Narrate or Simulate?
Agency and the Everyday in The Sims

Sean Latham (University of Tulsa)

In his 1936 essay "Narrate or Describe?" that great theorist of the novel Georg Lukacs begins his argument by plunging "in medias res," his "res" being the description of a horse race in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. And what he cares about most deeply is less the race (res) itself than the media--that is, the novel as an artifact capable of transforming something so banal as a day at the track into "a rich, comprehensive, many-sided and dynamic artistic reflection of objective reality" (121). By leaping in medias res, then, Lukacs actually begins in the medium itself, in what the OED calls that "intervening substance through which something is transmitted or carried on." And it is this question of the medium and the difference it makes that occupies us now, confronted as we are with the problem of how to theorize the emergence of new kinds of narrative structures in that "intervening substance" called the computer.

This paper will draw on the work of Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukacs to argue that computer games have just now begun to create new kinds of narratives distinctly suited to our postmodern condition. The argument will begin by tracing briefly the spatialized structure of games such as Zork and Doom which reduce narrative to mere navigation. Like early hypertext fictions such as afternoon: a story, these games transform us from readers into navigators who must follow a series of complex but always pre-scripted lexia. The result, as Janet Murray observes, is "a desire for agency that makes us impatient when our options are so limited" (132). Her oddly nostalgic argument in Hamlet on the Holodeck, however, borrows significantly from Lukacs, echoing his conviction that "the Victorian era [was] arguably the pinnacle of novel writing in England" (257). Like Lukacs, however, she fails to realize that the desire for agency in a world mediated by Foucault's "micro-politics" of power and knowledge is precisely the problem which all those novelists after Dickens, Thackeray, and Tolstoy have been struggling to resolve. Murray thus makes a significant error when treating hypertext as little more than the primitive stage of an emergent media. Instead, it must be seen as an index of the limited possibilities for agency in a world increasingly conscious of the constraints placed upon it by mass-produced objects and ideological scripts.

Instead of lamenting the failure of the digital medium to take us back to the good old days of Dickens, this paper will contend that The Sims creates narrative possibilities uniquely suited to the digital medium. The game itself eliminates all of the epic elements so admired by Lukacs and so readily integrated into computer games like Myst, Riven, and Alpha Centauri. Its gameplay, in fact, revolves entirely around the most quotidian of details: buying a couch, cooking a meal, talking to a neighbor, and even watching television. The real challenge The Sims poses is how to construct a meaningful character and even a sense of agency in a simulated world emptied of epic meaning. What remains, of course, is a new kind of narrative driven by Lukacs's "description" and Benjamin's "information," challenging the reader/player to assemble a meaningful story from a collection of pre-scripted dialogue and mass-marketed commodities. Rejecting the allure of complete interactivity and blissful submersion touted by VR theorists and even admired by Murray, it uses the digital medium to open a critical and self-reflective window on our own life in that famous "desert of the real."