The Sims 2, Maxis’ sequel to the best-selling computer game of all time, has already moved one million in its first week. Is there anywhere to go but up? It is one of very few games that can claim true cross-market appeal, joining the ranks of Super Mario Brothers and Tomb Raider in terms of sheer visibility. The blank-faced “sim” is an icon unto itself, which begs the question of how it’s possible to have an icon be defined solely by its viewer. Plato would have had a field day.
Perhaps some of its broad-spectrum popularity can be attributed to the fact that it technically isn’t even a game. In a game, there are points to be won, levels to be attained, and a goal. An ending. The Sims offers the first two, but when your original sims die, their children carry on. The Sims is as meaningless as human existence itself, and it’s through this prism that the light of consumerism is shined. There’s a rainbow in there, although the colors look faded through the filter of reality.
But these points have been enumerated and elaborated upon in countless other reviews, for the original game. The sequel brings two new, long-awaited features: the aforementioned childhood, aging, and death, and a true three-dimensional interface. (The Sims previously employed a static, three-quarters isometric view.)
In permitting the use of true 3D, with its endless rotation and zooming features, Will Wright has done something truly astonishing — made The Sims 2 yet one step closer to the Orwellian ideologue the first attempted (and all but succeeded at). Despite my column in Canadian Gamers Magazine, I’m not much of a gamer, but The Sims 2 enthralled me from the first moment I discovered I could trap a sim in a tomb of stone or water and watch them slowly die. Poe would have had a field day.
In short, The Sims 2 gives us walking, talking army men to train our childhood magnifying glass upon, but gives them a domestic bent that blows open our childhood paper-towel-tube spyglass. Our inner authoritarian now has a worthy playground. In a world with adult responsibilities and duties, how truly fulfilling it is to be able to die. The miles to go before we sleep have become mere yards.
But Will Wright shouldn’t let it go to his head; that kind of morbid domestic arena has existed for hundreds of years. It was known as a dollhouse.
Ibsen would have a field day.