From Family Photo Albums to Storytelling Modules:

Narrativity in Computer Games Exemplified by The Sims Franchise

Table of Contents

1. Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1

2. Narrativity in Computer Games ............................................................................... 2

2.1 To Be or Not To Be: Are Games Stories? ......................................................... 2

2.2 Conceptions of Video Games and Interactivity ................................................. 5

3. Narrativity in The Sims Franchise ............................................................................ 9

3.1 Narrative Traits in the Game ............................................................................ 10

3.2 The Crumplebottom Legacy: Mini-Narratives in The Sims ............................. 16

4. Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 20

Works Cited ............................................................................................................... 23

Note on Plagiarism attached

Table of Figures

Fig. 1: Need bars in The Sims 2. ................................................................................ 11

Fig. 2: Different neighbourhoods in The Sims 2. ....................................................... 13

Fig. 3: Story-modules in The Sims and The Sims 2. .................................................. 15

Fig. 4: A Sim being attacked by Mrs Crumplebottom in The Sims 2. ....................... 19

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1. Introduction

“Players … can give characters unique identities, even their own”

(Moltenbrey 28) – what sounds like a feature from a contemporary online video

game in fact refers to a computer game that is 15 years old: The Sims. The game is

part of a computer game franchise with four main titles and many additional mini-

games adding up to the gaming experience of every respective title.1 With more than

175 million copies sold globally, the game is one of the best-selling titles in the

history of video gaming (Sapieha). An interesting development, especially with

regard to the content of the game, which is nothing new to anyone and thus rather

bland: it is a game about life. The game has a “unique style that requires players to

create their own Sim families … and then place the characters in various situations

and settings” (Moltenbrey 28). The player fulfils the basic needs of the Sims, which

are very similar to that of humans: they get hungry, need sleep or need to use the

toilet. He also builds their houses, organises meetings with neighbours and helps

friendships and relationships to bloom to the point where the Sims build their own

family trees by having partners, children, in-laws et cetera. 2 The game provides

many options to customise the playing experience, for instance by the feature

aforementioned to make the Sims look like real-life individuals.

Although having a rather ordinary content, The Sims franchise manages to

spark the imagination of its users in an unprecedented way. Players upload their self-

made Sims, houses and neighbourhoods into the Internet and make them accessible

for other users. Apart from this customer-generated content, another very popular

feature is that of uploading stories conducted in the game – an assembly of in-game

screenshots with short texts that make up a coherent narrative in the end.

However, The Sims being a video game and not a traditional narrative

medium such as literature or motion picture raises the question whether a game can

possess narrative traits when its handling is obviously different to that of traditional

media. In fact, “[t]o be a gamer is to take on a slightly different persona than to be a

reader or a viewer,” as McKenzie Wark notes: they do not follow the rules of

1 During the course of the paper, the terms “video game” and “computer game” will be used synonymously. However, it should nevertheless be noted that video games normally describe games that can be played on other devices than the computer as well, such as consoles or handhelds. 2 In order to pursue an easier readability, this paper only refers to users and players of video games as male individuals. Nevertheless, this refers to female individuals alike.

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grammar, but instead follow the rules of an algorithm, a “finite set of instructions for

accomplishing some task which transforms an initial starting condition into a

recognizable end condition” (ibid.). Thus instead of interpreting narratological

features such as character constellations and stylistic devices, the gamer needs to

interpret the algorithm of a game (ibid.). Also, while a novel or a motion picture

stays the same in its content every time it is read or watched, a game can be different

each time it is played. In the humanities there is an on-going debate whether a

computer game can or cannot be treated in the same way as traditional narrative

media, known as the debate between ludology and narratology. While ludologists

deny video games as stories, narratologists argument in favour for this notion. In

terms of The Sims franchise, however, there are strong indications that this particular

video game can in fact be treated like a narrative beyond the realms of literature.

This paper will therefore draw on the arguments of the debate between

ludology and narratology and summarise the differences and similarities between

video games and traditional media, meaning literature and film. After an explanation

of the algorithm in video games as the equivalent to grammar in literature, the main

distinguishing feature of video games will be analysed: interactivity. This awareness

of conceptional differences of video games to literature and film shall help to apply

the individual traits of video games to narratology. The paper then concludes with an

analysis of The Sims franchise and the narrative traits embedded into the game,

illuminating why it can be seen as a narrative.

2. Narrativity in Computer Games

2.1 To Be or Not To Be: Are Games Stories?

The status of computer games in the humanities is hotly debated when it

comes to their belonging to a particular discipline. As a form of hypertext – a text

“which does not form a single sequence and which may be read in various orders”

(OED) – one could deduce that they can be seen from a narratological point of view.

However, scholars have argued that narrative theory is not sufficient to deal with the

medium, going so far as to try to establish a new discipline within the social sciences

called ‘ludology’ or ‘game studies’ (Simons). The discipline is occupied with the

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study of games in general and video games in particular, thereby negating “the

common assumption that video games should be viewed as extensions of narrative

… [because] they are not held together by a narrative structure (Frasca 222). An

argument in favour of a ludologist perception of computer games is that narratives

are usually fixed stories with no possibility to modify them whereas video games are

different every time they are played (Frasca 227). Also, the fact that they are played,

that a user navigates through them is quite different to traditional narratives such as

novels or films: “The gamer becomes part of a cybernetic loop, engaged with the

game character not just emotionally, but also representationally (the player is figured

in the fictional world) and propriosceptively (the player controls this figure through

physical input)” (Ciccoricco 243). Of course someone reading a book also engages

physically with it by leafing through the pages. The difference, however, is that the

reader is not represented as a character in the story he is reading. Also, characters in

computer games are different from characters in a novel as they are displayed

visually and thus “always already more than a ‘mental construct’ because, like a

character in film, we can see them on screen” (Ciccoricco 244). The ludologist

Marrku Eskelinen names another reason why games cannot be studied

narratologically, as a narrative would involve “the presence of narrators and

narratees” (Eskelinen qtd. in Ryan, Avatars 185) while a computer game does not.

