Video Games: A Republican Plot

Yeah, I know. I said I wasn’t going to write about gender and games any more, and I had even tapered off about writing about gamer-hating press. But this article was so ridiculous it lured me back.

As to the actual premise, about liberals playing games like conservatives, I don’t doubt that, and I think if the author had stuck with that thought, she might have explored the notion of people getting to express their alternate reality sides through games, exploring with different looks and genders and values.

But she didn’t. Instead she offered up her experience playing a handful of games while making a facepalmfest of factual errors and pole vaulting to conclusions.

I’ll focus on The Sims since I’m pretty familiar with it, I did play Civ in versions I’ve since forgotten, getting both aggressive and pacifist victories.

The author gives out a lot of incorrect, outdated and misunderstood information about Sims. This annoys me because Sims is one of the few games that desperately strives to get it right. If you’re playing the latest version, 3, you could in theory populate a whole neighborhood with vegetarian, recycling, bicycle riding gay/lesbian married couples who earn their living making clay statues of dolphins and writing about feminism. They occasionally bog down in wrongness, such as when that elderly suit told them to make it more Indiana Jones-like, but you could in theory also make the populations of France, Egypt and China as politically correct as possible, right down to the Birkenstocks. Find me another video game where you can do that.

This essay made me think of two people I met in Sims Online. One was a girl at some group gathering who was telling someone “Oh yes, I played Sims once, and after I made a perfect house with a perfect family there was nothing else to do and I got bored.” It was in a chat box, but you could just picture her making that smug little expression some women do when saying something outrageously stupid yet clearly expecting applause for it. I always assume women like that spent a lot of time working as strippers in countries where they don’t speak the language, but I could be wrong.

The other was a gay kid from some flyover town. What he did was make a sim of himself and one of Brad Pitt and had them run around through town, making out in broad daylight. Gasp.

I daresay that a sandbox game like Sims is worth a couple of thousand official copyrighted psychological multiple choice tests, as far as gauging how particular individuals decorate their inner life. So are MMOs, for that matter, and they actually tend to sieve out the personalities and herd like minds into the same guilds.

So from my particular angle, this woman is doing the equivalent of blaming Microsoft Word for the fact she likes to write romance novels.

I will cheerfully agree that a lot of shooters, for example, would probably appeal to a more conservative crowd. War games in general are frowned upon by certain pacifistic types, and since games in general have to do with conflicting strategy among multiple humans, if you’re going to be that Amish maybe you should just leave the games alone and go bake a nice shoofly pie (and then FedEx it to me). What about music games though? What about Tetris, the infinitely catchy game from the ashes of the Soviet Republic? What about Mario? He’s a carpenter, and presumably union, which would in theory make him liberal, although the way certain liberals have been abandoning unions these days could open that subject up for debate. What about Plants Versus Zombies, where your fragrant ecologically correct flowers defeat the mindless march of dittoheads … uh, inarticulate undead guys?

WoW players seem pretty evenly split with regard to the US culture war, amazingly enough, and since they’re not limited to the US, people get to find out firsthand that there is life beyond the artificial two-party division we’re locked into here. Even more amazing, individuals with opposing political views frequently get along just fine in raids. And as far as Sims, all I know about what other Simmers do alone with their computers comes from my exposure to what they post on the official site, and the fan sites they set up. This has been eye opening.

Some players like to re-enact movies or novels. Some download anatomically correct skins and do porn. Some copy themselves and their families. Some obsess on making buildings. Some make machinima videos, and some tell stories on the official forums. Some freeze time and have legions of never-aging beautiful people running around displaying awesome hair and clothes, and never worry about the baby-having whatsoever.

And this writer can’t think of anything to do but play legacy families and raise babies.

Legacy families are fun. I’ve got one going at the moment in Sim Francisco, because I wanted to build a drop dead awesome mission style mansion and the best way to do that is to have people living in it. I took a break from that to see if I could get a photographer sim that has every single photography accomplishment (I have all but four, one is a bug and the other three were going to take too freaking long). And that was a break from my main neighborhood which picked up a bad lag bug, not sure if the last patch fixed that. Next I want to do an all musician neighborhood.

I will agree with the author that it is easiest to raise sim children with a stay at home parent. Especially if you have the nightmare-inducing triplets. But ya know what else? You can get a nanny. Either a NPC babysitter (who takes care of the younglings on autopilot), or make one yourself in Create-A-Sim, and move her or him in. Once the sprouts get to puberty, you can kick the nanny out. Or you can have gramma and grampaw sim hanging around to change diapers. Or you can make a freaking robot babysitter. The whole notion that Sims “forces” the female sim to stay home and raise the rugrats irritates me. She goes to the hospital, gives birth and gets maternity leave -- is it sexist to insist she shouldn't? Her partner(s) (in case she's bi or polyamorous or something) can call in sick from work and hang out with her changing diapers. No, it's not automatic, is that the chief political incorrectness here?

This just led me to wondering if you can use a cheat code to force pregnancy in male sims in 3 the way you could in Sims 2, when they got impregnated following alien abduction, and whether they’d get maternity leave. Interesting conundrum.

I’ll make a couple of observations though, which can be sort of dispiriting. Yes, baby-having could be a reason female sims’ careers don’t move as fast, or generate as many simoleons. That probably is reflected in real life. Although, sims also do not ever get spousal support payments, and stay at home sims can make ridiculous amounts of cash via stay at home careers like gardening or painting.

And, although you can play a legacy family as either a patriarchy or a matriarchy … if you’re focusing on boys, you have a lot larger window to find a mate, since it’s perfectly fine for a male sim to father children a day before he hits his elderhood birthday, but elderly lady sims can’t make babies any more. I doubt if all the culturally constructed social engineers in academia could do much with that set of facts. Until we can get robots to do all our gestating for us, we’re kind of stuck.

But y’know, you could always try having your sims have sex in the time machine … Or just freeze time in young adulthood until finding some fair maiden desperate enough not to care that you're a Grumpy Slob Couch Potato with a haunted attic.