The Sims: Mundane Made Interesting

If someone were to come up to me ten years ago and say, “There’s this new game coming out, and you get to cook, clean, and everything else you can’t stand doing in it,” I would have laughed in their face. Heck, I still might to this day, but for a different reason: that very game has me hooked.

Yes folks, somehow The Sims has made the most mind-numbingly boring tasks seem intriguing to me, and with a movie in the works, Sims 3 coming to stores next February, and more “spin-offs” than a VH1 reality show (i.e. The Sims: Pet Stories, The Urbz: Sims in the City, etc.), I know I’m not alone.

Sure, there’s much more to do than day-to-day chores in the game, but on the most part, let’s face it: The Sims really shouldn’t be as fun as it is. My character is pretty pathetic; she gets up, goes to work—lather, rinse, repeat. To further add to the intrigue, she goes to the bathroom, bathes, eats, and cleans, occasionally chatting with others in some gibberish language. Ho-hum. The story of my life; the story of my Sim’s life. (Yes, I too speak gibberish sometimes.)

A while ago, I became obsessed with an online game called Student Survivor. I spent hours taking my “pet college student” to class, finding her a job, and making her study. One day, I had an epiphany: why am I living all of this over again? It wasn’t that exciting the first time around, so why am I practically spending as much time as it took for me to get my B.A. for my character to get hers? She doesn’t even exist!

Some say that there is at least some validity to this seemingly vacuous gameplay. According to the International Journal of Computer Game Research, “not only do people’s experiences influence their perceptions of their Sims, but that people actually project aspects of their own lives into their creations as well,” meaning that it can actually be valuable in clinical psychology. In a study that they did, for example, one participant stated “[My Sims] each had a different aspect of myself; … each one would have goals I could relate to.”

Perhaps my compulsion to play Student Survivor was expressing my desire to learn more. Perhaps my desire to make dinner in The Sims reveals my secret urge to become a chef. Perhaps my inclination to get in the occasional Sim-fight is revealing my innermost jerk….or just plain fun.

Psychobabble aside, I guess what it really boils down to is everything’s more interesting when we’re not actually doing it. It’s like the nosy neighbor that always peeks out the window to see what you’re up to, even when it’s something as banal as mowing the lawn. Escapism at its finest: watching others scrub the toilet, and finding comfort in knowing that it’s not you. Boy, do I love The Sims.