The Sims: A game about having control until one minor thing goes wrong and everything collapses. Just like real life!
You start with a plan. You create the perfect house. You get the money, even if you get it through unethical means. You choose a career for your Sim's aspirations and decide their perfectly suited partner beforehand. Still, they find a way to sabotage everything over a full bladder or a food craving.
Games like these only remind us that it doesn't matter how much we plan; life can have other ideas for us. Except in real life, there are many more variables.
It's funny that some of us like to play a game that reproduces what, in our own lives, makes us anxious. Maybe it's because in The Sims we can fix everything with a click, and it's a much more controlled environment, which gives us a sense of security and predictability that real life can never provide.
I can't believe I spent so many hours as a kid playing a game that reproduced adult life. I suppose that's the logic behind most games, though, like when we used to pretend we were doctors or teachers. It's just another way to rehearse what one day might be our lives.
Interestingly, we spend such a large portion of our lives preparing for adulthood, like adulthood is the time when everything is put into practice, and in a way it is, but what about those years we spent playing, studying, and rehearsing- aren't they important as well? Weren't they enough on their own?
Playing The Sims is more similar to playing with dolls, though. It's like having an overview of your life, like if you were able to see it in third person and control it from there (while also controlling almost everyone else, lol).
Wait, wouldn't that be great? To be able to load all your real-life problems into a computer, and then an agent could make a render of your apartment and yourself and everything, and then you could actually rehearse different actions. I think it's a great idea, but also a very dangerous one.
I mean, will computers ever be able to contemplate the endless(?) possibilities any action might have? (I suppose this is a proto-mathematical thought)And if they can, wouldn't that create another meta-life? Or would it be part of the same life/universe? Food for thought.
Anyway, coming back to less dangerous territory, the current Sims give us what we crave the most in our adult lives: predictability and the capacity to control everything.
Still, I'm going to suggest a different approach for the upcoming weeks and months: let's try to use the computer less and touch grass a little more. I have a feeling that will help a lot more than downloading yet another video game and losing ourselves in it.
I've considered buying a phone with no internet myself, like one of those vintage, cool models.
Do you remember the Nokia C115, or was it only popular in my town?