The Sims or, Scenes from a Marriage

We've been robbed.

A burglar came into our house in the middle of the night and escaped with our widescreen plasma television, our $2800 personal computer and a $500 full-grain leather Sarrbach armchair (from Werkbunnst). We have a couch in our living room that we picked up off the street on moving day. My wife works as a patrolwoman from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. She comes home exhausted after working 16-hour shifts as an LPN at the university hospital. We just built a new wing onto the house so our daughter, Megan, could have a bedroom. We're looking for a new apartment for the two of us.

It would be disingenuous of me to say I'm confusing reality with The Sims, but I'm afraid that I can't exactly say that my Aspyr/Maxis-created simulacrum and I are leading separate lives. I teasingly told my wife, Beth, that she should move up from being a mere mayor — the premise of SimCity 3000, a game to which she had been a fervent devotee for months — to a puppet-master micromanaging individual lives — the premise of The Sims. She brushed the suggestion off and was content simply to practice urban renewal in the slums. That is, until she saw The Sims in action.

Now? It hasn't even been a week and our iMac has become a dedicated behavioral sciences case study, and to a lesser extent, so has our whole apartment, as well. In a move that's so her and so not me, Beth has named her pilot Sim couple Sean and Beth Weitner. It would be more my speed to create overly obscure alter egos, a reference within a reference that only I'd understand and that would allow me simultaneous intimacy with and detachment from my Sim contingent. But Beth, Beth has made us.

It may be less than Kafkaesque, but the following really happened: I came home from running errands one weekend morning and was greeted with an indignant "You're in trouble." Meek, I walked over to face my accuser and had my attention directed toward the screen. "You keep trying to give Bella a backrub and she keeps getting really upset."

In The Sims, the friends you have are as integral to your social advancement as your skills, and so making and keeping friendships are key to the game. It's hard to do — you can lose someone's interest easily, or say the wrong thing (a neighbor actually booed at our daughter) and even once you've made a friend, you can lose them. (I wish my life had a pop-up window that warned me that my inattention was about to cost me a friendship.) Anyway — since you can only control one "family" at a time, one way to get the ball rolling on the whole friend-making process is to take control of another family in your "neighborhood" and have them act friendly toward your original family. As the other family, you can make all the overtures of friendship, allowing your original family to respond (although, while you're controlling the second family, you don't have any say over the direct actions of the originals — they just behave in accordance to the personalities you've created).

And so I watched the scene play out as Beth described. Giving backrubs is a pre-programmed social interaction in The Sims, a way for two people well-disposed to one another to increase that relationship. ("Increase" because relationship quality is measured numerically, from one to 100.) Sean was given the maximum amount of "outgoingness" in the crafting of his personality, and sure enough, he kept sidling behind Bella, a neighbor of ours who is also married, and laying his hands on her shoulders, resulting in some presumably negative verbiage. (Sims talk in gibberish and pictographs, so an icon showing two people with a flashing red minus sign is the substitute for a handful of invective.) And Sean is certainly persistent; I watched him get rebuffed by Bella four or five times.

I, accused — and I certainly felt as if I had misbehaved, for my high school years were certainly littered with well-rubbed backs. How did Sean know? (I'm loathe to mention that when Sean — Mr. Outgoing, remember — initiates a hot-tub session, he gets full-monty naked and everyone follows his lead.)

These creepy intimations of Sims imitating my life keep occurring. "You know, I've created Sean with as close to your personality I could," Beth said one day, a line which sounded to me like a stone-cold presage to something I didn't want to hear. "I find it funny whenever Sean has to study up on his mechanical skills, his fun goes way down." And it's true; it's agony for Sim-me to get a mechanical "point" (a quantifiable increase in my aptitude in that particular skill). Not that there's any direct bearing on my life to correspond to this.

The instance that really got me, however, came early. The Sims is essentially Beth's game, and I just play it with her when we have overlapping free time, so when I first started playing I came into the middle of the story — our daughter Megan had just been brought out of her infancy (which lasts three days). It was apparently a trying time for our proxies; in an attempt to show me how adorable Sim-we were, Beth ordered Sim-Beth to kiss Sim-me, and I watched in some horror as "I" pushed her away — hard, from the look of it — and chewed her out. Again, I felt like the floor had been taken from beneath me; this wasn't a problem-solving method I much endorsed.

The daily lives of Sims are pretty straightforward — apart from skills like creativity and mechanical ability, their lives are measured by their "Motives": hunger, energy, comfort, fun, hygiene, social life, satisfaction with their physical surroundings and bladder fullness. As their overlord, it's your responsibility to make sure that they don't get "in the red" in any of those categories. Respectively, then, they have to eat, rest, relax, bathe, talk, have nice digs and eliminate, and they more or less rely on you to make sure they do. As they age, they appear to get more self-sufficient, but when you're starting out, adults just home from work will stand in front of the vehicles they carpool in — to the tune of many honking horns — until you specifically make them move. And when they are scraping at the bottom of any of those Motive barrels, it's reflected in their personalities, their abilities to do anything or their willingness to do what you ask.

The back-and-forth between Beth and me is constant when we lean in close to the fishbowl to watch our doppelgängers. "Of course his fun is low; he never sees you." "Oh, Megan likes you much more than she likes me." "Look, she's about to fall over because she's been up so long." Forget projecting yourself onto your pets; this takes the idea to a whole new level.

There's plenty of social commentary to be alternately extracted from and applied to The Sims. You can hire a maid (and we needed to — immature Sims will leave their dinner plates in the middle of the floor, and it only takes about 12 hours before they're fly-infested), but you can't socialize with her; you can only dismiss or fire her. The more expensive something is, the better it is for you; if you buy the pricey, self-flushing toilet, your comfort actually increases by sitting on it. And my favorite: Adults have well-rounded skill sets, which different activities increment in different ways; children can perform the same activities but are quantified solely by their letter-grade GPA. (Megan is an A+, thank you very much.)

But the richest insights The Sims delivers are outside the box, so to speak. We contracted Sims fever from another couple — longtime friends — and when we get together, we gossip and gossip about our Sims like we've never gossiped about real people. And it's more and deeper and weirder than just discussing a new toy; passersby (or a non-Sims-attuned friend with the misfortune of dining with us) would be convinced we were talking about real people, so acutely do we dissect them. Just sitting down with friends, it's sometimes a stretch for me to come up with a conversation's worth of noteworthy events that have transpired since I last spoke to them; with other Sims junkies, it's a point of pride that your Sim made dinner without burning down the stove or was able to find two hours in which to watch cartoons. Forget the romantic escapism and fanatical questing other games provide. With The Sims, you feel a great sense of accomplishment just to have gotten through a day, to have spent time with friends, to have kept a family together. There has perhaps never been a game in the history of the world that valued such things so highly, and maybe that it comes at this point in our history means something.

Maybe. But it's a question for another time, 'cause I'm in line for a promotion if I can make just one more friend, and I need to fire up the hot tub.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)