The other side of the trenches of the so-called “ludology vs. narratology”

debate is occupied with narratologists claiming that computer games are “mostly

cribbed from some other media – from novels, films, or television. Games mostly

just recycle, or ‘remediate’ bits of representation from other media” (Wark 129).

Upon the claim that there is no narrator and narratee present in games, they would

answer, “narration occurs when signs are arranged in such a way as to inspire the

mental construction of a story, and it does not necessarily imply a narratorial speech

act” (Ryan, Avatars 185). In order to fulfil the conditions of narrativity, a medium

must “consists of a world (setting) situated in time, populated by individuals

(characters), who participate in actions and happenings (events, plot) and undergo

change” (Ryan, “Beyond”). A fictional world depicted in a computer game that

progresses over the course of time and is inhabited by intelligent avatars would

perfectly fulfil these conditions from a narratologist point of view (Ryan, Avatars

200). Narrativity is thus “not coextensive with literature nor the novel” (Ryan,

“Beyond”). The ludologist assumption of a narrative being a fixed story is invalid

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when taking into account the flexibility of oral storytelling: oral accounts of the same

story are usually never exactly the same. Computer games can also be different every

time they are played, maybe because the player is improving his skills or because

chances are distributed differently upon starting the game. Whatever the case, the

outputs can be as variable as an urban legend told orally for several times.

Forms of hypertext including video games are indisputably different from

traditional media, such as novels or films. They include an ergodic dimension as they

are based on interactivity, meaning that the game reacts when input from the user

occurs and vice versa (ibid.). In Tetris, for instance, the player is confronted with an

infinite series of blocks with different forms falling from the top of the screen. His

task is to bring these blocks in the correct order to fill all the gaps. If he is successful,

the blocks disappear. If he is not, they keep on falling and force him to bring them in

order even further.

However, these differences in the way a story is presented and shown on,

for instance, a computer screen “does not mean that the stories themselves are

radically different from traditional narrative patterns” (ibid.). Video games can very

much carry traits of narrativity “such as individuated characters, concrete setting and

naturalizable goals and actions” (ibid.) with the aim to lure the user into the game-

world. Thus “[n]arrativity performs an instrumental rather than a strictly aesthetic

function” (ibid.). Once the player is involved in the game, the narrative seducing him

to play may vanish into the background (ibid.). An example for a game attempting to

include these components into its hypertext is the adventure game Tomb Raider: Lara

Croft, an attractive and sharp-tongues English aristocrat and professional

archaeologists, goes on several trips around the world to discover long-lost artefacts

to save them from raiders that are only craving the profit the artefacts generate. With

Lara Croft, the game contains an engaging character in the form of an attractive and

witty young woman, a female version of Indiana Jones. Also, it includes a concrete

setting with the game taking place in a cave in the Peruvian Andes. Last it contains

both goals and actions: The action is set off by Lara being requested by a wealthy

businesswoman to go on an expedition to discover an artefact from a tomb located in

the mountains of the Andes. The player’s goal, then, is to discover said artefact. In

conclusion “we can accept that coherent world games aspire to be successful if not in

the same way as a literary work then at least by some of the same means, such as, in

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this case, an emotionally engaging character” (Ciccoricco 243). Only the means for

incorporating them can differ fundamentally from traditional media as they fulfil

more of an instrumental instead of an aesthetic function while traditional media

usually concentrate on the latter.

Narrative traits cannot be found in each and every video game, though.

Considering the example of Tetris again, it is arguably hard to find a narrative

pattern in such kind of game as it “must involve actions whose purpose is not just

winning or losing but fulfilling a concrete goal” (Ryan, Avatars 193). If this

condition is granted, a game inspires to be told to others – and “[t]he greater our urge

to tell stories about games, the stronger the suggestion that we experienced the game

narratively” (ibid.) since every story relies on the ability to be told to someone. It

would be easier for a player to recount his gaming sessions of Tomb Raider in

comparison to the times in which he played Tetris. So another condition for a game

to be considered as narratively designed is that “each of its individual runs produces

images of a world that undergoes change as the result of events” (Ryan, Avatars

189). In Tomb Raider, for instance, the player solves several puzzles that open up

different paths – some of them leading to the final artefacts more or less directly,

while others lead him back to the start of the game. Thus “games may not be stories,

but they can be machines for generating stories” (ibid.).

Although video games are capable of having narrative traits, their

interactive nature sets them apart from traditional forms of narratives, such as

literature. Thus the underlying concepts of these media are fundamentally different.

Nevertheless, video game architecture allows the application of narratological

methods onto them. In the following chapter, the conception of video games will be

explored before an exemplary video game will be thoroughly analysed

narratologically in chapter 3 of this paper.

