The Great Depression was a good time for movies, say some. Frankly, I think it's idiotic to think that farmers on an exodus from dust-buried foreclosed farms would stop on the way to their next migrant farmworker gig to take the kids to watch the bourgeoisie dance and sing and fall in love. I can imagine that the breadlines were longer than the theater lines. But the logic is not entirely fallacious.
One of the primary functions of entertainment, insofar as it is entertainment and not art, is the immersion of the viewer in an artificial world free from the problems that plague her in the real one. So, given two nickels to rub together and a choice of two forms of discretionary spending - a ticket to see I Love You, Man or Monsters vs. Aliens or, say, a day pass to an art museum or tuition for an adult education course... you do the math, right? But whether 21st-century cinema will rise to the challenge of succoring the credit-crunched and the foreclosed is outside of my scope.
If you think about it, video gaming today is where the film industry was in the 1930s. The technological base and the business model have been established, but the critical reception of the art form has been lukewarm at best, and its potential as a medium has hardly been discovered. I believe that the current recession is an opportunity for a lot of new forms of culture, business, art, and entertainment to expand from marginal niches into the mainstream as many underperforming institutions are culled from the herd. And all that aside, a video game is a damn cheap way to waste a lot of time doing something fun and escapist. This is an opportunity disguised as a crisis for developers in a position to act.
Some developers just don't see it that way. On the 3rd of February, Electronic Arts announced it would be delaying the release of its highly-anticipated flagship title The Sims 3 from February 21 tol June 2, 2009. From the press release: "The June launch combined with the break-through game the team is building gives us the perfect runway to create awareness for The Sims 3."
The game was finished. The game had been available for pre-order. The game was poised to sell hundreds of thousands of copies within days, even if it was an utterly mediocre abortion. Now it has alienated its customers, dated its graphics, concept and engine, and pushed itself from a relatively competition-free release period into a much more competitive one. And for what? Some unmeasurable future "marketing" payoff. Four months in which it might run the TV commercials it failed to run in the months before the original release date, this time with money it doesn't actually have after some painful quarterly losses. What's the point?
Granted, the francise has metastasized a bit from Will Wright's "digital dollhouse," a facinating and engrossing sandbox experiment in the definition of gaming and the nature of human existence, into a Hall of Mirrors of solipsistic consumerism where you earn and spend real money to earn and spend fake money in a positive feedback loop that gets larger and more ridiculous with every expansion pack. (EA completely missed the point, but they don't care, because this is the third highest-grossing francise in gaming history behind Mario and Pokemon.)
But that aside, this game is exactly the kind of escapist fare that people need right now. A game where everyone starts off life with twenty thousand simoleons at 0% APR, everyone has health insurance, bills are abstracted out of gameplay, and the American dream is only a few mouse-clicks away, no matter what score you got on the SAT or who your parents were. In the parallell universe of the Sims, there's no such thing as social class, rape, war, addiction, teen pregnancy, herpes, credit cards, laundry, homophobia, acne, factory farming, sexism, racism, cancer, or the need to shave or cut your hair. It's what you stop believing about the world when you see your first preventable death, or when you watch someone - possibly yourself - fail through no fault of their own.It's what people would think America was if they only watched sitcoms. It's a consumerist utopia.
I've been fascinated by the life simulation genre and the mirror it holds up to us as human beings ever since 1986's Alter Ego (online version here, which I highly recommend - it only takes an hour or two to play and it's a masterpiece that will definitely make you laugh and might even make you cry). Therefore, while the Sims 3 is undoubtedly a shitty, watered-down version of what it could have been with Will Wright or a comparable talent at the helm (sans unwarranted managerial interference), it will sell like cocaine and both my spouse and I will play and love it. I just wish, as I watch my 401(k) struggle at around half its 2006 value and eviction notices accumulate on my next-door neighbor's front porch, that I could have it sooner.
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