Break the Aspiration Meter!

In 1860 Milton Bradley released The Checkered Game of Life, a board game in which players compete across a patterned plane of gilt and muslin, beginning on a square marked “Infancy” and ending, if they are lucky, at the opposite corner, “Happy Old Age.” A century later, in celebration of the game’s hundredth anniversary, the Milton Bradley Company released the version we know today. The modern Game of Life has a track that winds, like a tapeworm, through the rational stations of birth, vocation, and retirement. The two games differ in form and trajectory, but they both imply that life does indeed have form and trajectory. To live is to pursue a nice, designated end. The games are preparatory exercises, teaching children to expect a narrative of adulthood, a future that will come pressed into conventional shape.

The Sims is another of those doctrinaire forms, something children play until they know what life is. Released in 2000 by Electronic Arts, the computer game allows users to pilot virtual people—“Sims,” either prefab or designed to one’s specifications—as they age, work, and procreate. Over the years it has earned many comparisons to Bradley’s Life, for it, too, assumes that the human fate is one of accumulating success and connection. Everyone, in The Sims, is goal-oriented: the game requires that all Sims possess an “Aspiration,” an existential objective to which any minor desire, any fact of biography, is subordinated. In one version, The Sims 2, there are five possible purposes to life: Family, Fortune, Knowledge, Popularity, and Romance. You either gain these things or lose them; to play correctly is to move toward a telos.

Perhaps because it assigns such meaning and order to time, The Sims is as attentive to anniversaries as the Milton Bradley Company. In January the franchise passed its twenty-fifth year, a date that it turned out many people had been eager to commemorate. To mark the occasion, EA announced it would rerelease The Sims and The Sims 2 for a handful of platforms. I had been feeling lately as if my own days were losing much of a predictive or reassuring plot—so when an editor for this publication suggested I might write something about the game, I downloaded and clicked play.

*

I had played The Sims 2 as a child, but my memories of the game are few. I remember building swimming pools; I remember forcing my Sims to cook many dishes of lobster thermidor. But the rest feels like a dream I can’t quite remember, in which many things happened but nothing mattered. Every time one opens The Sims 2, the game plays a perky trailer for itself. Watching characters dancing, buying clothes, and begging for money, I was overcome by a kind of sensory fugue, as if some vague, emotional muscle of mine was being furiously tapped and made to jump.

I did remember the apparatus of the game—its insistent array of bars and meters, which all appear at the screen’s bottom, there to quantify and thus facilitate life’s progress. Sims come with an endowment of eight needs, which include “Hunger,” “Hygiene,” “Bladder,” and “Comfort.” If you believe the objective of the game is to keep your characters alive—and not everyone does—these needs must be met via constant interactions with household objects. Sims also have desires, which are quaint in their ambition and specificity. What a Sim usually wants is to interact with other Sims, perform activities like “Watch TV” or “Eat Lunchmeat Sandwiches,” and buy expensive furniture. A Sim whose needs and desires are fulfilled will be healthy and content, and their “Aspiration Meter” will steadily fill. Unfulfilled Sims will have empty Aspiration Meters, and will tend to interrupt their days with sudden, distressing bouts of sobbing.

As a child I had mostly been interested in making my own Sims, but now I was curious about the characters and scenarios designed by the game’s engineers, figuring that those were the likeliest places to find a robust storyline. Possibly as a cheeky gesture to the game’s vision of life as a drama that builds and peaks, The Sims 2 is spotted with occasional references to Shakespeare: among its preexisting characters are the Capps and Montys, who socialize with the Summerdreams in a town called Veronaville. The game had furnished them with a clipped, sly description: “Patrizio Monty never forgot Consort Capp’s broken promise. But now his grandson Romeo has fallen for the Capp heiress. Will the Elders live to see the two families united?”

Choosing this set of characters was a poor strategy. The Capps were a household of four who lived in a stone manor among sumptuous gothic furniture, and they had to eat, bathe, urinate, and sleep almost constantly; the enormity of the home was a disadvantage. It took each Sim too much time to move between the areas—kitchen, bathroom, dining room—where they could perform necessary acts of survival. I had no opportunity to pilot any romantic interactions between Juliette (for some reason the game misspells her name) and Romeo, because her relatives were in perpetual physical crisis.

Sims, I learned, walk slowly; on several occasions, Juliette missed a date with Romeo because she could not get to her carpool in time. I later decided to move her to her own starter place, so that I would be less beholden to her family’s lunatic circuit of resources and privations. But when, while playing the Montys, I prompted Romeo to call her, I was told her new house lacked a phone. “You can’t call a Sim with no phone!” a game notification jeered, as if I were stupid.

