PLAYING GOD.

Sul Sul, and welcome.

It is safe to say that today, I still walk around with a figurative green diamond above my head. Simlish is my second language and I still reference it in everyday conversation.

Recently it has come to my attention that my dying love for these digital, pant-peeing, constantly hungry, moody digital avatars may say something about my psyche, and the psyche of other die hard simmers like me. Am I naturally drawn to ultimate control, and autonomous ruling? Is ultimate control of what my sims wear, eat, look like etc. a glimpse into my natural instincts of dictatorship?

My pervious Digital Artefact was centred on the tutorial aspect of video games, exploring how well they would condition a “non-gamer” to successfully navigate and play the game. After two shocking video uploads of me playing Dark Souls and The Last of Us I decided that idea was best left in the archives. The obstacles I ran into was the inability to delve deeper into the substance of the games, the tutorials offered nothing more to me than the aesthetics of the game and the controls I was supposed to use. As stated before I am not a gamer, so these controls did not come naturally to me, I was constantly looking down at the xbox controller trying to figure out where each button was. Early on in the Last of Us there’s a prompt on the screen to press L3, there is actually no button on the controller labeled that and I was stuck for quite some time trying to figure out where the hell it was. I had no idea the joysticks also worked as buttons. These kind of controls come very naturally for my someone like my boyfriend, who has been conditioned to years of gaming. For him, watching my episode was painfully infuriating for him.

This is a segue to problem two, the content I was making had little views and was more like torture to any audience. Gamers lost interest and were unsatisfied by my novice skills which are second nature to them, non-gamers aren’t interested in gaming to begin with and the long drawn out silences while I tried to locate L3, was as you may have guessed, boring af.

So I’ve decided to channel my energies into something I am expert at, The Sims. I have decided to present my DA as blog posts and short Youtube episodes where I expose myself as having dictator tendencies through my natural style of game play. I want to dig into my past games and sim creations to identify trends in looks for example and parallel that to the same ideologies of those found in the Nazis’ and their obsession with the Aryan Race. While I’m not Hitler reincarnate, I am very interested in probing my argument that in the psyche of Sims players there is a tendency for control.