One of the best-selling video games of all time, The Sims was released 25 years ago this week. If you don’t know, The Sims is a life simulation game. You create a character, manage their moods, and help them to satisfy their desires. You build them a home, help them get a job, make friends, maybe find a partner. They can even have children. You could of course just let your Sim slob about the house all day, do nothing, and see how that works out for them. These types of games are called ‘sandbox’ games, because they have no pre-set goal or outcome. Within the parameters of the game, you do whatever you want to do with your Sim. In part the psychological engine in the game is based on psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This says that humans first seek to satisfy their basic physiological needs of food, water, warmth, and rest. Next in the hierarchy is safety, then belonging and love needs, usually expressed through a partner type relationship or with friends. Then there is the need for accomplishment or prestige by achieving goals. And finally, Maslow’s concept of self-actualisation, which means fulfilling one’s full potential, and may include some form of creative expression. This model isn’t the only psychological model about human desires and motivation, or the evolution of human thinking, but it is a good one and is used extensively in coaching as a result.
Games like this reflect to us something important about our reality and how we choose to lead our lives. A fractal reflection of the nature of reality, art imitating nature. In The Sims we are humans playing a game about being a human, having friends and partners, and getting a job. In fact, the game is used to give people a break from actually doing these things in-real-life. But computer games, properly structured can be very educational. They allow us to play out the consequences of actions in a non-real way, so that we can learn. Then when faced with similar real-life situations, where there are real-world consequences, we can perform better than we otherwise might have. We are not using computer games fully to do that yet, but some are, and maybe in the future we can do this even better. What I also see in games like this is another reflection of the underlying structure of our physical reality. From a spiritual perspective I think we have chosen this life that we are living now. We have set some broad and some specific objectives, and from the spirit realm we are being guided to successfully play them out. It’s just most of us in the earth ‘game’ haven’t figured that out yet. We think the rules of the earth game are very different to what they actually are. It’s not that life is simply a computer simulation from another dimension, but there are similarities. One of them being that your Sim might die, but you get to start a new game as if nothing happened, except what you learned from the previous game. Imagine if we can begin to wake up to the true nature of our earth reality. It would be like the Sim in your game realising that the game world isn’t real, yes the experience is real, but the world the Sim inhabits isn’t real. Maybe soon we can begin to realise that physical reality isn’t real too, yes the experience of physical reality is real, but physical reality isn’t, not in the way we think it is. This realisation can free us to live our lives more fully, becoming our best version. You can be the Sim that becomes a superstar, or the one slouched on the couch watching inane TV all day. The choice really is yours.
The game designer Will Wright created The Sims, in part at least, as a satire on US consumer culture, only to see his game become part of what he was satirising. Maybe we can use it to wake-up in our simulation and start making better more self-empowered choices in our lives.
“Life is like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.” Seneca
