Hi reader, part three of the 2022 "top ten most read posts" series. Like last time, this one ran long so we'll cover just the one for today.
#6 | "How To Skip What You Love" (June 5)
I had this holiday tradition for many years with my brother where, after the usual festivities had ceased for the evening, we would plug The Sims into a PlayStation and play the game "head to head" into the wee hours. The only thing I learned from those sessions is that although no two people play The Sims in the same way, there does seem to be a shared instinct among gamers to recreate the closest possible version of ourselves in the game. This allows the player to turn The Sims into more than just a game - it becomes a virtual life lab, and we ran our pointless experiments over endless bowls of reheated stuffing while that voyeur Mortimer made his best efforts to distract us from noting our most important observations.
In hindsight, I can't say many of the events prophesied by The Sims has come to pass for me - no, I did not parlay my entry-level military job into a successful career as a musician (yet), and I feel it's highly unlikely I'll marry any neighbor after three dates. However, I did learn one thing about myself, and I think this lesson comes through in the post - my playfulness. One of the initial challenges I struggled with in the game was getting my character's personality to match my real one. The way you create a personality in the game is by allocating points across five categories - sloppy/neat, shy/outgoing, lazy/active, mean/nice, and serious/playful (adding points moved you from left to right, or left/right - for example, adding to sloppy/neat made you neater; the system makes no sense since it assumes people can't max out in all five categories). I had the first three categories more or less worked out right away - shy, active, and nice. I dropped myself somewhere in the middle for sloppy/neat. After allocating my points to those four categories, I made my mistake - instead of correctly stuffing all my remaining points into "playful", I wasted the remaining points on "outgoing", indulging some vague notion of creative license, or perhaps just testing a hypothesis that a chattier version of myself would improve the gaming experience.
Quite frankly, I probably overlooked the playfulness option simply because I didn't fully understand it at the time. I must have thought of playfulness as something that could be said of certain people (like saying "he's tall") rather than a quality that everyone possessed to varying degrees (like height). I don't believe I ever described someone else as playful unless it was extremely obvious to everyone, such as in the presence of a relentless goofball or an outrageous flirt. I therefore gave myself no chance of noticing the lesser yet significant degree of this quality in myself despite there being no shortage of examples suggesting such in those days - in my mind, I saw the way I goofed off as more of a situational behavior rather than an expression of personality. Another explanation is that since pretty much anything I'd worked on up to that point in my life required a degree of seriousness, success in general seemed very much dependent on taking things seriously. I think this fooled me into thinking it was a worthwhile aspiration to cultivate seriousness, or at least to present myself as a serious person whenever I felt the situation called for it. In my mind, a playful person and a successful person were two different persons. This didn't lead me to abandon my playful qualities, but I think I did ignore them to a certain degree because I never considered the possibility that playfulness could also be a factor in my success.
Since I had accustomed myself to presenting a serious side, when the game placed seriousness and playfulness on a sliding scale I naturally leaned toward the former. For me, succeeding in a game that simulated real life meant doing all the things I thought I should do to succeed in real life. You could say such a decision reflects the greatest design accomplishment of The Sims - despite presenting the player with no set way to win or lose the game, the player naturally tries to win anyway by accumulating wealth, which in a capitalist society is the definition of last resort for those who are otherwise unable to define success. Up to that point I had thought that seriousness would help me achieve this form of success, both in the game as well as in life.
As a writer I know that this is when I'm supposed to tie this whole thing together with a nice neat bow, detailing the moment of epiphany while playing The Sims when I suddenly realized the error of my ways. Alas (and at the risk of sending James Joyce spinning in his grave) I think the fact is that life doesn't really work in this way - the singular "aha!" moment that changes everything always feels like an oversimplification, like the way meteorologists pinpoint sunset down to the exact minute even though I've seen some of them last for over half an hour. I'm not sure exactly when I recognized just how badly my mentality regarding the value of seriousness was selling me short, but it definitely wasn't one moment while playing the game. (If there is any epiphany to describe in this essay, it's perhaps my realization as I write that the only meaningful way to win The Sims - to beat the game, as they say - is discovering how to precisely recreate yourself in the game, since this would demonstrate that the gamer had achieved a complete understanding of the self.)
I do believe playing The Sims did have some role in this process, and perhaps there was one night when I tweaked my character's personality a few points over from serious to playful that led me to recognize myself a little more on the screen. But I also know that there were so many other contexts where I noticed how injecting playfulness improved the situation, perhaps by leading to a better outcome or just making it a better experience for everyone, and eventually enough examples accumulated where I was the protagonist of these moments. At some point, it just became obvious how much more I had to offer if I recognized this quality in me. A serious approach to life is a perfectly acceptable mentality... for a serious person. For me, best described these days as someone who is constantly fucking around (apologies for the lack of a better expression), adopting a serious approach means the best I'll ever do is live up to someone else's expectations. I actually think that is all well and good for some people, but for me I'm more interested in reaching my own potential.
I think in recent years I've started making sense to myself because I am finding ways to apply my qualities to situations rather than trying to emulate the qualities that seem to be demanded after studying those situations. As I mentioned in the original post, I'm also becoming better at understanding others and recognizing how powerful this quality is for them. But I think what I notice most is the evidence of absence, where a lack of playfulness or perhaps a refusal to acknowledge its calling has confined someone within a diminished life. I think I've always known that anything you skip for long enough will disappear from your life, but maybe it hadn't been so obvious to me until that day when I encountered the woman who could walk right past the game she once loved to play.