2.2 Conceptions of Video Games and Interactivity

Although it is sometimes stated that “images and stories that populate

games are mostly cribbed from some other media – from novels, films, or television”

(Wark 129), the debate between ludologists and narratologists shows that

remediation is in fact not “a defining characteristic of the new digital media” (Bolter

and Grusin 45) although often stated otherwise. Video games work differently than

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literature or motion pictures because they underlie a different grammar, namely an

algorithm, and have the very distinct feature of being interactively designed. This

chapter will therefore shortly elaborate on the algorithm as an underlying structure of

video games and then move on to explore different dimensions of interactivity used

in the medium.

Just like literature, video games consist of a grammar structuring the way

they work. However, in this case the terminology is different. Instead of grammar, a

video game is made of an algorithm consisting of four key elements: representation,

responses, rules and randomness (Wolf and Perron 16). Representation means the

graphics, sound and gameplay the game presents (ibid.). Combing back to the

previous examples of Tomb Raider, this would mean that the graphics are three-

dimensional; the sound consists of both non-diegetic elements such as background

music as well as diegetic sounds such as shots fired out of a rifle. The gameplay

would be the user being in charge of controlling and moving Lara Croft through the

virtual world in order to achieve certain goals, such as finding the lost artefact. The

responses of the game describe both actions and interactions (ibid.). In Tomb Raider,

the user lets Lara interact with her surrounding: She pushes buttons to open doors, or

has to swim, jump and climb to overcome obstacles on her way to the lost artefact.

The action lies – to use narratological terms – on the discourse level of the video

game. Tomb Raider starts off with Lara standing in front of a massive cave in the

Peruvian Andes. When she enters the cave, a short video clip shows rocks falling

down from the ceiling, blocking the way back out. In front of her, a group of wolves

shows up. With no possibility to escape, the user has to interact against the action

and lets Lara fight the wolves. The next element, the rules of the game, consists of

“limitations imposed upon and determining the game’s activities and representations,

which regulate responses and gameplay” (ibid.). Lara not fighting the wolves, for

instance, would result in her being killed – game over. Due to the rules imposed on

the game, she is designed to be a virtual representation of a human being and thus is

vulnerable and mortal. The last element of the algorithm is randomness, meaning

unpredictable elements keeping the game from being the same each time it is played

(ibid.). As stated above, Tomb Raider contains a lot of puzzles the user has to solve.

Some of them can only be solved one way, while various combinations can solve

others. This latter kind of puzzle, however, brings with it various paths for the game

to progress: Depending on the kind of variation the user used to solve the puzzle, the

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subsequent ways to the artefact are either longer and harder, or he finds a shortcut if

he is lucky, or Lara dies if he is unfortunate.

These four elements of the algorithm have one thing in common: they

mandate choice from the player. “Every interactive application must give its user a

reasonable amount of choice. No choice, no interactivity” (Crawford qtd. in Ryan,

Avatars 99). Interactivity is the kernel of the differences between video games and

traditional narratives such as literature or films. It describes “the computer’s ability

to take in voluntary, or involuntary user input and to adjust its behavior accordingly”

(Ryan, Avatars 98). The relationship between the player and the video game is thus

reciprocal and open to change, with both parties able to change their conduct as a

result of a feedback loop, whereas the story of a novel would stay the same, whether

it is read on a beach, at home or at work. Nevertheless, an interactive narrative still

“involves the same building blocks as the traditional brand: time, space, characters,

and events. But these elements will acquire new features and display new behaviors

in interactive environments” (Ryan, Avatars 100).

Interactivity can vary both in intensity and in narrative potential. Marie-

Laure Ryan has developed the concept of the “Interactive Onion” to visualise the

different levels of interactivity: The skin of the onion consists of the so-called

peripheral level, namely the interactive interface (Ryan, “Interactive” 37). This

simply means that a game is designed to be interactive.

The second level is interactivity affecting the narrative, meaning that

although the game is predetermined in its (various) options due to a fixed algorithm,

the interactive nature allows a highly variable representation of the game (Ryan,

“Interactive” 40). Narratologically speaking, the interactivity operates on the level of

narrative discourse and not on story level (ibid.).

The next higher degree of interactivity is the level of creating, meaning the

user being a member of the story world (Ryan, “Interactive” 44). Nevertheless, “the

system remains in firm control of the narrative trajectory”(Ryan, “Interactive” 44).

This would apply if for instance in Tomb Raider, puzzles could only be solved by

one possible combination, giving the user no choice to pursue a different path.

The fourth level of interactivity is real-time story generation. In contrast to

the level of creating, “stories are not predetermined but rather generated” (Ryan,

“Interactive” 48). This means that every run of the game should result in a different

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story (ibid.). The way these stories are created can be twofold: top-down reflecting

the perspective of the author, or bottom-down, reflecting the perspective of the

characters (Ryan, “Interactive” 49). In contrast to lower degrees of interactivity, the

real-time story generation consists of a much larger number of rules: a set of

prerequisites that specify the condition of the game world; rules for the action that

happens in the story world; and the consequences following the actions that inflict

change upon the story world and its characters (Ryan, “Interactive” 50). For these

rules to be applied, the story must follow a chronological order and thus “reflect the

temporal experience of the characters. It would be, in a full sense, a forward-looking

simulation of life” (ibid.). Games of these forms contain a cognitive structure, very

much like a plot diagram also valid for interactive narratives “or to be more precise,

for the output of each of the individual runs of their underlying program” (Ryan,

Avatars 102). In chapter 3 of this paper, the computer games The Sims will be used

as an example of this level of interactivity, which is why there will be no further

explanation of the concept right here.

Meta-interactivity is the highest level of interactivity that can be achieved.

