Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto Read online

  I tried to keep this in mind when I started my new-and-improved fake life upon my own purchase of The Sims. My hypothesis was that the game’s accuracy would be dependent on my willingness to think within the confines of the game’s creators; I had to think like a machine. And it’s quite possible that this initial postulate was right. But I’ll never really know, because I couldn’t do it. As I made my little SimChuck live and work, all I could think about was what I would think about.

  What makes The Sims so popular is its dogged adherence to the minutiae of subsistence, and that’s where we’re supposed to feel the realism. But the realism I felt was the worst kind; it was the hopeless realization that I was doomed to live in my own prison, just like the singer from Creed. The Sims makes the unconscious conscious, but not in an existential Zen way; The Sims forces you to think about how even free people are eternally enslaved by the processes of living. Suddenly, I had to remember to go to the bathroom. I had to plan to take a shower. Instead of eating when I was hungry, I had to anticipate an unfelt hunger that was always impending. If I didn’t wake up at least an hour before work, I’d miss my ride and get fired. And though I need to do all those things in reality, the thoughts scarcely cross my mind unless I’m plugged into this game.

  After playing The Sims for my first ninety minutes, I paused the action, logged off my computer, and drove to a Chinese restaurant called The Platinum Dragon. I had to pass through some road construction, and it suddenly occurred to me that there would always be road construction—not always on this particular road, but somewhere. There will never be a point in my lifetime when all the highways are fixed. It’s theoretically plausible that my closest friend might someday abandon me for no reason whatsoever, but it’s completely impossible to envision a day where I could drive from New York to California without hitting roadwork somewhere along the way. It will always exist, and there’s nothing I can do about it. And for the first time, that reality made me sad.

  Chuck Vs. Chuck. Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Why I Don’t Understand Anybody.

  There seems to be an inordinate number of movies about mankind going to war with machines (Terminator, A.I., that Stephen King flick with all the AC/DC songs, etc.). That plot device always struck me as something of a cheap shot; as far as I can tell, machines have been nothing but completely civil to us. However, I can assure you that this scenario will never be a problem, even if they completely turn on us. It turns out that computers are the most gutless goddamn cowards you’ll ever meet.

  My SimChuck has absolutely no grit. He is constantly bummed out, forever holding his head and whining about how he’s “not comfortable” or “not having fun.” At one point I bought him a pretty respectable wall mirror for $300, and he responded by saying “I’m too depressed to even look at myself.” As an alternative, he sat on the couch and stared at the bathroom door. Quite the drama queen, my SimChuck is.

  And why isn’t my SimChuck happy? Because he’s a self-absorbed, materialistic prick. This is perhaps the most disturbing element of The Sims: The happiness of the characters is directly proportional to the shit you elect to buy them. As far as I can tell, acquiring electronic equipment and name-brand furniture is just about the only thing Sims find psychologically satisfying.

  The shopping angle appears to be the part of the game its designers found most compelling, as their catalog of faux products is both massive and detailed. This is the kind of shit that would prompt Tyler Durden to hit somebody in the face. Take the on-screen description of the Soma Plasma TV, for example. Buying this item for $3,500 increases the owner’s fun rating by six full points. And this is what you’d get:

  Perfect form…perfect image conformity…perfect entertainment. Soma Consumer Electronics takes the ‘plasma phenomenon’ to a brave new level in this elegant technology statement. With its incredible image quality, unique form and super thin Flatuspective screen, the Soma Plasma TV is the undisputed leader in nanopixel technology.

  It would be fun to claim that this kind of Price Is Right product exposition is a treacherous form of unexpected advertising, but that wouldn’t be true, as all the products in The Sims are fake. And it would make me seem as astute as Chip Lambert if I suggested this game is latently attempting to brainwash children into believing that shopping is an important part of life, but I honestly don’t think the wackmobile geeks at Electronic Arts have motives that sinister. It’s basically just weird, and it’s indisputable proof that The Sims is not a strategy game, even though that’s what it calls itself. If this was somehow about strategy, all we’d need to know is that getting the biggest television gets you x number of fun points. But nobody cares about the math. The reason so much effort has been placed in the “promotion” of fake Sims merchandise is so that its real-life players will enjoy the experience of buying them. It’s almost circular logic: If a human playing The Sims somehow enjoys pretending to buy a plasma TV that doesn’t even exist, it stands to reason that my little SimChuck would profoundly enjoy watching said TV if it were somehow real. By this justification, buying high-end electronics really should cure depression.

  And what’s even more amazing is that this is kind of true, and—ultimately—it’s what I’ll never understand about human nature (simulated or otherwise). I never enjoy the process of buying anything, but I get the impression that most Americans love it. What The Sims suggests is that buying things makes people happy because it takes their mind off being alive. I would think this would actually make them feel worse, but every woman I’ve ever dated seems to disagree.

