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Simulation & Surreality.
It first dawned on me that there was some serious ‘damage in the attic’ in our household when my ten year old daughter burst into my bedroom one Sunday morning shrieking and wailing like some mad wet hen mistaken for Bjork’s latest release. Amidst an ocean of sobs the explanation surfaced that her pregnant Llama had just eaten from a poisonous shrub that she herself had recently introduced into the poor beast’s environment. I’ll admit it took a second or two to get my bearings, but I soon realised my daughter was in fact referring to imaginary events and scenarios conceived inside her fertile mind as a direct result of playing with her ‘Zoo Tycoon’ virtual reality PC game.
Ahead of the game with Zoo Tycoon
For the uninitiated on the planet, this particular game requires the incumbent to create and manage a virtual zoo in almost every respect i.e. construction and maintenance, health and safety, research and development and so on. Now you can imagine, when things are going well with a game as involving as this, virtual events can lead to a tremendous sense of satisfaction in children. However, if the elephant’s excreta is found to be alive with parasites just when the vet’s gone AWOL, or if an escaped hippo is trying to hump a pensioner in the car park, then equally, ‘lows’ of addict-like proportions can kick-in. This oscillation between mood extremes formed the pattern for the months ahead.
Not so simple SIMS
Things took a turn for the worse the day my dear child logged onto her newly acquired expanded deluxe edition of the ‘SIMS’ virtual reality game. ‘SIMS’ in a sentence, is the equivalent to toy ‘Sylvanian families’ who choose to cost as much, but use less room and reside on your hard-drive instead of dominating every room in the house. Sylvavnians do not brainwash kids. Instead they just ruin Dad’s weekend by ending up inside a hooverbag with accompanying microsurgery and dust mite allergy. The migraine-producing scenario of having to buy the whole set again if so much as a miniature plastic spoon goes missing. Our dog had already taken a figure hostage and seemingly unsurprised by this, the rest of the ‘families’ looked on to see ‘one of their own’ chewed and consumed like a postman’s leg.
Countless toys festooning the house when no child will live long enough to play with them is totally sufferable compared to the darker side of ‘SIMS’ computer games.
It is a scarily sophisticated game that entangles your sprogs into realistic human situations that can take over their lives. Children build their own neighbourhoods, create their own characters, even, dress them by simply clicking on a toolbar bulging with style choice. They can, in fact, determine the lives of their virtual people, control their moods, dictate how they spend their time. They can invest them with a future; or they can have them thrown under a bus.
My daughter made the unnatural progression from worrying if her bald eagle’s bowels were functioning properly to fretting about the possibility of her ‘SIMS’ baby being taken into care by a lesbian social worker with unnerving ease. From a child’s perspective, whose craving to be grown up tends to dominate their very existence. ‘SIMS’ is the ultimate responsibility fix. From a parent’s perspective? Their craving, perhaps?
Hopefully, the urchins act like humanoids.
“SIMS” is like a roller coaster ride to hell. Where your child has to hold tightly onto the sides and hope not to go off the rails.
Click by click brick by brick
With the passing of time a very real melancholy seemed to creep into the fabric of our daily lives. Dysfunctional is a word I dislike. We were functioning; but we were functioning in the wrong world. My daughter was spending more and more time in a virtual world, and we, her parents, were having to battle more and more with the day-to-day consequences. Her own perception of reality was altogether changing. Mealtimes were seen as parental conspiracies, specifically crafted, to distract from the things that really mattered. She would come to the breakfast table looking like some cursed waif with complimentary curvature of the spine. When asked if she would prefer cereal or toast? She would respond with a stony silence and a stare from her eyes like darkened rooms. If coaxed to reply the most
I could ever hope for would be an unenthusiastic: ‘Whatever’. I would sometimes try and lift the mood by asking her about the farting habits of her sparrows, or inquire about social shifts amongst her virtual community. This would be greeted with a look of contempt reserved for drunken oafs at a temperance meeting.
On the school front, things, went into free-fall. ‘Going to school’ became ‘going to a virtual ‘SIMS’ seminar’. A seminar where she could meet and exchange ideas with other perfectly abnormal children going through the same perfectly abnormal intoxication with an increasingly absurd game. Teachers were viewed as acrimonious aliens. Homework was regarded as a form of time wasting exercise with cow-choking control. Indeed, anything not computer generated was seen as potentially hostile and threatening. The maker of this virtual reality game describes it as a ‘powerful tool’. Well they got that bit right. This piece of kit could have your kids flying planes into the side of buildings if you’re not very careful, screaming “Fuck weapons of mass destruction!”
