Reticulating Splines: Character Dynamics in The Sims

The Sims is nothing, if not proof of video games' unique potential to make any story interesting. One of the purposes of media is to mirror our lives back at us, giving us something we can see ourselves in, but most media has only been able to mirror the peaks and valleys of lives: the new partners, the family deaths, the births of children, and so on. We live most of life in the in-between: it's eating, showering, reading books, and emptying the bin. Unfortunately, you can't make a film or a novel about these parts of life that isn't crushingly dull, and that's because the basic elements of books and films such as characters and plot are inseparable from the narrative. For example, a boring plot like "This woman is going to eat a pizza and go to bed" makes for a boring narrative, and so our experience with the piece of media will be boring.

Games, however, have gameplay mechanics. These are basic elements that unlike those of films or novels can exist abstractly outside a narrative and remain compelling in that state, but which developers can still apply to narratives. In many games, we are used to mechanics underpinning a narrative, even if it's an emergent one. In Diner Dash, the narrative explored through the mechanics is that of a waiter trying to serve many customers within a limited timeframe, and in Risk, it's a narrative of armies locked in a global war. But to get an idea of what compelling mechanics look like divorced from a story, think about sports like tennis or football. In these games, the mechanics don't stand for anything. Rackets and balls are representative of nothing, and scores don't signify some fictional concept like ammo count or HP; the only relevance they have is to the mechanics of the game itself. Despite this, sports can be compelling to play because good mechanics don't need a narrative behind them to be compelling; they are compelling in themselves.

So if mechanics alone can be engaging and we can apply any mechanic to a narrative, this means that we can make any narrative compelling simply by realising it through compelling mechanics. In games, the otherwise mundane plot of the woman eating a pizza and going to bed can be engaging because now the story is supported by inherently engrossing gameplay. That pizza fills the Hunger bar, and the sleep fills the Energy bar, both of which we care about in themselves, provided that they exist within well-designed systems. Through such mechanical support, games can engage us with everyday tasks in a way that other media can't, and that's how we get to The Sims, a piece of media that closely involves us in the activities that make up the bulk of our lives.

In the above example, I isolated some of the game's activities and metrics in a way that might make them sound methodical to work through. For the uninitiated, The Sims may look like nothing more than a game where you identify the bars that need to be filled and click on the objects that fill them. However, every number and status tied to your sims has a deeper impact than is first apparent. An intimate interrelation between each aspect of your sim's life makes every tiny boost you can give to their levels and bars count for something. Their mood is not only worth improving in itself, but it also decides their job performance. Friends and lovers are worth caring about not just for relationship roleplay purposes, but also because they can give a sim a leg up on their career track and provide a reliable means to fill the Social meter. And their jobs aren't just one of the game's most persistent measures of progression; they also allow sims to make money to buy new products which can better increase their mood. It's all a delicately interwoven tapestry, and here we'll be using The Sims as an example of how games can build meaningful dynamics.

Because actions taken within one of the systems (mood, career, relationships, house-building) reverberate into other systems, the player feels that every move they make is part of something grander. However, like many gripping games, The Sims also provides a mix of systems that offer the player immediate reward and delayed reward. In general, getting a sim's mood elevated takes some time, but you'll also notice that some meters are faster to top out than others. Bladder, Hunger, and Hygiene can be changed from red to green in a matter of real-time seconds, but if you're playing the game on the regular speed, you'll need to put aside minutes to take care of low Social, Fun, or Comfort. This combination of brief and lengthy tasks means that duringg any in-game day, the play delivers on both the thrill of immediate satisfaction and less immediate reward that is satisfying because the player had to work towards it. In addition to providing the game texture, the gaps between how quickly we can fulfil each need can remind us of the way feelings ebb and flow in our domestic existences.

It may seem too imbalanced to have some motives fill at different rates to others but also keep in mind that the game often lets you take care of two or more stats at the same time. For example, sims can study or eat at the same time as sitting down, meaning you can fill stats such as Mechanical or Hunger while also filling Comfort. Similarly, there are activities which increase a sim's skills while filling their Fun such as painting or playing chess. You get to feel like a bit of a strategist whenever you find ways to kill two or even three birds with one stone.

Also in the interest of balance, many of the immediate rewards in the game only help characters in the short-term while the delayed rewards help them in the long-term, and The Sims frequently brings you to junctions where you must decide which you want. This is standard game design at work, but Maxis skin over this reward model in a highly intentional way. Frequently, the immediate short-term rewards come in the form of fulfilling a sim's needs, and the delayed long-term rewards come in the form of new friends and higher salaries. You have to make decisions like whether you let them play with a train set to max out their Fun now or whether you leave them to languish in boredom studying because it might help them get that Desk Sergeant position and allow them to buy a bigger train set in the future. You might have to choose between letting them have a snack after work or catch up with an old friend they're at risk of losing touch with.