  To succeed at this game, I am forced to consume like a mofo. Perhaps the greatest chasm between Chuck and SimChuck is that I don’t own a bed and he can’t live without one. I realize it might seem crazy for a thirty-year-old to exist without a bed, but I just can’t get myself to buy one; it never seems worth it, because all I would use it for is sleeping (and once I’m unconscious, what do I care where I’m lying?). I get by fine with my “Sleeping Machine,” sort of a self-styled nest in the corner of my bedroom. Oh, I can’t deny that some overnight visitors to my chamber of slumber have been “disturbed” by my unwillingness to own a traditional bed, but the simple truth is that I don’t need that kind of luxury in my life. My Sleeping Machine provides all the REM I require. I hope I never own a bed. But don’t tell that to SimChuck. Until I got him his $1,000 Napoleon Sleigh Bed ( “made with actual wood and real aromatic cedar”), all he did was cry like a little bitch.

  I Need Love. Or (Perhaps Less Accurately) Love Is All Around, But Only Around.

  Truth be told, my secret motivation for experimenting with The Sims was to see if I could sustain any kind of successful relationship within the scope of the game—essentially “playing” to “get play.” I’m guessing this is a pretty big draw for all Sims obsessives, since it’s hard to imagine how anyone regularly sitting in front of a computer for hours at a time could be having much sex. I realize that’s a stereotype, but the popularity of The Sims almost irrefutably proves it to be true: This game is single-mindedly designed to be a reflection of a normal life that’s filled with normal human interaction. Apparently, that notion is so far removed from gamers that it can only be pursued through a fantasy realm.

  Still, there’s something oddly Utopian about The Sims relationship-driven, peacenik theology. Unlike other video games I’ve enjoyed in the past—The Legend of Zelda, Elevator Action, the original Nintendo version of Metal Gear, etc.—The Sims does not require me to kill virtually everyone I meet. As I meet other Sims in the neighborhood, my initial options are to talk with them (understandable), joke with them (also understandable), tickle them (somewhat less understandable), or sneak up behind their back and scare the crap out of them (pretty incomprehensible, but hard to resist). Our interactions are marked by thought bubbles that contain little pictures of the conversation topic; the characters don’t speak with real words. They talk in a goofy pigeon language that has been compared to the teachers in old Peanuts cartoons, although I te
nd to think it sounds like a combination of French, Ebonics, and the Japanese pop band Pizzicato Five (interestingly, Sims players in different counties sometimes assume that what they are hearing is real dialogue they merely can’t decipher—Electronic Arts has fielded phone calls from Americans who thought they had accidentally purchased the Spanish version, Germans who suspected they had been sent the Italian version, Brazilians who thought they had the Canadian version, etc., etc., etc.).

  The first two people I ( “I” being “SimChuck”) meet in “Simburbia” are Mortimer and Bella, a guy with a mustache and a woman wearing a tight red dress. They evidently live nearby. Mortimer is a lot like my real-world friend Dr. Dave in Akron: He’s always up for anything. Bella is a tougher nut to crack; she often glances at her watch when I talk to her. But because Bella’s a woman, I keep talking (and talking, and talking), and I throw a little tickling into the mix, and I talk some more, and in no time at all I am given the opportunity to select the “flirt” option whenever I meet Bella on the street.

  I start calling Bella on my SimPhone several times a day, and she always comes over immediately. This SimChuck is one suave bastard. A little pink heart icon appears next to Bella’s on-screen dossier, and she begins defining me as “The Sim I adore.” We smooch hardcore. Yet—for some reason—I can’t come up with a finishing move. It’s not so much that Bella declines to sleep with me; it’s more that I don’t know how to ask. I stand by my bed and call her name, and she runs right over…but then we start talking about skiing. I buy a billiard table in order to impress her (and to set the stage for some, Penthouse Forum, Cybill-Shepherd-in-The Last-Picture-Show- style shagging), but all she does is clap her hands. I mean, I know she’s comfortable with me: She has no qualms about using the toilet while I’m standing right next to her, an experience that’s light-years more intimate than most kinds of oral sex. But SimChuck remains denied.

  And you know why SimChuck gets no nookie? Because Bella was lying to me all along. At the height of our relationship, I invite Bella over for a game of pool (and “maybe more”), and she says, “Sure, I’d love to come over. Can I bring a friend?” I reluctantly agree, but guess who shows up: Mortimer! It turns out he and Bella are married. Upon watching Bella’s hello embrace, Mortimer immediately slaps me, and we kind of scuffle. I try to call him the next morning to apologize, but he tells me to get bent. In a matter of simulated hours, I’ve managed to lose my only male acquaintance by not having sex with his wife. This is unprecedented. Even Chuck can’t compete with the problems of SimChuck. I had no choice but to buy a Zimantz component hi-fi stereo system ($650).

  God’s God. Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Will Wright.

  After seventy-two hours of Simming I had grown so despondent over the sexless, consumer-obsessed state of my fake life that I called directory assistance and got the number of Electronic Arts in Redwood, California, demanding to speak to Sims creator Will Wright. They directed me to their satellite division Maxis, and I used the Maxis company directory to leave a message with Mr. Wright, assuming he was working on the prototype for Sim-Soul and would most likely never call me back. However, I was wrong: He returned my call in just a few hours and tried to help me understand how I’ve managed to destroy my life twice.

