Can My Sims Self-Actualize?
Chef: Abraham Maslow Ingredients: Hierarchy of Needs
We all know about Abraham Maslow and his famous hierarchy of needs. If you asked the high school version of me who Abraham Maslow was I could give you three responses:
- He created the hierarchy of needs
- He formed the idea of self-actualization
- He’s the guy who said “it is natural that if the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything as if it were a nail.”
My college-aged brain now (kind of) knows that there is more to Maslow’s concepts behind just the rudimentary understanding of them as well as real criticism and knowing that these are not the only motivators. As a digital designer, I’d like to explore the relevance of his theory to interactive design.
Meet Abraham Maslow
Before we go into all of that, some background. Abraham Maslow was born in Brooklyn, New York, on April Fool’s Day 1908 to Jewish immigrants from Kiev. He went to the City College of New York, he married his first cousin Bertha (ouch), and hated his research because he found it trivial and pointless. He continued at Columbia and then joined the faculty at Brooklyn College.
World War II and the many horrors in the war inspired a lot of his ideas about self-actualization and the hierarchy of needs. He died while jogging on June 8, 1970.
There’s more interesting stuff about his rocky relationships with his mother, his obsession with successful people such as Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and his distaste for leadership here!
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs go over some of the most fundamental aspects of being human. The idea is that the needs work as a ladder. You can’t reach the rungs at the top if you haven’t climbed the first step. The steps are Physiological Needs, Safety Needs, Love/Belonging Needs, Esteem Needs, and Self-Actualization. Self-actualization is a state in which a person reaches their full potential, they can be creative, think critically and have a healthy understanding of others and self.
Interactive Media Examples
I’ll provide examples of games that address the top part of the pyramid by providing experiences that are sociable and shareable — with accomplishments that can be shared with others, and that might even create the possibility for feelings of love and belongingness.
I’ll also explore self-actualization experiences which allow players to have a sense of self and fulfill the rest of the hierarchy of needs. This includes peak-experiences or key life moments. Let’s start with the most addicting game ever created.
Dungeons and Dragons
This multi-player game is both social and sharable. It’s easy to play in a group, enhances group dynamics by forcing groups of individuals to work as a team and fulfills a basic need to socialize, potentially addressing the third tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
The game has changed much since its original conception but much like the game the idea of working together with others and creating relationships as a group is still at its core.
Oregon Trail
Oregon Trail is a game that illustrates the hierarchy by playing with the ideas of human physiological and safety needs. There is one goal: survival. Without the other motivators for belongingness and socialization (it really it a single player game that you play for a short while and quickly give up on). But it allows you to test the limits of human physiological needs and safety needs from the safety and comfort of your own home. So, you can virtually experience what its like to go through these hardships without you know, dying.
My childhood terror of “Piglet’s Big Game”
When I was seven and my brother was five we got our first video game console, a PlayStation 2 equipped with one game only: Piglet’s Big Game. This was a terrifying game about nightmares and what haunts everyone’s own personal dreams. Deep stuff for a game created for young children. A big part of the game and why we would stop playing it for months at a time was a lack of feeling of safety. For children it is difficult to distinguish the differences in feelings of fear in games and media and feelings of fear in real life. At 5 and 7 the game was stress inducing. Giant elephants, loosing your friends forever and getting stuck in someone’s mind. No thank you.
Sims and self-actualization
Like real people, Sims have physiological needs that take priority. They need food, water, they constantly need to use the bathroom… Once those needs are fulfilled they have safety needs (having a home that is safe), love and belonging needs (they enjoy socialization as much as the next person, they develop friendships and relationships). They have esteem needs (they feel success, strive to have accomplishments, feel validation from others). The question now is, can Sim’s be self-actualized? They have the ability to be creative, solve problems and are often more self-aware than we expect. So, my next question is- if Sim’s can be self-actualized what are the rest of us are doing wrong?
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