Simplification: The Sims and utopianism.(Critical Essay)

While the emergent forms of visual digital media--spectacle cinema, computer animation, music video, arcade and computer games--are not solely the province of youth, young people are arguably those in the culture most involved with them. Indeed, it has been suggested that these new, electronically mediated spaces are the 'natural environment' of youth (Green and Bigum 1993, p.127). In such a cultural context, the role of these media in the production and negotiation of subjectivities requires the kind of theoretical analysis that has developed in relation to print fiction read by the young, and recent work has emerged that advocates comparative analysis of computer games and literary narrative (Zancanella 2000). Such comparisons must be tempered, however, by careful attention to the specific modality of gaming, a modality that has significant implications for the way the game positions the player as subject. For example, while simulation games, in which players construct interactive narratives in a model of the contemporary social environment, are in many ways structurally analogous to speculative fictions, the game mode must be taken into account in any analysis of the ways in which the player is positioned by them.

The Sims, currently the best selling computer game of all time, is a simulation in which players interact with a screen world, building and decorating houses, and striving to direct and control animated 3D figures as they find or lose employment, enter or leave relationships, and ultimately 'succeed' or 'fail' in life. While the digital technology which produces the cinematically realistic screen interface is historically unprecedented, the experience of playing The Sims has elements in common with that of reading narrative fiction, in that the game positions the player to identify with characters acting out scenarios of work and play in recognisable spatio-temporal settings. More specifically, the game's positioning of the player is arguably analogous to the reader-positioning effected by the speculative genre of utopian narrative fiction. The word 'utopia' punningly combines the Greek words 'eu' (good), 'ou' (no) and 'topia' (place) to signify 'the good place that is no place', so that utopian texts configure spatial and social arrangements which, by improving on those of the author's own context, position the reader to think critically about the inadequacies of that context for its subjects. The Sims, too, offers the experience of exploring spatial and social arrangements that seem to improve on the contemporary context, and thus the game potentially constitutes a site for active speculation about the ways in which the contemporary social environment positions its subjects. Ultimately, though, the nature of the gaming activity works to limit the opportunities for critical comparison. This paper explores the implications of the medium of the computer game in relation to the potentially utopian narrative project of The Sims, and analyses the cultural effects of the game's positioning of the player as similar to those of the 'degenerate utopianism' (Marin 1990, p.239) of postmodern spatial experiences such as Disneyland.

Theorisation of the nature and function of computer games is still an emerging disciplinary field. Some of its key figures argue that the specific modality of this new media form renders it so different in kind from more traditional media forms such as print narrative and cinema that the academic study of games requires an entirely new disciplinary project, variously described as 'game studies' or 'ludology'. Espen Aarseth, for example, has coined the term 'ergodic' to articulate the textual specificity of the computer game, deriving the word from the Greek words 'ergon' and 'hodos', meaning 'work' and 'path' (Aarseth 1997, p.1). He defines games as ergodic because the novelty of cybernetic systems is that they are information feedback loops capable of generating different semiotic sequences, so that:

 
   the experienced sequence of signs does not emerge in a fixed, 
   predetermined order decided by the instigator of the work, but is 
   instead one actualization of many possible routes within what we may 
   call the event space of semiological possibility. 
   (Aarseth 1997, p.33) 

Thus 'the ergodic work is individualised or quasi-individualised on the audience level' (p.31). Aarseth therefore argues against what he describes as a kind of colonising of game studies by literary or cultural theory. As the discipline of game studies develops, however, persuasive arguments are emerging to suggest that theoretical perspectives derived from cultural and literary studies may be helpful, even necessary, complements to game studies. Christopher Douglas, for example, argues that it is possible to read computer games as modally specific in their ergodic structure, while also drawing on reading practices from literary and cultural studies, on the grounds that 'literary studies' experience with reading designed worlds might help us to understand how digital games situate their operators' (Douglas 2002, p.5).

Even though the work of theoretical boundary setting is still in progress, the powerful effects of the gaming experience on the construction of personal and cultural identity in contemporary youth culture means that the task of reading and analysing computer games needs to be undertaken. A form of theoretical bricolage seems defensible in such a conjuncture. For example, Aarseth's argument that the ergodictext is individualised on the audience level is clearly relevant to a simulation game such as The Sims that offers players opportunities to create families and make lives for them, and then press a 'Quit' icon and play the game again with new families and new lives. But computer games do not offer infinitely open-ended semiotic structures. Rules of gameplay, such as the model of the social that informs the programming of The Sims, set the parameters of players' experience of the game, and those rules are themselves constructed in relation to specific social and historical contexts. Lev Manovich, like Aarseth, argues that the generation of multiple semiotic sequences is a defining characteristic of a computer game, so that its 'branching interactive program' allows the player to forge unique trajectories (Manovich 2001, p.128). ...