/ Cory Doctorow / 6:26 am Wed Jun 17, 2009

Homeless Sims are surprisingly depressing

Robin Burkinshaw, a British games design student, created a homeless father-daughter pair in The Sims 3, "moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes." The results are surprising heart-rending:

This is Kev and his daughter Alice. They're living on a couple of park benches, surviving on free meals from work and school, and the occasional bucket of ice cream stolen from a neighbour's fridge.

When you create a Sim in The Sims 3, you can give them personality traits that alter their behaviour. Kev is hot-headed, mean-spirited, and inappropriate. He also dislikes children, and he's insane. He's basically the worst Dad in the world. He is a horrible human being, but he's also amusing to watch...

As her father dislikes children, he hates sleeping next to her. In the morning, he's always the first to wake, and he immediately throws a tantrum and wakes up Alice to tell her to leave the room. Alice understandably responds that they're not in a room, and she doesn't have anywhere to go. Then they argue, and Kev seems to blame Alice for every possible thing.

Part 0: Hello!

Part 1: Alice and Kev

Part 2: No hugs and no sleep

Part 3: Just trying to be alone

(via Wonderland)

20

  1. This is awesome. I’ve known Robin for years but didn’t know about this project until I read it here. I was genuinely welling up when Alice got a hug from a neighbour!

  2. The trick to being homeless is that you have to have a daily routine. Mine goes like this: In the morning, I get up, stretch for about 15-20 minutes, then take a nice long walk, oh about 30min – 1 hour if I can get it. Then I go for coffee or other hot beverage. By mid-morning, I’m ready to start panhandling. I’m good for about 2 hours. Some others I know can go all day. But if you can do the cup, that’s usually the quickest – but alot of idea trading goes on with that method. After brunch, I like to go shopping or read the news or write letters. A bit of socializing after that with the gang on the corner, and maybe around evening, take in a dinner show. It’s a wonderful life as long as you’re not on the Internet.

  4. Very interesting experiment. I put a crazy homeless guy in a filthy lot in my Sims town too. The only problem is you kind of need to force them into this. If you bought one of them an easel it wouldn’t be long before they could make and sell enough masterpieces to make a very decent living. Or a guitar and they could play for tips.

    My homeless guy seems to like to hang out around the bookstore.

  5. I love all the comments about feelings and just how sad this is. The issue of homelessness is so real and tragic that I think as a culture we visually make them disappear. Much like walking down the road and not seeing all the wires and telephone poles.
    Yet when we now place this in a controlled and comprehensible situation it evokes emotion – does anyone find that a tad disturbing? Yes, we have a backdrop, a point of reference, but how many of these posters get the same emotion walking past someone on the street? (see poles analogy)

  7. The thing about the family members not getting along is interesting, because the people I’ve known who have been homeless for some amount of time (I’ve never known anyone to be chronically homeless), have had really bad relationships with their family. It seems that you “need” the family unit to get along in this world, if you’re within certain age ranges or professions, or races. That need leaves these people open for abuse, which leads to them giving up on their families and running away.

  8. The latest update contains a genuinely surprising and affecting incident: I was stunned that an artificial character would do such a thing.

    I won’t say what it was right now, even whether it was good or bad, to avoid spoiling people, but I would recommend checking out the whole story, which is still ongoing.

  9. I read this, and OMG! It’s interesting how far computer games have come, especially computer AI, that you can effectively just create a person’s attributes, leave them to get on with it, and see how they act like ‘normal’ people.

  10. This is a great story, but I can’t help but wonder how much of the perceived complexity in the characters is added by the narration; I haven’t played the latest one, but the thing that always disappointed me about the earlier version of the game was how simple the sims were; they reacted in predictable ways to a very small set of stimuli. It only took a few hours of play for me to exhaust all the possibilities and start getting bored. I got the feeling that they started out with the idea of making a human life simulator, and somewhere along the way decided that what they really wanted was a platform for selling graphics expansion packs.

    Though I’m definitely intrigued now.

  11. “Yet when we now place this in a controlled and comprehensible situation it evokes emotion – does anyone find that a tad disturbing? Yes, we have a backdrop, a point of reference, but how many of these posters get the same emotion walking past someone on the street?”

    I watched a TV series not long ago (can’t remember the name offhand) where some generally privileged people, who usually held the opinion that homelessness was the fault of the homeless person, were put out onto the streets to experience what it was really like. It was heart-wrenching to see them go through those journeys. With the people we see on the street we don’t have that backstory. We don’t see their life. We can’t get that emotional connection. If their whole life were filmed and we watched it, maybe we would. But I do see your point, of course.

  12. @Bob Doles Communist Doppelganger:
    That pretty much sums it up. I’ve never been able to figure out how anyone can “play” the sims for more than a few days.

  13. @#10 – To address your concern about the complexity, The Sims 3 definitely has deeper personalities for the Sims. The traits make it harder to predict how your Sims are going to act – and especially how hard it is to predict how NPC or Townie characters are going to act.

    Your Sim needs to discover the personalities of the other Sims before you can start predicting how they will react to certain situations. Some Sims are much easier reads than others. In my game, my Sim’s neighbor is merely an acquaintance and two of her five traits have been revealed. Another Sim who is a “good friend” is still a complete mystery.

    So, the short answer is, they did expand on the cookie-cutter personalities in TS2, but there is still a limit to the unpredictability (for the most part) after some time.

  16. Years ago while I was playing Sims 1 I created the Whitetrash family – Judy the mother, Betty the girl and Bobby the boy. Just by ramping up some attributes and eliminating others I created an all too real dysfunctional family – a boy with virtual ADHD and a girl who was moody and withdrawn. Judy the mom worked as a nurse and was away from home a lot, leaving the kids to wreck the place and never go to school. Compared to the interactions of Sims 3 it was primitive but the thing I hadn’t anticipated was how bad I felt for having created their living hell and how much I wanted to fix it for them. It was impossible, so I did the next best thing a remorseful God can do – reset button. I brought them back as wealthy, happy and a nice house.

  17. I only played the Sims once, on a rented copy of the PS2 version a few years ago. All I really remember is that it seemed to take a disproportionally large effort to get my character to avoid pissing herself.

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