Many of the choices in the game are not only tactical but also about what kind of lifestyle you want your sim to lead and have you make a statement about what matters most to them. In many other games, you're making decisions about how your characters develop, but the sentiments you express through those decisions run along the lines of "My character prefers ice magic" or "They're a sniper" which are meaningful to gameplay but rarely help cast the characters as people. In The Sims, those same kinds of systemic choices make statements we can relate to. They're statements like "This person is a couch potato" or "This person is hard-nosed and career-oriented" or "This person is a social butterfly".

In addition to giving us more roleplaying tools and variety, these choices simulate the pressures we feel as adults. Often, you make decisions for your sim that don't make them immediately happier or even grind down their happiness, but you pick them because they help support their lifestyle. The Sims may be a game of self-actualisation and empowerment, but it also does confront that, as adults, we often have to take care of obligations we don't want to because otherwise, we'll find ourselves in deep trouble somewhere down the line. It's not that you can ever have a sim entirely neglect their motive meters to focus on relationships or career, but sometimes the challenge becomes less filling all those meters and more tending to their vital needs while leaving enough time in the day for them to read or lift weights or have friends over. There's affirmation in it though; an assurance that all activities in life, even if they're not immediately placating, can lead back to joy. The inverse is also true: because relationships and careers can be affected by mood, The Sims declares that taking your time to make yourself content can also help build a better life in the long-term.

Mechanical interplay is also extant in the game outside of its capacity to directly create reward, realism, choice, accuracy, and commentary. It forces us to create new tasks for us to attend to. Attending to those tasks often creates other tasks which when carried out create other tasks, and on it goes. This creation primarily happens via the mood system as the activities which we use to fill one stat often drain one or more other stats. E.g. By filling your sim's Hunger bar, you lower their Bladder, or by having them exercise to up their Body, you drain their Energy. The hits to motives can also happen indirectly because all bars decay over time and so choosing to take an action that is not tending to any individual meter is an implicit choice to let that meter drop. However attentive you are to your sim's needs, they will decay, and one reason for that is that each day has two long, mandatory periods where you must let those motives fall without any intervention. That is, when your sim is sleeping and when they're working.

Having our solutions create new problems is one of the ways The Sims achieves its "just five more minutes" compulsiveness. However, the workflow that carries us from task to task is liable to interruption by various technical weaknesses. In any household with two or more people, it's often inefficient to nanny your sims 24/7, so what you do instead is create a sensibly-ordered queue of activities for them to carry out and then come back a little later when they're finished. The problem is sims sometimes struggle not to drop one or all items from that queue due to pathing difficulties or because they must wait for another person to finish their task before they can interact with them. Despite sims being able to talk when eating together or watching TV together, they otherwise lack a grasp on multi-tasking. E.g. If they want to tell someone a joke and that person is chopping vegetables, they won't start the joke while that person is preparing food as you or I might, they stand there dead-eyed until that person finishes the whole rigmarole of preparing the meal. It both wastes your time as a player and makes the characters feel robotic.

But provided your sim doesn't get jammed in one of these social gridlocks, you often find situations where it feels natural to keep playing the game because you can almost always see operations that you can perform immediately and that will have reliable and positive results for your sim. If you've just had them eat then you often find their Bladder meter is low and it only takes a second to fill that, that may bring down their Hygiene meter and so it's easy to fill that, then maybe they need to go to work, and it's easy to let them do that. There are reasons to design games in such a way that they don't give players an obvious "next step"; puzzle and strategy games, for example, rely on partially obscuring what the next "correct move" is, and the satisfaction arises from teasing it out of the game. However, the longer you leave the player without a clear, viable, and beneficial option they can take, the more likely you are to lose them in that period. Not that The Sims doesn't sometimes drop you into this no-mans-land where there's no task your sim can do that ticks off a pressing goal, but when functioning correctly, it, like many good games, is an infinite chain of tasks where play itself adds more links. And even if you're prioritising keeping your sim happy and they have no more needs to attend to, you can still often squeeze gameplay out of households because you can fill surplus time with working on their knowledge, physical ability, and relationships.

This flexibility of your sims' lives gives you a lot of control over how difficult the game is. If you want non-strenuous play that you can relax to, then you can aim to just keep your sim's mood as high as possible for as long as possible. However, for those who have dreams of their sim living the high life, they may opt to not only keep their sim happy but also well-read, fit, and popular. The lack of any explicit goal in the game, accompanied by the means for players to conjure up all sorts of goals for themselves means they have a lot of say in their workload. The player also has a great deal of ability to adjust the difficulty by deciding how many people they have in a household. Because the audience decides how hard the game is completely through in-world decisions, they're not at risk of being taken out of the moment by an "Easy, Normal, Hard?" menu.

The game gives us the power to wrap a neat bow on every sector of a character's life from family to education, and this is where the empowerment fantasy resides. It's normal to think about empowerment fantasies as only existing in fantastical or action-packed entertainment and to treat down-to-earth games as their opposite, but any game which gives you agency significantly beyond what you have in the real-world is an empowerment fantasy. Real-life is hard to manage and full of random mishaps and mysteries, but The Sims empowers us by giving us a life we can have mastery over. It reduces everything in life down to a number that we can track and a set of actionable steps that will raise that number. Got a thankless job? Then sit down at the chess board and boost your Logic until you get a promotion. Unhappy? Then just look at which of your needs are low and interact with the right objects until you're not. As with most empowerment games, The Sims ensures the actions you take have assured outcomes. If you put in the work to get a promotion, there is no chance you'll get passed over for someone else at your office. If you go to bed, there's no chance you'll not be able to sleep. And there are very few day-to-day surprises; the worst thing that's likely to catch you off-guard is an appliance breaking.

