SIMS, HUMANS, AND GODS
or why humans like to play Gods while playing Sims
By Dionne Lugue
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| Here they are in their glory |
One of the oldest warnings to humankind is that we are not Gods. We can find that piece of advice in Genesis 3:5, sometimes known as the Serpent’s Deception: “For God knows that in the day you eat of it [forbidden fruit], your eyes will be opened and you will be like God…” This hasn’t stopped us from trying, though, over and over again. Still, despite the warning from the big book, we keep on taking a go at the role, a God that is, as if we just can’t help ourselves or have been programmed by some higher or lower being to do so.
Today not many people read the bible, or not enough to heed Old Testament warnings. However, we can look to a different type of sacred object for guidance: the incredibly popular Sims franchise is the best example we have of the philosophical problem of human overreach.The fact that it’s a video game about playing as a God or not makes it all the more disturbing.
The creation of The Sims franchise was born out of destruction. In 1991 the Oakland firestorm destroyed the home of William Wright, who would then take his experience of rebuilding his home to design The Sims. Originally titled Home Tactics the idea for The Sims focused solely on building homes to simulate how virtual humans move around a space, but when the developers found more pleasure in watching the people than building the houses they knew they had tapped into something special.
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| Wright lost his house, but we got a game |
Moving forward with this new idea, the design for the game turned into a virtual dollhouse where the player can look after and control people by controlling their hunger, hygiene, fun, career paths, essentially all aspects of life from birth to death. To accomplish this Wright took inspiration from works detailing human needs, such as Abraham Maslow's 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which places a hierarchical value on basic needs such as safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization. As well as Charles Hampden-Turner’s Maps of the Mind, a book which compares more than fifty theories about how the mind works.
The Sims was published through EA, Electronic Arts, on February 4, 2000 and during its four-year run it sold over 10 million copies worldwide. By 2014 three more versions of The Sims, each introducing new features, were released totaling in nearly 200 million copies sold in 60 countries in more than 20 languages, making it one of the best-selling PC video game franchises ever. The Sims franchise currently holds four of the top fifteen spots for best selling PC games of all time and was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016. It was then that the director for the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, Jon-Paul Dyson, stated, “By turning the computer into a toy to explore the complexity of the human experience, The Sims radically expanded the notion of what a game could be.” Dyson is right. The Sims moved gaming into a different direction, emphasizing creativity and control and showing how badly we want to be Gods.
However, real life is unpredictable and we have little or no control over it. The Sims lets us see what happens when we gain control and play God. All of a sudden this little urban planning game reveals how we view our own human experience and what would happen if we had complete control over it. In other words, what happens when you become a God. Anything and everything that could possibly happen, within the realms of what the developers have provided, begins and ends with you. The official Sims 4 website promotes this idea with the catchphrase, “Play With Life.” Similarly, the descriptor that displays before anything else is, “Your choices shape every aspect of your Sims' lives from birth, to being a toddler, and into adulthood.” It is the premise of Westworld and every other science-fiction utopia and dystopia.
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| It's fun, trust me |
Once you purchase the game and start it up you are given full control over how your Sims look in the Create-A-Sim feature. In Create-A-Sim you have control over the physique and personality of your first Sim family, or group of strangers, up to eight individual sims per household. There are pre-made face and body types that one can build off of or you could press randomize until you find something you like. It works very much like the randomness of DNA.
In the shoes of a God the player controls the DNA through different panels. There are panels for selecting the gender, age, voice, and even walking-style from the various in-game options. Below the age and gender panel is the personality panel where you can select three personality traits to attach to each sim. Young Adult, Adult, and Elder sims get three traits while Teens, Children, and Toddlers receive one to two traits. Traits are grouped into four subsections between emotional, hobby, lifestyle, and social. The combination of the traits dictate the personality of that Sim and how they react to the world around them. Self-explanatory traits like “Clumsy” and “Loves Outdoors” are simple enough but then there are also traits such as “Noncommittal” where the Sim becomes tense if in a job or relationship for too long. Conversely they become happy once they break off a relationship or quit their job or take longer to propose.
One of the goofy aspects is that they can discuss their fear of commitment with other Sims. In the same panel you can select what their lifetime aspiration is, what they want to accomplish with their life or who the want to become. You can edit the sims bodies in detail by selecting different parts and dragging directly from their bodies or with sliders. This can lead to small changes such as how far a Sim’s eyes are from each other, the muscle tone, narrowness of their nose, fullness of their lips, how large their gut, chest, and backside are, the color of their eyes and skin, and much, much more. You can also determine their hairstyle and clothes that they will wear for different occasions such as everyday, sleep, and formal events. Adding more sims is as easy as clicking on the Add-A-Sim option where you can repeat the steps above or use the Play-With-Genetics feature where you have a sim that is the offspring of two other sims in the family. Finally you can type in their first and last name, completing their identity. Once your happy with the birth of your Sims, it's time to move them into a neighbourhood.
