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This week on the NYR Online, Zoe Hu writes about The Sims, a computer game released in the year 2000 that gave its users God-like power over the lives—and deaths—of the denizens of its virtual suburbia. Returning to the game, Hu finds that it eerily prefigures the way algorithms have transformed society, turning each of us into “an emitter of inputs,” an avatar for the assumption “that the processes of thinking and producing can be reduced to a series of commands.”

A Sim’s mood will plummet if her house is poorly decorated, or if she hasn’t taken the garbage out, or if, in an effort to learn a skill, she’s forgotten to fulfill a need. This kind of hair-trigger existence may explain the impulse that so many players cite of wanting to set their Sims on fire or drown them in swimming pools. Contra popular belief, these users are not behaving like psychopaths so much as feeling an understandable reflex toward entropy. One desires to see the system lurch into breakdown, to dash the finely made dollhouse into pieces.

Below, alongside Hu’s essay, are four articles from our archive about video games, social media, and the perils of simulated life.

Zoe Hu
Break the Aspiration Meter!

Far from providing a nostalgic refuge from the contemporary Internet, The Sims taps into some of its most foundational assumptions.

Ethan Zuckerman
Could Internet Culture Be Different?

Kevin Driscoll’s study of early Internet communities contains a vision for a less hostile and homogenous future of social networking.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost
Video Games: The Secret Life

How games work and what they can mean

Zadie Smith
Generation Why?

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost
Exhausting All Possibilities

The video game The Stanley Parable is about what it means to be free in a tightly constrained simulated world.

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