On this level, the player is not only consuming the game from an outward

perspective, but is also acting as a designer of the game itself by making changes to

the game world (Ryan, “Interactive” 59). Tomb Raider, for instance, comes with an

application in which the user can design his own levels, thus immersing himself “in a

story world and writ[ing] the code that brings this world to life” (ibid.).

The top-down or bottom-up conception on the level of interactive real-time

story generation marks a difference between two dichotomies marking a difference

in the way interactivity is executed: internally or externally and exploratory or

ontologically (Ryan, Avatars 108). Internal interactivity positions the user into the

story world as a vital member of it by means of an avatar (ibid.). In a game using the

external mode of interactivity, the user is placed outside the virtual world and

functions as a god (ibid.). The latter corresponds to a top-down algorithm while the

first is equivalent to a bottom-up design. Exploratory interactivity refers to the user

solely navigating through the game with no impact on the storyline’s progress (ibid.).

An ontological design, however, leaves it up to the user to decide which forking path

to take in the virtual world; determining which possible worlds develops has direct

influence on the story that unfolds with it (ibid.). These variations position the

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narrative components of a video game – time, space, characters and events –

differently, for instance with the user being able to be either member a character of

the virtual world or its god looking at it from the outside, like an author. The

distinction will be further elaborated in chapter 3 with an analysis of The Sims within

these dichotomies.

A last distinguishing factor is the sort of game in terms of genre in a broader

sense: ludus or paidia. On the one hand, ludus stands for a rule-based game with a

variable outcome that results either in winning or losing; the player invests efforts to

influence this outcome for his purposes, as they value winning more than losing

(Ryan, Avatars 198). Paidia on the other hand stands for a free play without

computable outcome, representing all games that are played “for the sake of an

imaginative experience” (ibid.). The paidia sort of game is full of mini-narratives that

do not necessarily have something to do with the underlying aim of the game. Its

users are more interested in “the legends that explain landscape features, the gossips

of nonplaying characters about people and places, the knowledge of the natives that

will lead them into new territories” (Ryan, Avatars 199). The Sims is a prime

example of such a game, as the following chapter is going to show.

What is the connection between narrativity and interactivity, then? In fact,

interactivity requires “a system of choices involv[ing] a nonlinear or multilinear

branching structure” (Ryan, Avatars 99) while narrativity “presupposes the linearity

and unidirectionality of time, logic, and causality … Narrative meaning, moreover, is

the product of the top-down planning of a storyteller or designer, while interactivity

requires a bottom-up input from the user” (ibid.). The following chapter will analyse

the computer game The Sims in depth to show that narrativity and interactivity do not

exclude themselves and that an interactive medium such as this computer game can

absolutely bear traits of narrativity.

3. Narrativity in The Sims Franchise

Little did Maxis’ chief creator Will Wright suspect when the company

issued the computer game The Sims. Today it has become one of the best-selling

computer game franchises in the history of the medium, having sold more than 175

million copies globally (Sapieha). The franchise has produced four major The Sims

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games until today and many more add-ons providing supplementary material for

playing. But what kind of game is The Sims and why is it interesting to analyse it

from a narratological point of view? This question is going to be answered in the

upcoming chapters.

3.1 Narrative Traits in the Game

The Sims is a life simulation game in the best sense of the term: The player

is thrown into a virtual suburb, inhabited by the Sims. He creates characters, builds

houses for them and guides them through life by fulfilling their needs, finding a job,

building up skills and finding friends. The Sims can build a family tree and can thus

not only have partners, but also have children, become grandparents, siblings,

cousins and even pet owners. Thematically, the game is “patterned after TV soap

operas [and] played on a PC, and it is designed for lengthy playing sessions that

create never-ending stories” (Ryan, “Interactive” 55). All this forms the

representation of the game. The responses the game computes become clear once

interactivity from the player becomes involved: “The principal mode of interaction is

the selection of items from a menu” (ibid.), meaning that if the player clicks on an

item such as a computer in the Sims’ house, he can choose from letting the Sim

search a job, browsing the Internet, or playing an older version of The Sims –

bringing a sense of intertextuality into the game. On the level of responses, the

algorithm of the game thus “operates from a strictly bottom-along perspective. When

the user selects an action, the system computes its consequences and updates the

current state of the game world, opening up a new set of possible actions.” (ibid.).

When it comes to the rules of The Sims, it is important to note that simulations tend

to behave differently than other games: They can accept the rules, but also

manipulate, reject and contest them (Frasca 229). In contrast to Tomb Raider, for

instance, the Sims can drown in a swimming pool if the player does not order them

out quickly enough, but other Sims can nevertheless bargain with the Grim Reaper

that shows up to take the Sim with him – and fight death if the pay is high enough.

The element of randomness is thrown into The Sims in various ways, for instance

while stargazing: The Sims can lie outside and stargaze with their bare eyes.

However, there is a five per cent chance they get hit by a satellite and die. Also, they

can choose to stargaze through a telescope with a twenty per cent chance to be

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kidnapped by aliens, which has serious consequences for male Sims, as they return

pregnant with a green-skinned alien baby.

