The Tepid Hater

Sims 1 is at its best when it is a simulation of private lives. Sims are slow and their need bars go down quickly, but that very difficulty make paying attention to the sims activities rewarding. Banal activities like preparing for the commute in the morning, watching tv after work and calling a friend in the evening, are given weight because of the sims needs. The Legacy edition comes with all the expansions and patches, plus a few tweaks to the original games, yet despite the presence of depressed clowns and evil magician, the picture of late 90’s suburban life remain intact.

Sims comes with an innate sense of interior design, reflected in their “room” need bars. The best way to manage it is to periodically modify the house and the furniture to see how its inhabitant reacts. The principle of design favored by the games are taught to the player through this feedback loop. Even the items description reinforce those ideas. By the Sims 2, the “room” meter becomes a “comfort” meter, and the importance of particular principle of designs disappear.

To be able to show the effect of change in decoration and house plans quickly, renovations have to be abstracted. There are no contractor to hire; all material appear out of thin air, without the necessity of work. This is not just convenience for the player; it’s part of the picture of suburban living. A picture with a perspective.

The strength of The Primary Phase is its cohesion. The Secondary Phase Phase is a step down in quality in that regard. As for the books, the first abruptly end after Magrathea, the second mix events from the Primary and the Secondary Phase, the third is an adaptation of a Doctor Who story and the last two fail to be engaging at all.

It might seem strange to talk of cohesion for a series driven by meanderings and random chance, but those two ideas compliment each other because the program is obsess with meaning and purpose. What should be meaningful is rendered meaningless by either the narration, other characters or the world itself. Ford's rant's at the Golgafrinchans is the culmination of this idea: Humans sucks, they are a stupid species because they focus on things that don't matter and suffer for it. That very idea, the heart of the show, that easily find home in the world view of the worst people on earth: tech CEOs.

In this worldview, the violence created by bureaucracy is because people are fools. A lot of the comedy comes from how human (and specifically, English) the aliens are. Not just English, the entire galaxy operate under 80's corporate capitalism. Economic crash come and goes, but the underlying system remain the same (how else to accrue interest until the end of the universe?). The oppression that make this system function is ignored. Violence is never systemic, but the result of individual actors who fail to properly judge what is meaningful from what isn’t.