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| See, lots of variation |
In the beginning there are three neighbourhoods to choose from. Willow Creek, Oasis Springs, and Newcrest. They are very simply a typical suburb, a suburb in the desert, and a denser city. You also have the option to move into a premade home, build your own, or download and place a home built by another person in the Sims community in the Sims Gallery where other players upload their creations. This introduces the Build Mode feature--this was the underlying inspiration of The Sims, building homes--and allows players to place walls, rooms, doors, windows, essentially anything a home would need inside and outside to function correctly. Once you're satisfied with your new Sim home it’s time to play with life.
Live Mode is where the majority of the gameplay takes place, where you control what Sims do, who they talk to, and how they feel. Interactions between Sims are divided into five categories: friendly, funny, mean, mischievous, and romantic. Relationships develop between Sims based on these interactions which become increasingly available. Different interactions with other Sims can also affect your Sims and the other Sims emotions which are also divided into categories ranging from happy to sad, focused to tense. With all of these variables and an infinite amount of replayability The Sims appeals to so many. Each Sim could have the best possible life where only good happens but, and just as easily, they could have a life full of death and despair just because the player, who is effectively their God, felt like it. What do these Gods do with their control, or more importantly, why?
There are millions of Gods out there who have and are controlling the lives of Sims. While the developers of the game have always kept the lives of Sims light and cartoony, especially in the way it depicts death, it is very easy to turn the game into something much darker. If the player wants to introduce drugs or graphic violence you could by simply downloading community created modifications into their game which EA has provided a folder for, but they cannot support directly. Mods, short for modification, allow the player to add almost anything into their game that isn’t there by default. Mods always have the risk of “breaking” the game, since the people creating them are not EA or Maxis employees just anyone who knows how to code well enough. Even though there is a folder for mods, EA and The Sims developers have effectively “washed their hands” of responsibility should these community created mods break a players game. Perhaps even they are disturbed by what rogue Gods do with the materials they’ve provided and have thus turned their backs because it is far beyond what they intended.
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| If we can do anything, why do we do so little? |
Still, a large amount of players seem to enjoy introducing realistic chaos into their worlds. Watching their creations experience some of the worst things that could happen to a person appeals to a large amount of people. Some of the enjoyment in playing a rogue God might come from the lack of repercussions because Sims aren’t real, they’re merely pixels on a screen. But many admit they have formed connections with their Sims to some degree, yet they still choose to do these horrendous acts at the end of the day. Reddit user pseudo_meat, who confessed that they, “just like this rampant source of chaos spiraling through the universe,” is a perfect example of rouge Gods in action.
Confessing online on a Sims forum titled, What is the worst thing you’ve ever done in The Sims series, pseudo_meat stated that they used mods that allow casual sex, referred to in-game as “woohoo.” This removes the in-game requirement of love between two Sims before pregnancy can occur. Their reasoning for this was that they want the world they’re controlling to be as realistic as possible. In their own words, “The Sims live in this pleasant-ville version of reality where everyone needs to be in love before they can woohoo, and where every pregnancy is planned. And that's just not the world I live in.”
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| Anything can happen and it does |
With this casual woohoo mod installed, pseudo_meat’s world contained what they call the “Bang House,” where one Sim they create would live to create chaos in other Sims relationships. This Sims entire existence is to have casual sex with any sim that pseudo_meat decides. This leads to broken families and unintended pregnancies where, at one point, there were 10 kids in the house. However, even in this instance a God can still have a connection to the Sim they created. Sometimes rogue Gods will stop injecting chaos and return to normality so their Sim can live out the rest of their life in peace as pseudo_meat explained, “There's a time when I reign it in. When she gives up her old ways…and retires into a content life of peace and quiet. That's where this story ends.”
It could be said that these moments of remorse tells us something about humans, that even when we are given the tools to play a vengeful God we still hold onto some aspect humanity. That even when rogue Gods are doing these disturbing things that the developers of The Sims do not intend to happen, it allows these rogue Gods to look within themselves as a person—as psuedo_meat puts it—“things that made me question exactly what kind of person I am.”
One of the most philosophically interesting things about humans gaining power is not that it changes people, but rather that it amplifies what kind of person was already there. Perhaps this is why The Sims attracts so many people, the unintended insight into humanity and oneself. Behind the utopian cover that The Sims looks like at first glance, it is moreso a controlled environment testing what humans do when they are given power over others. Whatever the player choose to do reveals more about themself then perhaps what they expected, or even what they wanted, to learn about themselves when they started playing. Knowing what kind of person you already are without the real-world consequences of your actions.
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| It's all about philosophy |
Most video games tell a story that lives only within the game itself. A superhero saving the day, a medieval warrior slaying demons, a pair of brothers saving the princess from a turtle-like dragon in a Mushroom Kingdom. What The Sims tells us, however, is more than the stories a player creates for The Sims within the world. The Sims—more than any other video game—tells us about ourselves. We just have to play as a God to recognize how human we are.
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