So “[u]nlike what would happen in storytelling, the sequence of events in a

simulation is never fixed. You can play it dozens of times and things would be

different” (Frasca 227). This is what makes these games both external and

ontological when it comes to the execution of interactivity: the user plays god in a

virtual world,

[h]olding the strings of the entities that populate this world, and sometimes selecting these entities … [the gamer] specifies their properties, makes decisions for them, throws obstacles in their way, alters the environment, launches transforming processes, and creates events that affect the global evolution of the virtual world. (Ryan, Avatars 113-14)

In other words, the Sims’ destiny lies in the hand of the user with two theological

options: he can either turn on the ‘free will’ mode, leading to the Sims leading their

own lives with the player just watching; or he can turn the ‘free will’ off and order

the Sims around (Wark 131). This brings the top-down perspective into the game,

which can exist parallel to the bottom-along mode: The player is a god, the lives of

the Sims lie in his hands and he has the power to order them around, with the result

to either make them happy or have them gesturing wildly at him, “as if cursing his

God” (ibid.). Evolution is an important key word when it comes to the game design

of The Sims: the game takes place in time, thus the gamer must learn to act within

this time span (Ryan, Avatars 115). There is a clock running in The Sims, but much

faster than the clock in real life. Here we can find a first parallel between narratology

and the game: “The difference between these two times parallels the standard

narratological distinction between ‘time of the narrated’ and ‘time of the narration’”

(ibid.).

Fig. 1: Need bars in The Sims 2.

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Playing any version of The Sims, it should be the player’s top priority to

fulfil their basic needs in order for the Sims to survive. These needs consist of eight

bars that need to be filled constantly, as can be seen in figure 1. By simply fulfilling

these needs, there is no obvious discourse to be found in the game, as it would only

consist of very basic operations such as sending the Sims to bed to fulfil their need

for energy. However, when constructing a Sim, the player cannot only choose

gender, age, hairstyle and colour and clothes, but also a number of internal variables

that “determine potential … to a genetic view of intrinsic nature” (Wark 132): From

the second part of franchise on, the Sims can have memories, wishes, fears and

individual life goals called aspirations that influence the development of each

individual Sim, for instance by prolonging his life with the number of positive

memories the Sim gains. They can even have a star sign that decides for instance

whether they are outgoing or introvert, neat or untidy. These individual traits of each

Sim “spice up the biographies of their characters with stories of love, hate, betrayal

and jealousy – the proper stuff of soap operas” (Ryan, “Interactive” 57). For

instance, an introvert Sim would require much less social interaction than an

interactive one and a Sim with a romantic aspiration would be frightened of marriage

in order not to sacrifice the possibility of numerous romantic adventures he craves.

Here, another parallel to narratology can be found concerning the concept of

characters. Roland Barthes describes a character “as a code of traits, which may or

may not be stated explicitly in a text, that provide the material by which the reader

constructs a characterization” (Barthes qtd. in Ciccoricco 241). In The Sims, the

characters, or Sims, are constructed with the same pattern: The player sets a code of

traits for them, such as life goals and a star sign, with an agenda in mind: does he

want a Sim that is craving for romantic adventures in his life? Or a more family-

oriented one? Depending on the chosen aspiration, the Sims differ in their wishes and

fears as well as in their respective life goals. This “definition of characters’ roles

corresponds to the authoring part of interactive storytelling. The story genre

prescribes the relations between the actors” (Charles et al. 105). The player takes the

role of a narrator when gathering the personality traits of the Sims and they perform

the role that was assigned to them (Charles et al. 104). Shawn Thomson even goes as

far as to compare it to a ‘proper’ narrative, namely F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great

Gatsby: “The flappers, performers, and merrymakers of Gatsby’s party seemingly

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come out of a character generator similar to that at work in The Sims. They are given

short bios and quirky personalities” (6).

The generic notion of soap opera comes into play when bringing various

individual Sims together as “[t]he basis for story generation rests with the interaction

between the various characters’ plans” (Charles et al. 108): Sims can meet one

another in various places, be it their individual houses or communal areas in the

suburb they live in, such as parks, restaurants or museums. Also they have a basic

need for social interaction and if they follow aspirations such as romance or building

up a family, they inevitably wish to meet and engage with others. Thus they

necessarily use the same resources, “whether these are objects of narrative

significance or other actors. In other words, the basis for their interaction at plan

level consists in them competing for resources of action” (ibid.). In consequence,

soap opera-ish operations such as relationships with more than one person, betrayal

and envy are not unknown to the characters within The Sims franchise. The game

fulfilling strong generic conventions adds up to its narrative properties.

Fig. 2: Different neighbourhoods in The Sims 2.

The gamer not only has an authoring power over the characters inhabiting

The Sims, but also on the setting of the game. The Sims brings with it a strongly

meta-interactive option, namely that of manipulating the story world. Apart from

playing the Sims through their lives, the player has the option to either choose a

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neighbourhood to play in or build his own from scratch, ranging from a macrocosmic

level at which he designs the neighbourhood, choosing whether he prefers a lush

forest or a desert with a UFO crash site, to the microcosmic level where he builds

and furnishes houses for the Sims to live in as well as parks, museums and other

communal areas. This way, the players “immerse themselves in a storyworld [sic]

and write the code that brings this world to life” (Ryan, “Interactivity” 59). For

Thomson, the player concerning himself with building and decorating parallels The

Great Gatsby once more as Gatsby’s home, West Egg, “offers all his dreams in one

immense down payment. He becomes totally invested in his home, his furnishings,

his car, and his clothes” (1). In fact, the meta-interactive level of The Sims with its

house-building module does bear a trait of The Great Gatsby as the more expensive

the furniture is, the more effectively it fulfils the Sims’ needs: a valuable bed takes

up only half the time of a regular one to fill the bar for energy. Also it displays the

Sims’ wealth, thus “creat[ing] a personal identity through commodities that fill and

decorate the house” (Thomson 2). These manifold possibilities to engage with the

game not only on the level of leading the Sims through their lives makes the game

“not [necessarily] follow a scripted narrative path, but [the possibilities] do present a

global design that gives a general purpose to the actions of the user” (Ryan, Avatars

114): he can either choose whether he wants his Sims to be successful in their lives

by fulfilling as much of their wishes as possible and by providing for them, or he can

choose to totally mislead them, depending on the story he wants to tell in the game.

