Sims in Space

Sims in Space

On a train traveling between Boston and my family’s home in Connecticut, I watched from across the aisle as a woman worked on her lap top to build herself first a character, then a group of friends and finally a house— in preparation for admission to the online Sims community. And it remains the most provocative thing that I saw during my holiday break.

At first I was just a voyeur of the technology. Scrolling through facial features, a three dimensional figure’s face bulges and sags according to the user’s tastes. The face blinks, turns and cocks its head, seemingly impatient for its own completion. This Pinocchio is a teenager with no time for its creator. The disaffected movements of the simulated character are just an attempt at keeping the puppet from being static, but the result shows that boredom is the easiest of human emotions for the computer to capture. Features were chosen and a suitably personalized hipster wardrobe picked out I must admit to taking some time to check out the physical endowments of these young men and women while they stood in their underwear. They’re bulging in all of the right places (even if the more interesting ones aren’t customizable).

But it was when my neighbor across the aisle began building her house on a gridded “suburban” lot that I started thinking that the Sims might be more than a game but a glimpse of something coming fast to our digital world. The Sims series of games assembles a palette of options—whether for building a city, a civilization, or a family—and the thousands ways these options may interact with each other provides the perception of free choice and control. The internet provides a similarly outstanding range of choices, but again these choices are along already established paths. You don’t know where web surfing will take you; you only know that someone has already been there before.

All of this leads to persistent questions about the boundaries of self-expression on the internet. And whether creating virtual three-dimensional spaces like those in the online Sims game expand those possibilities or simply provide an illusion of infinite possibilities. I’ll get back to this.