Design for Living

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I’d always written off video games as a waste of time. But after being dumped at age twenty-one by the first boy I’d ever truly fallen for, there were plenty of hours to be wasted. I’d stayed in Michigan that summer. A waitressing job was my only scheduled activity besides Being in Love. Periodically, I escaped boredom at work by crawling under the bar to drink rum straight from the bottle. My concerned co-workers thought going out might help. Instead, I went home and installed The Sims.
   When I was a kid, my hippie mother forbade video games, along with Yellow No. 5 and Guess jeans. But in 1989, when Electronic Arts released SimCity for the Mac SE-30, she let us play because it was relatively educational and lacked aggressive merchandising. I was thirteen when my parents divorced. My brother, Lewis, and I began spending weekends in the cream-carpeted paradise of my father’s apartment, with its Pop-Tarts and sugared sodas and Mac Centris with color screen. There, we devoted ourselves to SimCity 2000.
   SimCity was all squares and flatlands, but SimCity 2000 got specific and complicated. Shopping malls and marinas replaced obliquely labeled commercial zones, and you could erect bus depots and airports instead of simply laying down road. The goal was to create a functional city within a budget,

averting destruction by crime, poverty or natural disasters. On lazy Saturdays, we would have city-building tournaments, rotating hour-long shifts in front of the computer. After Lewis discovered the cheat codes to create endless banks, Dad suggested we build together. Bernardville spiraled into labyrinths of housing developments, swimming pools and nuclear power plants, linked by Jetsons-style highways.
   When I was fourteen, my father died. I set Bernardville aflame with nuclear explosions and spent hours staring at the ceiling fan.
   So, turning desperate that dumb hot summer in Michigan, I gambled that playing The Sims wouldn’t summon painful memories. It didn’t. It was too all-consuming. You create people, put the people in a house you build, then tell them what to do. I named and

For us, tiny cartoon hearts exploded immediately, like light bulbs in a microwave.

dressed my two-member family, selecting from three skin shades. I distributed twenty-five “personality points” between five traits (Playful, Neat, Nice, Outgoing, Active). The result was Britney, the scantily clad housegirl, and Ani, the neat worker bee. I chose a $3,500 lot on Sim Lane and built and furnished a small house with the remaining $16,500.
    The mood indicators on the bottom of the screen — hunger, energy, comfort, fun, social, hygiene, bladder and the ubiquitous room — fluctuate between green and red. To stay alive, your Sims need creature comforts, which means they need money, which makes consumerism the game’s driving force. When the daily newspaper is delivered, a Sim Looks for Job and either accepts or declines the single classified. A beat-up turquoise station wagon, reminiscent of high school and marijuana, carpools your Sim to work and brings her back, paycheck directly deposited into the family bank.
   Unhappy Sims lose their jobs, piss off the neighbors and, if pushed to the edge, kill themselves. How they feel about their rooms (even about something as random as a lack of wallpaper) can drive them to suicide. I built Ani and Britney a large bedroom with royal blue carpet and a flamingo lamp. I commanded them to speak to guests, bathe, eat and repair the sink. Ani snagged a gig as a security guard and was given the graveyard shift. She bulked up on “body points” to earn a promotion, which meant more money, which meant more stuff.
   The game has no levels, so the stopping point is simply the moment you must be elsewhere, or asleep. When Devon called at three in the morning, I considered putting him off until Ani earned enough money to buy a massage chair. But I quickly learned this much: Only Devon could distract me from The Sims, and only The Sims could distract me from Devon.

In The Sims, relationships develop on a numerical scale, and they make sense. I liked this because my relationships at the time made none. SimSpeak is simple: if an initial conversation (Talk About Interests) goes smoothly — like, say, the first time Devon and I talked — the relationship score raises and further communicative options appear on a pop-up menu — Tell a Joke, Friendly Hug, Flirt, Juggle. Yeah, juggle. Unable to engage in typical modes of ridiculous couple entertainment like imitating Napoleon Dynamite, the Sims juggle.
   Pictures in speech bubbles represent conversation topics. Pictures in thought bubbles indicate what your Sim needs. (This is generally a bed or a cheeseburger.) Most Sims enjoy discussing how much they do or do not like airplanes, sunglasses, and what I think is a symbol representing nuclear power.
    Sims react with green plus signs to mutual interests or welcomed gestures such as Passionate Kisses, like the one Devon and I shared the moment he stepped into my apartment. He’d spent months Checking Out/Admiring me at the gym. For us, tiny cartoon hearts exploded immediately, like light bulbs in a microwave. Within three days of meeting, we were chillingly intimate with each other. I suppose that’s why we ignored our vastly dissimilar social architecture. I listened to his beer pong stories and chose not to hear about his friends who still lived with their parents. I’d already spent a year living alone in Manhattan. But I figured it would work out fine. I could plan a career; he could stay bent over beer-stained pool tables and roll into the grocery store for bulk candy after midnight.

I soon noticed my mind shifting entirely into Sim views.