  “If there’s any core question with The Sims, it’s got be, ‘What is the purpose of life?’ Is it to be loved? Is it to be rich? Is it to be successful? They’re the same questions you could ask if you never knew the game existed,” Wright told me. “But it does seem like some people come to these interesting conclusions about themselves when they play. And if a game changes your perception of the world around you, it’s successful.”

  By that definition, The Sims would, in fact, be classified as art (and art in the truest sense of the word). Wright clearly sees it as such, and he makes a good argument. A forty-two-year-old who never graduated from college (though he did log time at Louisiana State, Louisiana Tech, and the New School in New York City), Wright fell into programming and gaming as an extension of his interest in robotics, a mentality that’s readily noticed in Sim behavior.

  I explained the conditions of my dilemma to Wright, and—perhaps predictably—he seemed to have heard every one of my questions before. I told him what had happened with Bella. “Yeah, Bella’s kind of a slut,” he snickered. He explained that his larger vision with The Sims was to show how day-to-day living is—in and of itself—an ongoing strategy problem, which is why so much of The Sims is built around time constraints and the oblique pressure of responsibility. We even had a friendly chat about Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which probably wouldn’t have happened if I had called the creator of Donkey Kong.

  However, Wright bristled when I suggested that The Sims is mostly a glorification of consumerism that ultimately suggests happiness is available at the mall. He didn’t necessarily seem annoyed by this accusation, but he remains baffled that everyone who plays The Sims seems to come to that same conclusion.

  “Materialism is the red herring of the game,” he says. “Nobody seems to pick up on that. The more you play, the more you realize that all the stuff you buy eventually breaks down and creates all these little explosions in your life. If you play long enough, you start to realize that those things won’t really make you happy.”

  When Wright told me this, I immediately asked if what SimChuck needed was a midlife crisis. Maybe if I kept playing, he’d eventually reach a point where he’d be self-actualized, even if I took away his $1,800 pinball machine. Once again, Wright bristled; he asked if I was talking about the little person in my computer or the little person in my own mind. I told him that it was hard to tell the difference, because we both seemed to be doing the same shit and neither one of us knew why.

  “Well, life doesn’t have a score,” Wright said. “I’ve noticed that whenever people play The Sims for the first time, they do all these little experiments. They want to see what their power will do, so they lock a character in a room for five days and watch them starve to death. They’ll try to make somebody electrocute themselves. But at some point, that power is meaningless. It stops being interesting. You need to have somebody pushing back.”

  That reminded me of something. Or (perhaps more accurately), that reminded me of someone.

  I hung up the phone and went back to my computer, opening The Sims and revisiting the place I had been when I started this essay. My SimChuck was still there, frozen in space, hungry and tired and gesturing like a madman, covered in piss. Up until my discussion with Wright, I had assumed individual Sims could not be killed; I thought they were like doomed vampires from Anne Rice novels, forced to exist eternally in a world they did not create. In truth, my Sim was just a confused little guy, still waiting for a reason to live.

  I clicked on the “options” key and directed my cursor to the button that said “Free Will.” I deployed actualization, and SimChuck was emancipated. I watched him take a shower and crawl into his Sleeping Machine, where he slept for the next fourteen hours. And then I did the same.

  “I don’t know how I feel about MTV’s The Real World,” he said. “I mean, is it really real? How real is it, really? Is it a depiction of reality, or is it a reflection of what we perceive to be reality? They advertise this as ‘reality programming,’ but isn’t anything programmed inherently fabricated? How real is real, you know?”

  She said nothing. She continued smoking a menthol cigarette. Twenty seconds passed.

  “Well, what do you think?” he finally asked.

  “About what,” she asked, exhaling through her teeth.

  “About The Real World,” he repeated. “Do you think it’s real?”

  “Compared to what?”

  “Well…to…I guess compared to things that are completely real.”

  Twenty more seconds passed.

  “Is the show taped or edited in the Fourth Dimension?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Are the characters robots?”

  “No.”<
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  “Can the episodic plotlines only be perceived by people who have ingested mind-expanding hallucinogens, such as lysergic acid diethylamide, mescaline, phencyclidine, ketamine, or psychedelic mushrooms?”

  “No.”

  “Well then,” she concluded, “it sounds real to me.”

  3 What Happens When People Stop Being Polite 0:26

  Even before Eric Neis came into my life, I was having a pretty good 1992.

  I wasn’t doing anything of consequence that summer, but—at least retrospectively—nothingness always seems to facilitate the best periods of my life. I suppose I was ostensibly going to summer school, sort of; I had signed up for three summer classes at the University of North Dakota in order to qualify for the maximum amount of financial aid, but then I dropped two of the classes the same day I got my check. I suppose I was also employed, sort of; I had a work-study job in the campus “geography library,” which was really just a room with a high ceiling, filled with maps no one ever used. For some reason, it was my job to count these maps for three hours a day (I was, however, allowed to listen to classic-rock radio). But most importantly, I was living in an apartment with a guy who spent all night locked in his bedroom writing a novel he was unironically titling Bits of Reality, which I think was a modern retelling of Oedipus Rex. He slept during the afternoon and mostly subsisted on raw hot dogs. I think his girlfriend paid the rent for both of us.