I was stupid; I could not set any of these lives into dramatic molds, could not make them hearken to the directions of narrative. Romeo and Juliette would share in no tragic destiny; I would not discover the broken promise that had estranged their families. Within my first hour of playing the Montys, father Patrizio’s icon abruptly disappeared from my screen. Death, which in The Sims 2 takes the form of a cartoon Grim Reaper, had arrived for one of my main players. His appearance seemed preprogrammed, but its timing was inexplicable. With no suggestion of a higher meaning or even furtive authorial design, Patrizio had shuffled off his mortal coil.

*

The Sims was created by a man named Will Wright, a college dropout who had vacillated between degrees in engineering, robotics, and architecture before founding a small gaming company, Maxis, in 1987. In its first decade Maxis rolled out several simulations in which players could virtually replicate and manage massive systems like ant colonies (SimAnt), farms (SimFarm), or municipalities (SimCity). In the latter players build and supervise their own virtual city, calibrating taxation levels, public utility provisions, police presence, and other elements from a God’s-eye view. These games, as Wright said in a 2000 interview, were interested in “the underlying principles through which a system behaves,” the way it can “swing in wildly different directions based on very minor differences at the outset.”

As he continued making games, Wright would become inspired by the postwar architect Christopher Alexander, whose 1977 book A Pattern Language became a cult manual for city design. It divided metropolitan life into modular elements—“SMALL PUBLIC SQUARES,” “GREEN STREETS,” “SHOPPING STREET”—and then instructed readers on how they should be combined. In this approach an environment became an almost mathematical operation: “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs,” Alexander writes, “and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”

Maxis was acquired by EA in 1997; three years later Wright released The Sims, the ur-game, a simulation of humanity itself. In the same way that Alexander proposed curating infinite variety under a standardizing aegis, so could the components of The Sims be shuffled and toggled into ever-proliferating realities. Wright had lost his home in the Oakland firestorm of 1991, and has said that the original purpose of The Sims was to simulate the building and designing of houses. Indeed, the game maintains a lasting obsession with real estate. To play a family one must buy a home, and a home in The Sims is like a zen garden: obsessively tended to, an object of constant maintenance and contemplation. One can spend hours surveying possible wallpaper choices or creating a painstakingly gabled roof. In a 2022 oral history published by Vice, the franchise’s first art director, Charles London, said that The Sims was meant to be “an architecture game.” Little characters were added to “score” the design choices, only to eventually become the main feature and appeal.

Some commentators believe that The Sims is meant to satirize suburbia. “The boredom, the sterility, the uselessness and the futility of contemporary life,” writes the media scholar Alexander Galloway, “are depicted precisely using the things that represent it best: a middle-class suburban house, an Ikea catalogue of personal possessions, crappy food and even less appetizing music, the same dozen mindless tasks over and over.” Others have argued that the game is more sincere, a naif’s tribute to property ownership and what one gaming website calls its “beautiful scenery and idyllic backdrops.” There are listicles, Reddit threads, and YouTube channels dedicated to ranking and showcasing Sims mansions, guided by the same voyeurism as the tours of real houses in Architectural Digest.  

But Wright, who left EA in 2009, did not give these manicured pixels a matching suburban ethos. A home in The Sims lacks the usual animating forces of family life. Intimacy between relatives is measured in points, increasing or decreasing without any given injury or kindness settling into a memory. A Sims home is not a haven or stage for emotions; it is only a system that challenges players to maintain its various parts. The game’s characters therefore never seem to experience the ongoing dramas of domesticity—neither its tender feelings nor its threat of betrayal, violence, resentment, dependency, scandal, and mutual ruination. As London put it, Sims characters, in their levels of happiness, signify the “efficient choices” a user makes in “object placement and room design.” The game, in effect, exports the density and urgency of the city and its management to the suburbs. The toilet, the refrigerator, and the bed are the chief fixtures of the game, meant to be visited in efficient choreographies of clicking.

This is, ultimately, less a narrative project than an ecological one. The Sims is about holistic relations, the quick and at times perilous responsiveness of one part of the whole to another. A Sim’s mood will plummet if her house is poorly decorated, or if she hasn’t taken the garbage out, or if, in an effort to learn a skill, she’s forgotten to fulfill a need. This kind of hair-trigger existence may explain the impulse that so many players cite of wanting to set their Sims on fire or drown them in swimming pools. Contra popular belief, these users are not behaving like psychopaths so much as feeling an understandable reflex toward entropy. One desires to see the system lurch into breakdown, to dash the finely made dollhouse into pieces.

