Beyond the Neograve: A Remembrance of Simulations Past
Every couple of years or so, I’m struck by a peculiar feeling. Usually I’m doing something exceptionally mundane like walking to class or unevenly slicing a bagel when it happens, but every time it’s the same: a creeping suspicion steals over me of deep moral compromise, a feeling of guilt, a chilling remembrance of crimes forgotten. I run through possible offenses in my head to no avail until, like a mirage simmering over a distant street, a sentence materializes in my mind:
All of my Neopets are dying.
It’s a bizarre thought to entertain given that, like most college students, I’m happy to report that Neopets haven’t had a profound presence in my life since the fourth grade. Still, this recurring feeling of guilt over the abandonment of my forgotten creations is, at the very least, thought-provoking. As a Millennial, I count myself among the many young adults whose childhood coincided with the flowering of computer game simulations. Tamagotchi, Zoo Tycoon, Club Penguin, Pokémon, Nintendogs and The Sims are merely some of the beloved games involving the virtual creation of pets or people which might demarcate those within my age group as “90’s kids.”
When I think back to my own experiences with these games, I remember the intensity with which I cared for my Sims families, the highly symbolic names I chose for my Pokémon and my disturbing readiness to trade away my soul for a rare and elusive Shadow Gelert. In particular, the world of Neopets fascinated me. Not unlike our own world, the animated Neopets cyber-globe presents the opportunity to live a hundred whimsical lives, each more fantastical than the last. However, this world which exists only within the pane of a computer screen is also governed by the same essential rules as our own: boredom, depression, starvation, economy. Your Neopets can embark upon quests, they can make friends, they can win money, they can buy a Playboy Mansion in Fairyland, but they can also contract disease, become impoverished and they can starve.
In hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if the creators of games like Sims and Neopets had at the heart of their projects the aim to teach kids about the ways of the world. Sims in particular focused so intently on the emotional valence of cyber-humanity that social relations and environment could be used to manipulate the psychological condition to devastating effects. For instance, if you were cruel, you might lock your nondescript Sim in a windowless, doorless house and wait until their inevitable psychological collapse prompted the Grim Reaper himself to sweep your unfortunate creation away with a flourish of his rigid cyber-cloak. In this world modeled on our own, creation is transient and easy to replicate and responsibility and mortality are concepts rather than realities. A game like Sims allows you to play God and to choose, depending on your mood, between the Old and New Testament.
I suppose it only makes sense that now and again I feel a twinge of retroactive guilt over the countless entities I’ve clicked into being, loved and forgotten. How many Nintendogs, how many abandoned Giga pets lie prone and starving in the total blackness of their individual cyberspace hells? I’d rather not know. These simulations, in their quasi-replications of reality, bear only one similarity to life itself: it’s something you can never hope to finish, in its infinite saga of remembrance and elusion, it finishes on you.
