Snow Crash was to the science fiction of the 1990s what the late David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest was to metafiction: a new satirical frontier. In the former, Snow Crash is the name of a virus that kills both the online avatar and its human host. In the latter, Infinite Jest is the name of an underground movie so amorally entertaining that viewers are instantly addicted, watching repeatedly until they become incontinent and die. When the wife of the first victim finds her husband dead in his recliner, she rushes over, “crying his name aloud, touching his head, trying to get a response, failing to get any response to her, he still staring straight ahead; and eventually and naturally she — noting that the expression on his rictus of a face nevertheless appeared very positive, ecstatic, even, you could say — she eventually and naturally turning her head and following his line of sight to the cartridge-viewer,” where the deadly Infinite Jest was playing.
If Stephenson’s Snow Crash or Wallace’s Infinite Jest were to appear in a literal form rather than a literary one, it wouldn’t be a virus or a movie; it would be a Will Wright video game.
Wright is an artist in the mould of a Jim Henson or a Dr. Seuss. Both successfully combine mass entertainment with complex moral lessons that work for young and old alike. Sims lets children play at being adults in a version of the real world populated by avatars who lose their jobs, find religion, and go crazy. In Sims, it’s hard to stay friends, it’s hard to remember to eat well, it’s hard to get enough rest, it’s hard to pay the bills on time, and find time to study, and do all the chores, and look after the kids. It’s just like adulthood!
My avatars are all of the Kermit genus, with soft contours and bright colours, capable of floppy and floppier gestures, which even at their most gnashing and bloodthirsty are totally non-threatening. Sims lets children and adults examine the consequences of behaviours they may not have experienced in real life. What if I don’t do the dishes? What happens if I flunk out of school? What happens if one person in the family gets all the attention? What if I become a hazardous drunk, or have seven children, or throw a party on Sunday night at three in the morning just to see what happens? What makes playing Sims novelistic is the sensation of igniting fate — of watching as one small choice sparks a whole chain of events. And by reducing all of life’s decisions to a mouse click, Sims allows us to see how many little things we must do to keep the stitching of our lives together.
It’s not in the verisimilitude of his detail that Wright achieves realism; his imagination is too driven by pop culture to follow a straight Raymond Carver or John Cheever narrative. But a Sims life can start to resemble, in its absurdity, a story by Rick Moody or Amanda Filipacchi. Sims has made kitchen-sink minimalism the most popular genre in the video game industry. Everything we do in Sims, like taking care of children, doing chores, making dinner, disappearing into our work, hosting parties, is what video games are meant to relieve us from. Is Sims just another way for us to neglect our duties in our real lives? It still seems improbable that after eight years a game about doing the things we groan about all day is still so popular.
But this is what makes Sims so addictive: it feels like a legitimate way to examine our lives, even if we’re aware of its infinite jest. In Sims, learning to
do the dishes is enjoyable. Green fumes rise from plates of food that have sat out too long; I click my mouse, and they’re gone. But for every achievement I make in Wright’s Metaverse, I am reminded of something I’ve failed to accomplish in my own. Sims is constantly reminding me how important it is to pay attention to these little things, but it’s so much fun ignoring them.
Wright’s next move with Sims could be to improve the psychological detail. Novels don’t need action; their unique strength is in mapping the psychological landscape. While Sims has novelistic potential, the game’s roots are still in theatre and sport, and might always be. But what would it be like if Wright were to turn his attention to a study of the human mind and make a bestselling game out of Sims neuroses?
Unlike most video games, Wright’s require players and their creations to interact cooperatively. But as much as I see communication as a key to the survival of my vegan super-race in Spore, I also recognize that there are other spe-cies, like my carnivorous interplanetary pirates, whose rule is based on violent oppression, demagoguery, and greed. In fact, most of my Spore creatures do things I wouldn’t endorse, like fighting another species to extinction. And if I care to look closely at my Sims avatars, I can see that they are sex obsessed and chore averse and financially labile. What does this say about me, us, Will Wright? And, more important, what does it suggest about the future? Imagine when Spore and Sims begin to conjoin and the game goes massively multi-player online, so that communication is actual and virtual economies flourish, and wars between species and galaxies exist in real time, and the equivalent of a url could take your avatar to a sleazy, Mos Eisley–like nightclub where you might meet a hot avatar, an avatar who might turn out to be that “special someone,” and you can’t help but think it’s ironic that you first made contact on a distant planet you intended to detonate.