Although there is no fixed goal in The Sims franchise in contrast to

teleologically constructed narratives, there is one particular feature that nevertheless

has a very strong narrative trait in it: the story-module. From the first part of The

Sims franchise on, it is possible to take screenshots of the game world and furnish

them with texts thanks to the story-module in the game. Originally intended simply

to allow “players to take snapshots of particular moments in their [Sims’] lives”

(Frasca, “The Sims”), the module evolved into a “feature to craft stories starring [the

players’] Sims. Suddenly, the family album became a comic book” (ibid.). With the

development from The Sims to The Sims 2, further options were added to the module

in correspondence to this evolution. For instance, the player can now alter the

sequence of his screenshots according to his likes, whereas in The Sims he has to

15

stick to a fixed sequence of events – or, in narratological terms, to a story instead of a

plot.

Fig. 3: Story-modules in The Sims and The Sims 2.

The Sims 2 story module offers the player the possibility to build leaps in time into

his story as well as such strategies as flashbacks or flash-forwards. With The Sims 3

comes the possibility for players to upload their stories into an online community

where they can share their stories with a proper readership. While the narrative

elements of The Sims franchise aforementioned are more or less scattered without

having a larger narrative frame, the story-module is a strong and thoroughly

narratological element in the game that adds one possible goal to playing The Sims:

namely that of telling a story, being an author.

As the player of The Sims leads his Sims through life with various goals to

choose from, the mechanics of storytelling and gaming are “integrated,

interdependent, and ultimately inseparable when it comes to understanding how and

why we play them” (Ciccoricco 233): The game is played both for the sake of

creating and telling the story of the Sims’ lives and in order to cope with every

random event that comes with it along the way. In contrast to narratives, it may not

be built teleologically. However, “in life as in stories, people must learn to deal with

the accidents of fate, and this is why The Sims is both a believable simulation of life

and a powerful story-generating system” (Ryan, “Interactive” 56). The developers of

The Sims franchise are fully aware of its narrative potential and actively use it by

including small narratives into the franchise. The next chapter takes a closer look at

these narratives and their relation to traditional media in narratology, mainly

literature.

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3.2 The Crumplebottom Legacy: Mini-Narratives in The Sims

The Sims franchise is a prime example for a game in the style of paidia: In

chapter 2.2 of this paper, the distinction between games following the rules of either

ludus or paidia was established, with ludus games being about winning or losing in

the end and paidia games as a form of free play without a particular outcome. The

aim of this latter form of gaming is to play in order to come into contact with a

creative experience (Ryan, Avatars 199). Another feature of paidia games is that they

contain mini-narratives that do not necessarily correspond to the overall aim of the

respective game (ibid.). With its possibilities to design both the setting and the

characters of the game and playing the life of the individual characters, The Sims

franchise belongs to the category of paidia games. Also, the franchise contains a

series of mini-narratives that are typical for this sort of game.

One of these mini-narratives is the incorporation of aliens into the game: In

all four parts of The Sims franchise, the Sims can be abducted by aliens while

stargazing through a telescope in the night. The abductions occur randomly and can

affect any adult Sim. While in the first part of the franchise the Sims are merely

abducted and brought back to their house, the narrative is much more elaborate in the

second part of the franchise with serious consequences if a male Sim is abducted: he

returns pregnant with a green-skinned alien baby. Also the player has the possibility

to set his game in a pre-determined neighbourhood called ‘Strangetown’. It is

described as follows: “Truth-seekers move to Strangetown hoping to discover the

secrets the town holds. Do aliens live among us? Do missing Sims mysteriously

appear here? In this town nothing is what it seems” (Maxis, The Sims 2). The

neighbourhood is located in a desert with a UFO crash site and an alien family living

nearby, probably drawing on the urban myth that surrounds the city of Roswell in the

US state New Mexico, where there has allegedly been an incident with a crashing

UFO, resulting in the city being a famous pilgrimage site for fans of extra-terrestrial

creatures and phenomena. The Sims 3 takes the alien mini-narrative further by

equipping the aliens with special skills, such as the ‘mental scan’, which allows alien

Sims to read the thoughts and personality traits of any Sim.

Another pre-made neighbourhood containing a mini-narrative uses explicit

intertextual references to literature: in The Sims 2, the user can choose to play in the

neighbourhood of Veronaville. The name already rings a bell with its reference to the

17

Italian city of Verona, which is the setting for William Shakespeare’s drama Romeo

and Juliet. A river divides the neighbourhood with one bank being built with villas

with a Mediterranean architecture, while the other bank is stocked with Tudor-style

houses very similar to those in Shakespeare’s hometown, Stratford-upon-Avon in the

United Kingdom. A river divides both Stratford-upon-Avon and Verona. In fact, The

Sims 2 draws on Romeo and Juliet with pre-made characters inhabiting Veronaville:

the families Monty and Capp, alluding to Shakespeare’s fictitious feuding families

Montague and Capulet. The description of the neighbourhood reads that “[t]he Capps

and Montys have been feuding for years, but that hasn’t stopped the younger

generation from crossing boundaries and falling in love. Will their actions lead to

ruin or bring the families together?” (Maxis, The Sims 2). The two teenage Sims

Juliette Capp and Romeo Monty are in a relationship with each other, while their

parents and siblings hate the respective characters from the other family, thus clearly

alluding to the families Montague and Capulet in Romeo and Juliet not only in terms

of nomenclature, but also by character constellations. The third family living in

Veronaville is called Summerdream – yet another intertextual reference to

Shakespeare and his comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The Monty family are one of many who have recurring appearances in The

Sims franchise. They appear again in The Sims 3-neighbourhood Monte Vista, clearly

designed after the city of Verona with a medieval city centre around a typically

Italian piazza. The family is described as “happy, successful, loved” with “no way

they could one day meet another family who would become their ultimate rivals”

(Maxis, The Sims 3), alluding to the families meeting in Veronaville in The Sims 2.