*

On my first day in my second Sims home, having decided this time to make a representative of myself, I burned the pastries I was baking in the oven. I bought several pieces of patio furniture, as well as an aquarium for my living room. At 4:30 in the morning, I woke up to practice the drums, and then “Studied Cooking” until dawn. I went outside in my underwear to greet my neighbors, an act I seemed comfortable performing and which was in fact well received by them. 

My home had a swimming pool, a bathroom tiled completely in green, and a staircase that disappeared from view when approached at certain angles. By all indications—and these indications were many, and they did not ever lie—I led a happy life. My needs were equally sated, suffering no lopsided attentions; I did not have any addictions; I was not compelled by things I did not want, and I did not want things I also dreaded. I had made a Sim in my own image, and she was good.

Desire in The Sims has a rude, instructive power, directing the player’s attention, toughening their strategy. When my Sim fulfilled a desire, her Aspiration Meter waxed full and gorgeous; if too much time passed, it started waning. One of her wishes was to take someone on a date, and one of her fears was to be rejected by someone on a date—a polarization of feeling I found poignantly neat. By lining up a diligent series of “Flirt” and “Admire” actions, I masterminded a romance between my Sim and a man from the neighborhood, a graying citizen whose Aspiration was to make money. I was sad, but she was happy.

The fate of any Sim depends on a player’s ability to execute such formulas. “To play the game means to play the code of the game,” Galloway writes. “To win means to know the system.” He calls this a matter of “life lived as an algorithm.” One helps a Sim by employing an algorithm, which is often the same thing as internalizing it. Far from providing a nostalgic refuge from the contemporary Internet, in other words, The Sims taps into one of the Web’s most foundational assumptions: that the processes of thinking and producing can be reduced to a series of commands. The user, in this view, becomes more creative as she becomes more machine-like. The rules allow her to manufacture possibilities; she is less an author employing technology for her own ends than an emitter of inputs, a conscript of the machine’s algorithmic logic.

Nowhere is that logic more apparent than in generative AI. At its most basic an algorithm is a set of instructions for achieving a designated result, such as the prompt that one might use to generate email text, say, or an atrocity photo in the style of Hayao Miyazaki. In 2018 Will Wright announced his first project in years, a game called Proxi, which has still yet to appear. In it, players will use AI to build animated scenes based on their memories, which they can then tweak and modulate as they wish.

A notable feature of algorithms is that they cannot draw their own connections to make sense of seemingly contradictory events. On The Sims you can caress a beloved and then immediately antagonize her, and these two acts will cancel each other out. A quantity of affection has been given and then taken away, but there are no ligaments of memory or sense between the moments, no way in which one act might deepen another or throw it into question. A Large Language Model, too, might flag certain phenomena as contradictory, but it has no way to interpret those contradictions, no way to reclaim or improvise meaning out of them—or out of anything.

It is only narrative that can do this: allow us to interpret contradiction by appealing to a higher level of sense, recoup absurdity and give us the structure we need to bear it. Shakespeare, The Sims’s foremost literary reference, was an expert in inconsistencies so potent they touched the level of the grammatical. Iago: I am not what I am. Edgar: Edgar I nothing am. Richard III: Alack, I love myself. Richard III again: O no, alas, I rather hate myself. A.C. Bradley once wrote that Shakespearean tragedy proceeded from “the actions of men,” even as he admitted that these men were addled by randomness and incongruity: moral conflict, not to mention the murky afflictions of dreams, hallucinations, madness, somnambulism, sudden fits, and pure, stupid chance. “Tragedy would not be tragedy if it were not a painful mystery.” This way of reading—aiming not at security but at making sense out of nonsense—is what “life lived as an algorithm” can never achieve.

Several nights later I opened the game and clicked on my Sim’s house. I brought her to the backyard; I deposited her in the swimming pool. As I removed the ladder, I felt I was performing a small act of mercy. An existence of wanting only what makes you happy is a fraudulent one, devoid of opportunity for surprise or significance. I waited for the Grim Reaper to arrive, and when he did, I saw that he, like Christ, could walk on water. “You can move in a new family,” the game notified me after it was done. “That’s the way your Sim would have wanted it, don’t you think?”