SATIRE
What if this is all a Sim’s game?
Is there a restart button?
I started playing Sim’s twenty-plus years ago. It freaked me out then. It freaks me out now.
At first, I was addicted. I’d make the kids late for school because I couldn’t get off the computer. When I started playing with my Sim’s, I was hooked for hours.
In the beginning, it was easy to manage the few people who made up the world I was creating. I especially loved building houses, installing fixtures, landscaping, and buying furniture. Keeping up with the daily tasks my people needed to accomplish to keep their lives happy and healthy (determined by a health meter) was fun and easy.
As the game developed and the number of people I was responsible for in some way, either by building enough eateries and making sure there were enough people to staff them and then making sure the employees and customers were all okay — and keep an eye on my family and everyone else they came in contact with, I realized I would make a lousy God. I just couldn’t keep track of everyone and everything every single second I was ‘playing’ the game.
My digital family spiraled out of control, my son was taken away by a truancy officer, a thief kept breaking in and stealing stuff and a clown kept showing up freaking everyone out. I kept wondering how the hell I would manage all this and get it back to a place where I could have fun again.
My solution was to turn the game off and wipe away everything I’d built. Doing so put it all back to the beginning, a place where the Sim’s world under my control didn’t stress me out so much.
This made me wonder, what if we’re all Sim’s? What if our player is getting overwhelmed and he’s about to do a hard restart? Or he just lets go of the controls and the animals escape the zoo and start eating people (like what happened in one of my cities)?
When I see some of the crazy stuff happening in the world I have to wonder — Maybe the player at the controls really did push that little girl into the rhino pit, or the pushing happened when another emergency required the players' attention?
But it’s the “Player One” phenomenon happening in my life that is really freaking me out. Like when I’m able to just ‘log off’ and fall asleep in a chair or when I suddenly decide to stop what I’m doing and go do something else as if being pulled away. Like when I stop doing the dishes and go fold laundry that’s been sitting on the table all morning and could wait until I was done with the dishes which will be what pulls me away to finish when I’m in the middle of doing something else later on. It’s like someone else is at the controls!
This happened to the mom I’d created in my Sim’s game. The morning would start and the kids would get up and eat and need help to get on the bus that showed up to take them to school. If the mom didn’t get them on the bus the truancy officer would show up and my poor mom would never get the breakfast dishes done. Eventually, her health meter went into the red and she started walking into walls. Then the people with the straight jacket came for her. That had me peaking out my windows.
I hope the player at the controls of this game is better at playing God than I was.
There are a lot of clowns now and it’s freaking me out.
“Hey, dude. A little attention over here?”
Creating the life of my dreams, one story at a time. www.nanciwrites.com