However, the Montys and Capps have not been part of The Sims franchise before the

second part of the series. There are two other families that have made regular

appearances in every part of the game, though: the Goth family and the

Crumplebottom family.

The Goth family is probably the most elaborate mini-narrative in the

franchise, with the family appearing in every part of the game. The family consists of

the married couple Mortimer and Bella (née Bachelor) and their daughter Cassandra.

Mortimer and Bella are befriended children in The Sims 3’s main neighbourhood

Sunset Valley, which is located 25 years earlier in time than The Sims and 50 years

earlier than The Sims 2. The leaps in time between the games show the development

18

of Mortimer’s and Bella’s relationship, with them being married in The Sims and

having a daughter called Cassandra. In The Sims 2, the situation dramatically

changes: Bella has been abducted by aliens and has not returned since. Mortimer,

now an old man, lives with the grown-up Cassandra and his and Bella’s younger son

Alexander, still grieving over the loss of his beloved wife, as the family description

reads: “[C]an Mortimer bounce back after the disappearance of his wife Bella?”

(Maxis, The Sims 2). When playing in Strangetown, the user will discover that Bella

now lives there after having been abducted by aliens. This links the narrative

evolving around the Goth family with the urban myth that is referred to in

Strangetown. Other parts of the Goth family are also a part of The Sims franchise,

with Mortimer’s parents being playable characters in both The Sims and The Sims 3.

The family has an impressively large family tree with characters relevant for the

fictitious history of The Sims 2’s neighbourhood Pleasantview, where Mortimer still

lives: there are books in the communal library indicating that the Goth family have

founded the neighbourhood.

There is another family with recurring characters in The Sims franchise that

can be seen on Mortimer’s family tree: the Crumplebottom family. Players of The

Sims and The Sims 2 know the non-playable character called ‘Mrs Crumplebottom’

(as can be seen in figure 4) from visiting communal areas with their Sims. Mrs

Crumplebottom stalks around the place and hits every Sim executing romantic

actions such as flirting or kissing with her purse – apparently because she does not

tolerate such amoral behaviour. She is constructed in the manner of being a typical

bourgeois. The German term, ‘Spießer’, derives from the term ‘Spießbürger’ and

describes a type of citizen in the Middle Ages that had to carry out their military

service on foot and thus carried with them weapons such as sticks and spikes – hence

the name, as the German translation for spike is ‘Spieß’ (Kajetzke 366). Mrs

Crumplebottom does not carry a spike with her, but she uses her purse in quite the

same manner, namely to fight. Another characteristic feature of the bourgeois is that

he does not approve of individuals with a different way of thinking or living as him

and likes to make that known in a very noisy and sometimes haughty manner

(Kajetzke 377), which goes in line with Mrs Crumplebottom noisily fighting lovers

in communal areas where everyone else who is present can watch her. Pop-up

windows showing what she has to say accompany this: “Disgusting! NEVER have I

19

witnessed such a tasteless flouting of proper manners in all my days! As the young

folks say, get a room!” (Maxis, The Sims; Maxis, The Sims 2).

Fig. 4: A Sim being attacked by Mrs Crumplebottom in The Sims 2.

In the Romantic epoch, the bourgeoisie was said not to be able to reach true

grandeur, as they were not able to feel deep and honest emotions (Kajetzke 367). A

closer look at Mrs Crumplebottom’s appearance in The Sims 3 might give a proof of

why she so strongly disapproves of other Sims being in love, especially with regard

to The Sims 3 playing 25 and 50 years earlier than the first and second part of the

franchise: in Sunset Valley, the main neighbourhood in The Sims 3, the player can

choose to play the Crumplebottom household, which only consists of one character,

the young female Sim Agnes Crumplebottom: Agnes Crumplebottom hadn’t even changed her last name to her husband’s when an unfortunate accident on her honeymoon ended the marriage. Between her growing bitterness and her husband’s ghost scaring away gentleman callers, only the bravest Sim would ever try to win her heart and fortune now. (Maxis, The Sims 3)

Agnes’ wardrobe only consists of black clothing, probably as a sign of her mourning

her late husband. In her house, an only half-furnished room can be found with

children’s toys and a cradle in it, indicating that Agnes and her deceased husband

had tried for a baby. A probable consequence of her grief would be her turning into

the dreaded Mrs Crumplebottom in the first and second part of The Sims franchise.

