Slices O' Life

A friend of mine who works in the game industry described a weird new internet project he'd heard about a while back. Apparently somebody's trying to cook up a realtime online simulation of , get this (and here my friend's face screwed up with disgust) EVERYDAY LIFE. That's right, you too can log onto a special members-only server, and for just thirty bucks a month or whatever, you can move your little pixilated homunculus across the typing pool to the water cooler, across the street to Burger King for a quick shake, or down to the cinema on a Friday night with your virtual missus to catch a (shudder) real, simulated Hollywood movie! We both had a good chuckle at the time, at the expense of the poor souls who were going to get hooked on this sort of mimicry of the game of life - individuals who, as my friend put it "must have real big social problems, if ya know what I mean."

Then I got to thinking...

How familiar would everyday, twentieth-century life really look when simulated through this medium that we all know and love? Game aficionados from the scruffiest pre-teen to Roberta Williams and the Miller brothers all seem to agree that part of the appeal of computer games is that they offer their player some sort of 'escape from reality,' as it's usually put. But perhaps genuine escapism is not quite as easy as these folks would like to have us think. After all, how much novelty is there really in stepping into the shoes of yet another armor wearing, sword carryin' whiteboy who's simulated task it is to swing the chopper, kill the trolls and grab the treasure? If one spends a large enough percentage of one's free time fulfilling these sorts of task on one's computer screen or video game console, everyday chores like getting the groceries might come to take on a whole new significance when simulated using the same devices. And unlike traditional sword and sorcery fantasy games (or ghost stories, or murder mysteries, or historical romances, etc., etc.) these sorts of simulations might actually allow one to return to one's own personal environment refreshed and ready to see things a bit differently.

One could find oneself a little disappointed, then, by how few IF games there are that try to make everyday tasks game-like and interesting, opting instead for more safe and familiar tricks of generating excitement like throwing in the odd corpse or eldrich horror here and there to liven things up. The only unambiguous exception I can think of to this rule is Ivan Cockrum's masterful game SUNSET OVER SAVANNAH, which simulates with amazing psychological accuracy and a surprisingly high level of suspense the thoughts of a fairly average middle-aged man as he walks along a public beach and trying to decide whether or not to quit his job. Other games come close - the actual events that take place Adam Cadre's PHOTOPIA, for example, could have been recorded on the third page of any local newspaper in the civilized world, but even in this game elements of fantasy creep in through the back door, as it were. This is one of the areas in which the Hypertext crown really have a lot more to contribute - check out the intense, unwavering realism of Micheal Joyce's storyspace masterpiece "an afternoon.'

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