Virtual parody

It was the Redhead’s birthday last week. Not only did I remember, I took her out to dinner and we went shopping for her birthday and got some clothes on sale. This wise and careful action on my part ensured that I would not be sleeping on the couch for the rest of the week. And I assure you, sleeping on our couch is not something I want to be doing: it’s a love seat with room for 1.5 people and is made of hard wood and cushions that have all the comfort of concrete slabs. Suffice it to say that if I had to “sleep” on the couch I wouldn’t get any sleep at all.

Anyway, the birthday was a success. Cake, streamers, balloons, and the most important part of all birthdays: presents. Let’s be honest, we all like presents. Admittedly, presents don’t represent nearly the allure they did when I was 10 and wanted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures. But no one can deny that gifts aren’t important. (Just ask all the guys who forgot and did end up sleeping on the couch. They know.) So the Redhead got the perfect present for her this year: a video game. Yes, she likes video games more than me. (Except for Halo—she doesn’t dig first person shooters.) So she found herself the proud new owner of The Sims 2. Let me first tell you that this game is “ridiculously huge,” to quote a popular red-gloved icon. The game itself is more than 3.5 gigs. Yes, that’s right, I said gigs. More than 10% of her hard drive is now tied up in a virtual reality world that is simultaneously identical and completely different from real life.

Each character has wants and fears, and you try to satisfy their desires by guiding them through every day life. You can use existing characters or set up your own. The Redhead set up a boy and girl that look like us to see if she could get them to hook up. She then proceeded to spend several “days” with each character hanging around the other’s house or in public places, hoping for the chance that the other would happen to pass by so they could meet. I thought this was funny, but I guess lots of people do that in real life too. The guy would then come over to the girls house and they would play video games together, which is genuine real life as far as I’m concerned. (The game is so complex that it has a game within a game—the characters can play SSX 3, and after having watched my roommates play that game for hours on end, I can assure you that the music, graphics, and multiplayer options on the simulated game were true to life.) The game got even more amusing as the two characters started a family. The girl proposed and the guy took her last name, which shows what an enlightened and flexible society the video game people live in. They had a baby through a process described as “Woo hoo,” in which the two characters get bed and perform what looks like WWF wrestling under the blankets. The entire pregnancy lasted about three or four Sim days, culminating when she woke up in the middle of the night screaming and then a baby boy appeared in her arms.

There were plenty of realistic touches to the game, however. If you flush the toilet while someone is in the shower they get blasted with hot water and yell at you. The beginning of the new mother’s 4-day gestation period was when she ran to the bathroom and proceeded to be violently ill. I have yet to find out if the guy has to sleep on the couch if he forgets her birthday, but I’m sure the game creators thought of that too.