   We were flushed and giddy, and we stayed that way until the breakup began. I say began because even though we never officially got back together, those hearts remained. Devon broke up with me because it was too much — too intense, too serious. “I can’t be your boyfriend without wanting to be with you constantly,” he said, “and I can’t be with you constantly right now.” The Sims has no options menu for Discover Bond of Two Kids who Lost Parents at Fourteen.
   He moved on to bright-eyed high school girls with early curfews and easy laughs, the kind he could take to parties, the kind he wouldn’t cry in front of. When I ask him now why he thinks it ended, he says, “I was young” or “It was a huge mistake.” It’s true that he was young — and confused, and depressed, and destructive. But I was in the game, and I wanted green, green, green. I didn’t know what he wanted that summer. He didn’t know. But it wasn’t happiness. And that’s why I needed The Sims.
   As the summer pressed forward, Devon lied to me about seeing other people, and was wild with suspicion that I was doing the same. But I wasn’t. When Devon suggested we just be friends, I reminded him that we never were friends to begin with. If we had been on The Sims, that joke would have been met with a red negative sign and the sight of both characters backing up into irresponsibly placed furniture. When I gave him an ultimatum — that we get back together or never see each other again — he lost it. Pepper could Make a Joke to Ani, but he couldn’t Run Car Into Tree, like Devon did after we spent two hours fighting at Denny’s.
   The Sims provided such quantitative and comforting ways to assess life that I soon noticed my mind shifting entirely into Sim views. My energy meter ran a green streak after an espresso. I felt my social meter flash red when my friends shot me disapproving frowns for leaving a party when Devon called. But I knew I’d be back in the green if he provided enough social energy to compensate — which he usually did, because we were incapable of occupying the same room without having sex. When that happened, for a moment, every other meter receded. As his hands grabbed my hipbones, concerns like Hygiene and Hunger became irrelevant. But my happiness would inevitably fade the next day, when I’d Call Neighbor: Devon and Invite Over and get rejected. When Devon said he was too tired to hang out, I remembered the Sim equation and backed off. Tired Sims, with their thought bubbles of oak-framed beds, don’t enjoy “juggling.” I spent hours in front of that screen. I could go on forever. Green, green, green.
   “Is there, like, a point?” Devon asked once when we played The Sims together. He preferred Tony Hawk.
   I shrugged. “I guess to get a really nice house.”
   “Miss ‘I Hate Video Games,’ huh?”
   “It’s not a video game.”
   “Yeah, it is.”
   I wanted to say this: The point is it stops me from analyzing our conversations until I drive myself completely insane. The point is that it is pointless and will never end.

We’re still waiting for the charted variables of our lives to match up.

Then it was the last week of August. My friends were due back on campus in days, and I hoped they would put things back in perspective for me.
   That week, I took a risk: I let Ani, Pepper and Britney take the bus to Old Town. The ride was offered frequently, but I always turned it down because I didn’t know what would happen. The Sims screen is always on the house — working Sims are out of the picture until they return. I knew no other world.
   Old Town was complicated and filled with unfamiliar characters. I couldn’t find the pigtailed papergirl or the scruffy castaways who set their own kitchen on fire. The girls wandered. I frantically shifted my screen to keep up with them. I clicked on the bus, waiting for a pop-up menu to open the door leading home. Nothing. I clicked on the bus stop. It was like banging a vending machine that wouldn’t surrender the Snickers I’d paid for.
   My Sims quickly became tired and hungry, in need of showers, toilets and lively conversation about airplanes and downhill skiing. They stared at me and wept. The graphic for crying makes it look like the characters are being shot repeatedly in the chest.
   “Go home!” I yelled at the screen. “Find the fucking bus!” I hadn’t saved the game for several hours, so I couldn’t return to where I’d been at noon. But that was before I bought the dishwasher and the hot tub! Before Ani became police chief!
   Ani’s thought bubbles are consumed by suicide. That very morning she’d been so happy, so in control. She jumped into the fountain and drowned. Britney wet her pants and followed her friend into the cold stone fountain.
    I Control-Alt-Deleted the whole thing to SimHell. Two months of toil, gone.
   Devon called a few hours later. “What are you doing?” he asked.
   “Feeling sorry for myself,” I said.
   “Yeah, right. You’re playing The Sims.”
   “No,” I said, sitting up and staring at the blank screen, which reflected my bloodshot eyes. “I’m not. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
   That was it for me and The Sims. I knew that I would soon have classes and social obligations, and I wouldn’t give myself the freedom to waste so much time in the near future. What I didn’t know was that Devon and I would hurt and make up and fuck and love over and over again for years, that it would take miles of distance and many other relationships for us to gain perspective on what happened that summer, and after. We’re still waiting for all the charted variables of our lives — like location, now — to match up so we can finally do the next logical thing.
   The next day, the last of the summer subletters had vacated and my best friend arrived in the driveway with all her boxes. I walked into our living room to greet her and saw, there in the middle of our mismatched couches, busted pillows and hospital-blue walls, just like that, there was an arrow extending over my head, up past our ceiling bloated with water damage — green.  n°