Sim Nation

Let's imagine the most boring video game possible. Instead of crashing spaceships and trigger-happy aliens, you would have suburban houses, leaky faucets and chatty neighbors. Instead of fighting evil, you would do the dishes, watch a little TV, then call it a night. Instead of saving the world, you would be saving for a bigger split-level. It's the opposite of fun like an '80s family sitcom without the jokes or Clark Kent without his secret identity.

Now open your eyes: you've just invented the most popular computer game of all time. It's called The Sims (short for simulation), and the premise is simple. You control an ordinary suburban family. You make them dinner at night and send them to work in the morning. You turn on the TV when they're bored and put them to bed when they're tired. Since it debuted in 2000, The Sims has sold 8 million copies in 17 languages and has inspired a devoted fan following. It's also one of the rare computer games played by more women than men.

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Next month, when video-game titan Electronic Arts launches The Sims Online, it will become something more than a game. Using the Internet, The Sims Online will enable millions of individual Sims to live, work and hang out together in a shared virtual world very much like our own. Result: a daring collective social experiment that could tell us some interesting things about who we are as a country. We're about to witness the birth of Simulation Nation.

The founding father of this brave new world is an affable, bespectacled, 42-year-old polymath named Will Wright. In 1981, after five years of bouncing around three colleges without graduating, Wright decided to try his hand at writing a computer game. He called it Raid on Bungeling Bay. "It was basically a pretty stupid fly-around-in-a-helicopter-and-shoot-people game," he admits. The object was to fly over various islands and bomb them back to the Stone Age. But Wright became fascinated with these tiny islands. He found himself spending hours giving each one a detailed, working infrastructure tiny people in tiny factories loading products onto tiny ships. "Pretty soon," he remembers, "I figured out I was having a lot more fun creating these little islands than I was bombing them." Eureka: the original Sim. Wright had discovered a new way to have fun.

At the time, the attraction was not readily apparent to many people. After Bungeling Bay, Wright cooked up a game he called SimCity, in which players took on the role of mayor of a complex, realistic miniature metropolis, complete with crime, garbage trucks, power plants and a temperamental populace. SimCity was a complex system that required constant, careful tweaking to keep it in equilibrium. This activity doesn't instantly register as "fun"--in fact, at first blush it sounds suspiciously similar to "work." When he showed it to publishers, they said, "But how do you win? There's no win-lose!"

What they didn't get is that there are some games that you don't play to win. You just play to play. In fact, Wright's games don't end; they just keep going. Wright ended up starting his own company and publishing SimCity himself in 1989. It became an instant best seller, earning him some very real, nonsimulated cash.

When Wright created The Sims in 2000, he narrowed his focus to a single suburban family wrestling with the everyday demands of job, family, housework and personal hygiene. On paper it sounds hopelessly soporific, the video-game equivalent of a Warhol movie, but the response from players was seismic. Counting its various add-on packs, The Sims franchise has sold almost 20 million units.

The game's genius lies in exactly what should have made it a flop: its mundanity. Instead of transporting players to another place and time, it offers them familiar, everyday situations. The object of the game, to the extent that it has one, is to keep your Sims your digital alter egos well fed, solvent, healthy, entertained and, in short, happy. The game never formally ends: you can keep on living your simulated life as long as you like.

But in the hands of its legions of devotees, the game has become an expressive language they can use to tell stories about their own lives. Briar Sauro, 27, a school librarian in Brooklyn, N.Y., readily admits to having a "slight Sims obsession," i.e., on a good day she limits herself to two or three hours. "It can take up my whole evening. I don't do anything else." She experiments with using The Sims to "re-create real-life interpersonal relationships." Sauro has created an entire Sims world full of her actual friends and family. "The first year I had the game, we were all having affairs with one another's spouses," she says. "When the Sims get jealous, they slap each other. There was a lot of slapping."

Sometimes things get even more serious. Elizabeth Powell, 56, a retired nurse, took up the game after her husband died. She made little Sims versions of herself and her husband to help her work through her grief. "I could still be with him psychologically, even though I understood the reality," she says. "To many of us, it is more than just a game. We don't just play The Sims; we express ourselves and our lives with real emotions, situations and interactions." Wright believes that it helps people understand their own lives: "You start to see patterns you don't when you're living. It takes all the messy grayness of real life and makes it bright and shiny."