Posted by Michael on April 22nd, 2006, in Games

I have a problem with The Sims. The game is very depressing to me. If you’re not a dedicated gamer, your Sims quickly become sad or suicidal. So instead of the attractive doll house that the game seems to be, it turns into a hamster cage full of pathetic creatures that probably eat each other too.

Another reason why it is depressing is related to the AI model in The Sims. It is the typical model of the scientist or the engineer: break everything apart into its constituent parts and then put it back together with artificial replacements for these parts. For a game, this is perfect: you end up with a whole series of gauges that you all have to keep full. Obviously these gauges continuously drop and filling one of them often empties another. Hours of entertainment! If you’re into that sort of thing.
But the effects of this form of interaction on our feelings for the characters in the story is detrimental. We want to feel empathy for these very versatile creatures but they never give you a break. They end up whining and nagging so much that your own sympathy gauge drops very rapidly. And you start looking for ways to kill them instead…

Chris Crawford once paraphrased Hitchock with regards to The Sims: while the Master of Suspense considers drama to be “just like life, but only with the boring bits cut out”, The Sims is also “just like life, but only with the dramatic bits cut out”. He has a point. Even in the sequel Sims 2, despite of its heavy focus on having friends, falling in love, having children, breaking up, and even dying, etcetera, The Sims doesn’t move you. It doesn’t even move you as little as a banal soap opera. It plainly does not move you. With all their variations in appearance, all their animations, all their clever AI, The Sims do not succeed in doing that one thing. This makes me think that the solution of Drama Princess will not be found in quantity. Perhaps quite the opposite.

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