So I’ve been playing Sims 3, specifically with an eye to exploring the emergent narrative side of things.
My first concoction was the pairing of a sim with commitment issues and a hopeless romantic. The former was a young adult named Delores, the latter a balding elder named Doofus. (Lest I seem not to be taking the experiment seriously: the name was a suggestion from the person who was looking over my shoulder during character creation.) Doofus’ life goal was to become a chess master. Delores’ was to become the girlfriend of ten sims. I figured Delores was going to be Doofus’ trophy wife, then break his heart by sleeping with half the neighborhood.
Contrary to my expectations, the simulation wouldn’t let me make Delores and Doofus married from the outset. Still, Delores was Flirty as well as having commitment issues, so I figured it shouldn’t take long to get the romantic Doofus interested in her. Unfortunately, I pushed them too hard early on, I think — I had Doofus propose that they go steady. Delores was horrified thanks to her commitment issues, and refused. She offered Doofus a kiss instead, which he refused in turn. Uncomfortable stand-off!
After a day or two of living in the same house, they ran into one another in the bathroom, got into some minor tiff that I didn’t quite understand, but then fell into their first kiss. But I was never able to push them much further than that. I’m not sure whether the simulation has a built-in objection to pairing people with such a large age difference, but they’d just occasionally hold hands or snuggle up to one another in bed; nothing more.
Meanwhile they were both desperately busy. Doofus was a terrible slob and the house became unlivable without maid service, but that meant that their net income after work was quite low and I had to make them work hard more than they wanted to. They were tired a lot. A fire in the kitchen set them back as well. Doofus fainted at the sight.
By scrimping I did manage to buy Doofus his chess set, and occasionally to send Delores out into the neighborhood to flirt with people, but she never got very far with her conquests. Once she tried to eat a neighbor’s ice cream and got kicked out of the house, whereupon she knocked over the trash can before going home. Nice girl, Delores.
Things were finally starting to look up — they’d gotten raises, Delores had thrown a few parties and started to meet other potential dates — when Doofus died of old age.
Delores was heartbroken. She was also coming up on her birthday, and the game prompted me to throw her a party for the occasion, which I did. She kept breaking down into sobbing fits and went to bed without blowing out her candles, while the guests were still present. In the middle of the night she got up to eat her cake alone. Her job performance suffered as she grieved, and everything seemed to go wrong around the house — cold showers, breaking dishwasher, toilet overflow.
She hit on one of her housekeepers and managed to get him to kiss her, but then he left and a few days later the maid service had to be canceled because Delores’ reduced single income could no longer support it.
Delores started to spend all her time playing chess on Doofus’ chess set. Oh, and drinking lots and lots of “juice” from the bar. She’s learning plenty of logic, but she hasn’t come out as the party girl I expected. She seems sadder and wiser now.
Time for a new premise, I think.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
I never thought a story about two sims could be so sad.
@brian:
Then you haven’t read “Homeless in Sims 3” http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/test/
Well, to the extent that “emergent narrative” means “a totally different sequence of events from what you intended or expected,” I’d call this experiment a success.
Looks like a rather positive experience so far?
I’m enjoying it. Still thinking about how it works and what I make of that, but it’s definitely interesting.
The game disallows romance between people of radically different ages. I think this is why it didn’t allow you to set them up as married initially.
That makes sense.
Actually, it only disallows romantic relationships between adults and teenagers. A young adult and an old person can definitely be one another’s romantic interest, since I made an older woman with the same goal of 10 boyfriends.
I haven’t played Sims 3; my experience of the other Sims games has been that they’re in equal measure impressive and unsatisfying. Too much hand-holding the sim people through basic care-taking and not enough influence over events of significance or importance.
About a year ago, I was hanging out in a MacDonalds. (They had free WiFi). There was a crew of 15 year olds at the booth next to me, and among them was a girl who was absorbed in her Iphone.
Suddenly she exclaimed, “My teenager just got pregnant!” Apparently the result of some hack or mod. She was delighted.
I find the hacks and mods very interesting; they reflect what people really want to do with their Sims, and what the designers made taboo.
By the ad I saw on TV about a month ago, Sims 3 is being marketed as a God-game; as a power fantasy. I assume there’s a great deal of thought put into delaying and frustrating the fulfillment of that fantasy. And the insistence on niceness, on Leave-It-To-Beaver-ness, also interests me:
It’s okay to show a person, a Sim, die, and to show the friend’s deep suffering; that’s wholesome mournography. But to show too great an age difference in romance is out.
And yet, although the metaphysics of the game rules out such a romance, it’s still expressible by the Sim who proposes they go steady.
I’ve always felt that the basic thing is missing. What would make a Sims-like game very interesting, to me personally, would be unintended consequences. Phyrric victories. Where the players and the Sims could fulfill their goals, on a more reasonable time scale than currently, and yet with a good chance that, by the time those goals are fulfilled, they no longer do what they were intended to do. Or they create side-effects that raise emotional problems.
I think the Sims games fail to be dramatic because taboo is enforced. Sims can suffer: but they cannot compromise themselves. One of the fundamental mechanisms of drama is the sunken-cost theory of morality. We (the audience, the characters) want a reasonable outcome; a little goal; a modest and benefitial event. And to get it, we just need to make a little sacrifice.
But making that little sacrifice puts us in a situation where we must make yet another sacrifice; and where the first one was in appearance, the second one is in principle. And so on: we (the characters, the audience) get in trouble.
But Sims can’t get in trouble. They cannot be fallen; it’s designed out of their world; and therefore they cannot be redeemed. Because taboo is enforced in the first place, there is no working-through of the moral code. It’s an amoral universe. There’s nothing going on.
As I say, I’ve been very impressed by the Sims games I’ve played over the past few years; but I’m still waiting for them to get that thing that allows me to sustain interest. And I suspect that thing will be the ability for Sims to compromise themselves; to get in trouble, real trouble; beyond meeting rent or having a fire a fire in the kitchen.
Is that even possible? I can’t say with certainty it is; but it’s clear that the current efforts are in the opposite direction.
Conrad.
Utterly awesome. This is exactly the kind of crazy, mixed-up, almost-real-life kinds of interactions I have found The Sims almost casually capable of creating, and they are, if not emergent “story”, certainly emergent “narrative”.
Mass-market or not, pedantic and silly or not, The Sims has always been unquestionably a canvas to create (or to allow to emerge, perhaps) imaginary dramas, and at a scale that is largely unprecedented elsewhere.
IMHO. :)
As always, reading well-written accounts of imaginative experiments in The Sims is vastly preferable to actually playing any of the notoriously unstructured and directionless games yourself (or maybe the existentialist “find your own purpose for playing” attitude which permeates The Sims is just too much for my delicate hardcore gamer sensibilities). Tellingly enough, save for a few details this story could easily be replicated within Sims 1 or 2, so the new game doesn’t appear to include that many signficant changes. At the very least, I would have hoped that tedious details such as toilet overflows (after all, they’re not THAT common in real life) would have been excised by now…
For a decidedly more morbid and outlandish Sims 3 tale, see 1UP’s latest Listen Up podcast (07/03/09).
the new game doesn’t appear to include that many signficant changes
I’d say it does: the Sims have much more of a sense of personality than they did in 1 (I haven’t played 2); the system of traits, short-term goals, and life-long goals provides much more of a sense of individuality, and the interactions between characters are richer.
I do think it’s a bit strange that the Sims live in a world of such awful plumbing and electrical engineering, though. I’ve never felt so persecuted by my own appliances.
It’s also good to note the neighborhood persistence (new to Sims 3) — even when you aren’t watching a particular house, people in the town are moving on with their lives.