What all these mini-narratives have in common is that they show one

possible way the game is played – for instance, the player can try to resolve the feud

between the Montys and the Capps in Veronaville in order to make Juliette and

Romeo happy, or he could let the teenagers run off with each other. Agnes

20

Crumplebottom’s biographical description reads that “only the bravest Sim would try

to win her heart” (Maxis, The Sims 3), leaving it up to the player to decide whether

there is such a brave Sim to win over her heart. However, as the individual parts of

The Sims franchise have no interrelations with one another, a change in a mini-

narrative that is executed by the player would have no consequences on other parts of

the same mini-narrative in other parts of The Sims franchise. Nevertheless they do

add little narratives to the game that can be read and interpreted as stories of their

own.

4. Conclusion

This paper’s aim was to show that computer games and especially The Sims

franchise could be possible forms of narration without being literature. In order to

prove this point, the debate between ludology and narratology in the humanities was

briefly introduced: Ludologists believe that games can never be stories and are just

games, while narratologists insist on narration as an underlying principle of games.

What can safely be established is that video games are different from the traditional

narrative media of literature and film because they are ergodic in nature, i.e.

interactive as they react to the user’s input. Nevertheless, they are perfectly capable

of containing narrative traits such as engaging characters, a setting, a goal and

actions bringing the characters towards it. However, these narrative traits are used

differently as they are less aesthetic than instrumental to lure the player into the

game. Also they cannot be established for every kind of game – a rather simple

design as in Tetris offers less capacity for narrative traits than a role-playing action

game such as Tomb Raider.

Video games are also different from traditional narratives because of their

interactive nature, which is far more elaborate than in traditional narrative media.

They also follow a certain grammar, namely an algorithm that mandates choice from

the user in order to react accordingly. The logical consequence of interactivity can

vary in intensity, but is always there up to the level in which players can alter the

game world. A reader, on the other hand, can never alter stories in novels, but only

his perspective on them. The level of interactivity depends on the game’s generic

design with it being either a ludus or a paidia game. The first term refers to a game

21

that is either won or lost, with the player investing efforts to win. The latter term,

paidia, describes a game that has an open outcome and is designed to be explored.

The Sims franchise belongs to the latter genre, as it is a life-simulation with

no fixed goal. Instead, it is up to the player to decide which goal he wants to pursue.

The game possesses a number of narrative traits. It contains unique characters in a

suburban setting. A virtual clock is ticking, similar to the time of the narration and

the narrated time. The game’s goal is defined either by the Sims’ respective

characters – they can possess life goals and aspirations – or by the player’s choice.

Whatever the case, the game follows the generic convention of a soap opera which is

given because the Sims engage with one another and form proper character

constellations, just like in traditional narratives. Last, the game contains a story

module that actively promotes storytelling while playing The Sims franchise.

The developers actively use the narrative potential of the game by including

mini-narratives into it. These mini-narratives draw on urban myths such as a UFO

crash site in the New Mexican desert as well as on intertextual references, such as

neighbourhoods with characters in a constellation similar to Shakespeare’s Romeo

and Juliet. There are also a number of recurring characters that embed The Sims

franchise into a narrative frame and place the respective games in the franchise in a

timeline. The Sims 3 is located prior to The Sims and The Sims 2, as the player learns

when he pursues the development of Mortimer Goth and Bella Bachelor: they are

befriended children in The Sims 3, then a grown-up married couple with a young

daughter in The Sims. Last Bella has disappeared and Mortimer has grown an old

man with an adult daughter in The Sims 2.

The recurring characters also allow to be interpreted in the manner of a

traditional narrative. The recurring character Mrs Crumplebottom, for instance, is an

elder lady in The Sims and The Sims 2 who is a proper bourgeois, smacking romantic

couples with her purse to prevent them from amoral behaviour in public. A young

woman with the same surname, Agnes Crumplebottom, inhabits the world of The

Sims 3. She is a recent widow and taking this into account as well as the fact that The

Sims 3 is set earlier than the other parts of the franchise, one can easily conclude that

Agnes Crumplebottom and the ominous Mrs Crumplebottom are the same person, as

a result of Agnes grieving over the loss of her husband.

22

The Sims franchise still allows for more research than only its narratological

properties: as the game can be altered heavily by user-generated content, it would be

an interesting take to analyse the motifs of players uploading their self-made houses,

characters or furniture. As players can upload their self-made stories from the game

into online communities, another possible research project could investigate the

interaction and interactivity in these online communities with regard to the game.

There has already been research about spin-offs of traditional narratives, called fan

fictions (for further reference, see for example Bronwen or Page3). Another

possibility would a sociological analysis of The Sims franchise as a “parody of

everyday life in ‘consumer society’” (Wark 127).

In summary it can be said that “the abstract cognitive structure we call

narrative is such that it can be called to mind by many different media, but each

medium has different expressive resources, and will therefore produce different

concrete manifestations of this abstract structure” (Ryan, “Beyond”). A computer

game can be as much of a narrative as a novel or a film. Games can even help to

promote reading and the engagement with storytelling: in a study among school

children from fifth to ninth grade playing a computer game involving reading as a

necessity to fulfil a level successfully the authors found “that students with no more

than average interest in reading will spend a great amount of time engaged in

interactive fiction that requires quite a lot of reading if they are successful at the

quest” (Lancy and Hayes 45). Thus computer games cannot only be narratives

themselves – due to their interactive nature they can even encourage their users to

more independent reading (ibid.).

3 Bronwen, Thomas. “‘Update Soon!’ Harry Potter Fanfiction and Narrative as a Participatory Process.” New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age. Ed. Ruth E. Page and Thomas Bronwen. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011. 205-19. Print.

Page, Ruth. “Interactivity and Interaction: Text and Talk in Online Communities.” Intermediality and Storytelling. Ed. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. 208-31. Print.

23

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