I thought it would be just a matter of time before she requested a catheter for the next game as any further interruptions would require mainstream counselling for all of us.
Parents like me watch with fixed expressions and bitten tongues as our children filter into school each morning with a face like a smacked arse and knuckles dragging on the floor for one reason or another. Then as if injected with huge quantities of cocaine we watch with trepidation as devotees of SIMS, easy to spot, huddle together, chattering excitedly like some ‘lovebombed’ cult discussing why their ‘family’ on the latest ‘Superstars’ version were suffering from depression when they had fifty choices of clothes to wear on the menu.
I look back with fond nostalgia to the days of Pokemon and Furbies. Power Rangers and teenage Ninja mutant turtles when a harmless black market of swapping to collect the whole set was as healthy as collecting cigarette cards and impetigo in my childhood days.
A shoebox and a piece of string was enough pleasure. I reminisced about how that little box became.. A ship. A cave, or double decker bus. Or a prison for snails and woodlice that I could stick pins in and then race down the banister to see who would fall off first. I used to play with ‘Jacks’ and a tiny red ball. When accomplished at this, that small ball became boring and a potato was used for more tests of dexterity. When I was equally tired of that I stuck the potato up the neighbours car exhaust and watched the fun. Now kids expect to collect all versions of SIMS at £30 a throw. Then added to that the cost of hiring Men in Black to de-programme her.
Children in my less fragile era learned about tied various string knots. In case one day we would become a pirate or lorry driver. Now when I asked her about his after a reluctant mission to get her motivated at her Girl Guides meet. She said “what’s the point Daddy we have Velcro now?”
There is one sickening SIMS program called ‘Hot date’ where you can create virtual shagging for those times kids want to experiment with ‘actual’ shagging before they leave home. Another, SIMS ‘Unleashed’ is a virtual environment where the whole graphic family get to look after house pets. My daughter spends weeks neglecting her own platoon of small mammals, so how does that work? Our vet complained that she had not see our cat or dog for months. I congratulated her that she was fortunate because I had not seen them for far longer than that. Our newly acquired border collie used to have the odd walk with kids down the street from time to time before this SIMS machination. Now it is positively acrophobic. At least the poor mutt used to be included in their typically bizarre games in true Beatrix Potter style and have ‘pretend’ dental operations with the use of kitchen cutlery performed on it. Or trained how to push a pram ‘Charlie Chipperfield’ style. Now it is dusted occasionally as my darling daughter in front of that damn monitor breaking all records for motionlessness.
Getting our house in order.
What kills me is how these obnoxious computer generated images command a far greater level of concentration than any of her draconian teachers. If there was a ‘four minute warning’ my child would still bother to waste half that time to ‘save’ the game! The other half arguing with her parents why she had to in the first place.
I embrace ‘Kid’ computer culture. When my offspring leaves school it won’t be nibs ‘n’ ink like when I was at school. But when they spend all day getting a screen figure to do some homework and ignore there own I get a little pissed. Or watch the tiny character use the shower or toilet with a conveniently placed mosaic fuzzspot to hide their modesty (what they have genitalia too?) and I get moaned at for leaving the lid up YTHis is when I get a mite testy.
Facing the music
The ‘backing music’ is strangely haunting. One cannot describe what its like. A sort of mishmash of supermarket music and a porn soundtrack ‘mixed’ with a sixties film romance set of continuous jingles. Shut your eyes and some some anorak with drainpipes is skipped through the bluebells with some bint with a skirt to keep her neck warm. The orchestra sound as if they have been squeezed into my bathroom and only enough elbow room for one person to play their instrument at a time. The Harpist getting more airtime than most. Lee Harvey Oswald would have listened to this cocktail of insipid droning just before he was mentioned in despatches. The sort of music you should listen to during ‘Clockwork Orange’ or when you are asked to ‘hold’ for the fifth time.
The worrying thought is that the sound is hypnotic and disturbingly subliminal. I was the bloke in the drainpipes.
Damage in the attic?
So this then is the state of affairs. Our daily lives resemble that of ‘The Osbournes’ minus the money, status, fame, sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. We still try and get through to our daughter, but she now only responds using her virtual ‘SIMS’ language which sounds like a cross between a Tibetan monk gargling with gravel and Dr Stephen Hawking on low battery. We are up to our necks in gerbil shit because my daughter prefers to act out responsibility rather than take responsibility. My question is this: is it me, or is my daughter in serious need of a loft conversion?
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