This isn't to say that all life struggles in The Sims have a happy ending. Sometimes two sims' personalities and interests clash, and you'll never get them to be friends. Sometimes the tasks to juggle in a household become too numerous, and it falls apart. I'm also not suggesting that sequels to The Sims didn't better simulate real-life woes or that there is anything wrong with an empowerment fantasy. All I mean is that The Sims is optimised for entertainment and imparting optimism rather than pure simulation. Empowerment fantasy does not necessarily just give us a chance to detach from the real-world but often involves making us feel better about our capabilities in the real-world because it lets us vicariously live through empowered characters who are skilled at what they do. There may be a valid argument that slice-of-life games don't only encourage us to think about what makes us happy but also make it so that attaining that happiness no longer seems so elusive. They tell us that we can get that promotion, we can go out with that crush, and we can buy that marble bathroom we want.

The Sims is a fantastic example of what it means for a game to have good dynamics, and those dynamics are how it remains so entertaining and convincing. You can pack all the mechanics in the world into a game, and it won't give it depth. Instead, depth occurs in the many regions where the mechanics compliment each other. While the depth of The Sims may not be a strategic one, its systems interlock in a way where you are forced to pay attention to all of them because they all hold sway over each other, and some of The Sims's brightest moments are those where you see true-to-life scenarios emerge from its dynamics. Here's some illustration of that concept: I had a couple of sims who lived in the same household and worked roughly 9-3 jobs. During morning and evening, they would sit down to eat and sometimes also watch TV together. This led to them conversing around the kitchen table or on the sofa, and so just by being in proximity to each other, they grew together. This happens in most multi-sim households. But then one of them got a new job where they worked night shifts, and without their joint meals and TV time, the two drifted apart. There is nothing hard-coded in the software to say that two people working different shifts should see their relationship score drop; it happened because these two entities in the system were no longer bumping up against each other. Other emergent behaviours in The Sims which match familiar social patterns include one sim with a high Neat stat unintentionally becoming the cleaner for a household full of people with low Neat stats or the most Outgoing sim in a home being the one who brings new family friends into the fold.

Events in games feel more real when you model them through systems rather than just rendering them visually or in text. Your sim eating feels real not just because you witness them forking food into their mouth but because they have a Hunger bar that they replenish when they eat. Their relationships feel more real because you don't just get scenes of people becoming friends; that friendship is a direct result of interactions you command your characters to have with other characters. We are better at suspending our disbelief in the face of media when that media utilises all of its communication methods to make us believe something is happening, and mechanics are frequently the primary communication method of games. But we can't stop there. From the above examples, we can see that video games communicate not just through mechanics but also dynamics and so a true-to-life game needs to do more than bolt on meters that show human emotion or display figures that reflect the connection between two people. It also needs to have its variables, systems, and interactions realistically push and pull each other.

Put another way, realistic mechanics meet to form realistic dynamics, and realistic dynamics meet to form realistic aesthetics. It's that recognisable interrelation between the parts that leaves The Sims unmatched as a slice-of-life sandbox, and that gives it sentimental value for me. When I was a kid, this piece of software was more than just a digitised dollhouse. While every other game wanted to spirit me away to a WWII battlefield or the deck of a spaceship, The Sims was a game that told me that the kind of life I lived every day was interesting enough to have a virtual experience made about it. It was my first exposure to a game that was trying to be more about connecting me with the real-world than disconnecting me from it, and it was the first title I played where, on some level, I could recognise the graphics, sound, and every jot of the gameplay all reinforcing each other. Games that have had a broad appeal beyond the traditional audience of 18-35 tech-savvy nerds have often reached that tier of popularity by making themselves mechanically shallow. The astounding thing about The Sims is it found its way into the hands of an unprecedentedly wide audience for a PC game while remaining systems-driven and without diluting itself as a simulation. It did this by modelling scenarios that had not just broad appeal, but which almost anyone could understand systemically.

Other games require players take a crash course on their design and are often the most comprehensible only to people with knowledge of cars, guns, or other video games. The Sims, with its realistic mechanics and realistic interactions between those mechanics, prioritises knowledge of real-life, something we all have. If you can understand that people need to go to a job to make money or eat to stay full, you're most of the way to knowing how to play, allowing it somewhat complicated yet still accessible systems. That's meant that long after I was sitting at the family computer, directing animated virtual dolls to the fridge, I've been able to talk to so many people who've had the same experience and those talks have often been with people who'd never otherwise pick up a video game. The next time we want to think about how games could bridge the gap between strangers to the medium and diehard fans or how every system could be more than the sum of its parts, we'd do well to remember The Sims. Thanks for reading.