Keeping up with the Simses
Alleva, Richard
KEEPING UP WITH THE SIMSES , From Monopoly to cyberspace Prior to the Christmas season of 1934, board and card games had two great glories: they injected a little artificial drama into ordinary...
...A computer game called The Sims or, if you care to interact with a lot of people all over the country, The Sims Online...
...Despite daily confirmations of suburban anomie, rampant drug use, ecclesiastical earthquakes, terrorists in our midst, and the current misfortunes of corporations and Wall Street, I trust and pray that my historical parallels are half-baked...
...So much for high drama...
...Yet, it is simply the triumph of electric banality over real-world banality...
...Bridge calls for the sort of secret diplomacy (those warning kicks under the table) that kept nineteenth-century Europe relatively stable, but it doesn't entail chauvinism or espionage...
...Throughout January, demand kept increasing and relief gave way to astonishment...
...I shrink from contemplating what future Americans will make of 9/11, but look at Civil War reenactors, or the jungle of conspiracy theories that cropped up about the Kennedy assassination...
...As in Monopoly, the goal is to acquire and expand...
...First, though Americans are supposed to be sadly adept at forgetting the past, what we actually like to do with catastrophic milestones is to stroke them, fetishize them, and finally turn them into some kind of pop entertainment...
...If war is the paradigm for chess, Monopoly is more like a day in the office...
...When you read about Sims players who spend six hours a day on weekdays and many more on weekends in front of their monitors (with expansion packs and control schemes installed), you just know which life-flesh-and-blood or pixeled- they find more stimulating...
...Second, banality put under a spotlight can become fascinating, as Andy Warhol soup cans testify...
...This is, of course, the old story of the visionary whose instincts win out against the old fogeyism of the moneymen, but I would like to point out that though the Parker Brothers were wrong, they were not soundly, logically wrong in their specific objections...
...KEEPING UP WITH THE SIMSES , From Monopoly to cyberspace Prior to the Christmas season of 1934, board and card games had two great glories: they injected a little artificial drama into ordinary lives, and they were not life...
...But when friends and the friends of friends requested copies, Darrow began charging them $4 a set...
...And so forth...
...If Monopoly offers its players a fantasy of buying and selling, The Sims offers an alternative existence containing absolutely everything in life...
...Of course, such sanity was too good to last...
...Likewise, in the depths of the Depression, when capitalism was taking the worst battering it had ever received, a game allowing players to become fantasy capitalists flourished...
...Only after Darrow gave successful demonstrations at FAO Schwarz in New York and several stores in Philadelphia did Parker Brothers consent to sell off the remainder of his stock...
...In Monopoly, the banality of business transactions becomes part of the mystique of the game...
...I think Monopoly succeeded for two reasons...
...The game's inventor, George Darrow, reputedly concocted it (out of linoleum, cardboard, and paint samples) strictly to wile away empty hours after his firm fell victim to the Great Depression...
...Except (and this was another Parker complaint) that it can consume more time than an eight-hour workday (one game, played in Danville, California, took 820 hours...
...Yet, whereas in the old game the players pretend to be powerful capitalists, Sims I can't know for certain if the thought of Monopoly ever wafted through Will Wright's mind while he was inventing The Sims, but I do know he benefited from the exaltation of banality and relaxation of tempo that the Depression-era game introduced...
...Why didn't the American Communist Party take note of this and instantly disband...
...Having cheered, groaned, smirked, or grimaced your way through the game, you and your friends put away the board or the card table and get on with the earnest, interesting problems of real life...
...The cards show their faces, the king is checkmated, the backgammon stones arrive home...
...Monopoly, a game about capitalism, achieved success precisely when capitalism seemed to be crumbling...
...Imitating human struggle but dispensing with human agony (unless we've gambled away our savings), a good game marches inevitably, economically, excitingly to one powerful climax...
...e half-baked...
...Since the orders kept coming in and Darrow didn't feel up to forming a company of his own, he took his invention to Parker Brothers who gave it the fish eye...
...Poker exalts hypocrisy without messing with ethics...
...At the very moment in American history when families were losing their savings and some their homes, George Darrow introduced a game in which capitalism not only works (despite all the "Go Directly to Jail" cards) but works mildly...
...The plodding pawns die for their masters while the ambidextrous queens maneuver and strike for their spouses until one of the kings is hemmed in and slain...
...Once Monopoly proved that players were content with its humdrum endgame, Wright was free to invent a game without any real termination at all...
...Within a few more months, George Darrow, former victim of the Depression, had a generous contract and embarked on a comfortable retirement...
...If The Sims is the successor to Monopoly as the game of middle-class acquisition, ruin, and expansion, does this mean that middle-class life is crumbling in the real world...
...The End...
...Nine pages of instructions for a mere game...
...And surely the Parker executives must have noted the flaccid way every Monopoly game ends-not with a dramatic slapping down of cards or the toppling of a king, but with the toting up of cash and property values...
...The pace of play is so plodding that it becomes comforting...
...To put it another way, games are warfare without blood...
...Monopoly was a return to normalcy on cardboard...
...It must have seemed Darrow was introducing the player to a new job instead of a pastime...
...By Christmas, 1934, all the sets were sold and the firm felt relieved...
...Now, skip ahead seventy years and what do we find vast numbers of Americans playing...
...Along came Monopoly...
Vol. 130 • February 2003 • No. 4
