Rhapsody

The first thing most people do when playing the game is re-create themselves, says Wright, and they often learn something in the process. He once got a letter from the parents of an adopted Romanian boy, orphaned at age 9 or 10. The child seemed depressed—even traumatized—and wouldn't talk about his background. "Then they got him The Sims," recalls Wright. "And he ended up replaying his childhood in the game for them. He created a version of his [biological] family and showed them what had happened. [The game] became a tool for self-expression."

"It gives you a model for a realistic environment," agrees Henry Jenkins, a professor of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert in video gaming. "You can program your Sim to look and sound like your last girlfriend and figure out why your last relationship fell flat." Some psychologists say their patients actually discuss their Sims games on the couch, an updated version of the classic therapeutic technique of playing with dolls. "When The Sims works well, it's kind of like a projective test. You can really see a lot of their psyche spilling out into their games," says John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey who specializes in cyberculture. "I spoke to one teenager who created a version of herself and her boyfriend. Then she created another version of herself—an evil version—to try to steal her boyfriend. She wanted to see what it's like to be evil."

In fact, nefarious behavior may be the best part of the game. In real life, you wouldn't dream of doing nasty things to your friends and family. But in The Sims, the lid blows off your id. In hundreds of fan Web sites devoted to the game, players gleefully describe the wicked ways they've killed their Sims—such as putting them in the pool, then removing all the ladders and waiting to see how long it takes them to drown. As in fiction and art, of course, tragedy can be powerfully cathartic. "People really love to explore 'failure states,'" Wright says. "In fact, the failure states are really much more interesting than the success states."

The strongest draw of The Sims, though, may be the way it allows you to indulge your acquisitive streak. Wright knew that buying stuff for your Sim household—designer clothes or wide-screen plasma TVs—would be a major part of self-expression, just as it is in real life. But possessions also suck up time, as documented by sociologist John Robinson, a scholar of "time studies"—how much time the average American spends on routine activities. Robinson discovered strange truths about our lives, like the fact that we might spend half an hour in total each day getting from place to place in the house; he also found that we spend 154 minutes watching television and 20 minutes on child care.

As players build increasingly lavish homes, they find that the high life can be more of a hassle than it's worth. "Your Sim winds up spending all his time just navigating the place," Wright says, laughing. "Sure, you've got the pool table in the west wing—but you've got to get there." Players buy their Sims more and more gadgets and toys, but reality bites back. "They want the dishwasher because they think it'll save them time. But if a player loads their house down too much, soon they find the stuff breaks and needs maintenance," Wright says. "Suddenly, these things you wanted so much all became time bombs, when you originally bought them as time-savers."

Nonetheless, most long-term players say designing Sim households is the chief delight of the game. "I don't really even play with the families anymore. I just focus on the design. I spent a couple of days setting up a Moroccan-style house, complete with a courtyard and a market," says Andrea Grimison, a woman in Germany who spends a few hours a day playing the game. "Now, this is a place I'd like to live!" She set up a Web site to share her work, and now thousands of fans download her concepts every month.