Tyree's Tuppence

by Tyree Campbell

Virtually &%$#ed

Recently I received something called a "flying hug." It's rather like what one is invited to take at a rolling doughnut, except that you keep your clothes on. Still, when one considers that the donor of this action was a comely and lissome [and evidently quite flexible] young woman, and that the recipient of this action was a man born in the late Mesozoic, one can perhaps appreciate the very niceness of this expression of affection. After all, we live in a society which reveres everything ancient except its own quinquagenarians and beyond, and...well, let's face it, people with wrinkles rarely get to commingle with people without.

Somewhat after my birth...say, the early Pleistocene...commingling took place rather more chastely in the games of yore. And with far less artificial milieu and atmosphere than those of contemporary games. We played Cops & Robbers, Cowboys & Indians, Dodge Ball...you know, the games that are banned now because of the violent or impolitic content. The best part about these [violent and impolitic] games was that equipment didn't cost smeg. Cap pistols, as my father said, did not grow on trees alongside money. So we learned to point our index fingers, using the thumbs as the hammers, and filled the air with bang-bangs and kapow-bam-splats and, of course, the shrieks of the dying and the unconquered...

"Got you!"

"Got you first!"

"Did not!"

"Did too!"

"Mooooooom!!!!!"

Sigh.

Dodge Ball, of course, required a ball--or a reasonable facsimile, say, the gourds down in the canyon behind the housing area. For us, Dodge Ball was seasonal...

[Using gourds had certain advantages. Charges of "Got you!" could usually be supported by empirical evidence...]

In a scarcity of equipment forced upon us by poverty, we had to make do with our imaginations. For wars, baseball bats made excellent cannons. Boom! I got you, and your little city, too. We could dig tunnels in the dirt with our hands, and pretend we were gophers, digging up clumps of grass ["Put that back in the lawn, and play somewhere else!"] upon which to dine as the mood took us.

For me, the creme de la creme was an old abandoned washing machine.

It was 1950 or so. Bubble gum came with Space Cards [rather like baseball cards for geeks], a journey through the Solar System as it was believed to be at that time--including tropical rainforests on Venus, ha! Contemporary television shows included Captain Video and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, and of course the usual Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials in the theaters on Saturdays.

So I removed the agitator from the washing machine, climbed down inside, and found that I could affix the Space Cards to the inside of the chamber, and pretend I was on my way to...Mars...Jupiter...Arcturus...wherever I wanted.

Pretend.

Pretense compels the use of imagination. Remember that scene in The Matrix, about the food? It's really some gray slop that looks like puree of squid entrails, but--with proper application of imagination--tastes like a Porterhouse steak.

So we played and we imagined and we dreamed and we grew up and we did the things we did...and some of us got to fly, and some became astronauts, and some soldiers, translators, truck drivers, parents, writers, what-have-you. We even played [*gasp] house. Compulsory teas and crumpets...not a guy thing, but when commanded from On High [i.e., Mom] to participate, one drinks the tea and eats the crumpets.

Fast-forward to now.

You can still play house...whoa! can you ever!

The game of house is now called the Sims Game. A Sim is a "simulant." It is a graphic representation of you...and not necessarily the you that you are, but the you that you always wanted to be, or even an evil you that you never dared to be. Other Sims in the game are manipulated by you...

For instance, let's say you don't like a teacher. You can create a Sim of her or him, blop that Sim into one of your games, and let your own Sim abuse that one to your heart's content. Conversely, let's say you do like a teacher. You can create a Sim of her or him...get the picture? And it doesn't have to be your teacher. You can be creative about it. It could be your neighbor, or the boy across the aisle in History 101, or even your favorite writer [which I discovered some time ago, rather to my amazement...].

Anyway, that's a Sim. Broadly speaking, they all have more or less the same configuration as Barbie and Ken. You can give them any face you want...or even patch one in of your favorite or least favorite persons, by cobbling it from a photograph. You can attire them [or not] pretty much any way you wish. [A friend of mine wears a Star Trek uniform with a Green Bay Packer cheesehead hat].

Sims began as an offline game of practice relationships, and included versions called Livin' Large, Hot Date, House Party. These were rather private affairs...you played by yourself, or you invited a friend over to play with [um...play Sims with, I mean]. With one monitor and keyboard and mouse, probably a maximum of four could play "house" comfortably. In the Sims Games, you could do just about everything that you can do "irl" [or "in real life," for us acryonymal styracosauruses]. You can cook, hug, dress, shower, pee, exercise, work, play. Of course, during the personal hygiene activities certain areas of the Sim body are pixellated, but "unblockers" and cheats are readily available.

Last December a new Sims game was made available to the Universe. It was called "The Sims Online," or TSO for short. The comfortable limit is no longer four. You can simulate relationships online with anyone who's in the game, anyone anywhere.

[What's all this gotta do with pretense and imagination? Gimme a minit, I'm woiking here, capisce?]

Where was I...oh, yeh! Simulated relationships. Each Sim comes with preset lists of options. For example, I can click my mouse on, say, your Sim, and something like a dropdown option window will tell me what I can do to or with your Sim. Some of these options include Make Friend, Make Enemy, Give Gift, Whisper, High-5, Bow, Pile-Drive into Floor, Dance, and...yup, even THAT! Keep in mind, now, that your Sim...the Sim of you...is not necessarily you. It's who you want to be, or imagine yourself to be.

And so you engage in simulated relationships. The girl you never dared kiss, you may now pretty much kiss at will. The guy you despised for dumping you can now become the dumpee...depending on what you want to dump on him, of course.

But in another context, these are not merely simulated relationships. They are "surrogate" relationships. You can exist, then, in a society without ever opening your front door...without ever smelling the roses or pricking your finger on a thorn. Sims are safe. No fuss, no muss...no heartbreak, no ecstasy...safe. You can even commit suicide safely.

There are at present millions of TSO players [yeh, including me...how else do you think I got flyingly hugged?] engaging in virtual relationships. Millions more [including me, yeh], have virtual pets in Neopets. But virtual existences can be addictive. I find them interesting because they stimulate the creation of milieux and characters...good exercises for a writer...although I must admit that flying hug was...well, never mind.

So what's the problem?

You can create a world without ever having to go out into the real one. You can have relationships without ever having to experience one. And with all of your options handed to you by whoever runs Sims, you need not use much of your imagination...and the pretending is done by clicking the mouse on your mousepad. Soon, perhaps, there will be Sims in Space...so that we never have to go there.

That's the problem.

When I removed the agitator from that old washing machine, I created infinite variables. If I didn't have the right Space Card for my destination--and often enough, I didn't--I could create one using, not my mouse and a list of options, but my mind. My vision. How I wanted to go out there...

So the question becomes: why should we dream about going out into space, when Space is ours at the click of a mouse?

Well, that's for you and me to answer, isn't it? We're writers and artists in the genres. Dreaming is what we do best.

But I still won't object to a flying hug, now and then.

Past Tuppence:
March 2003
December 2002
October 2002
August 2002
June 2002
April 2002
February 2002
December 2001
October 2001
August 2001

Read more from Tyree Campbell in any of the following:

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 3

Sex and the Single Alien
An anthology

Nyx
A novel by Tyree Campbell

Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 2

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