What It’s Like to Be Virtually Homeless
It’s perhaps the saddest experiment in social gaming I’ve ever seen. One intrepid Sims 3 player has started a blog called “Alice and Kev: The Story of being homeless in The Sims 3.” It chronicles the misadventures of a father and daughter with almost no cash and no roof over their heads.
The blog is a running stream of their life, with different episodes every few days complete with screenshots. I went through them all so far, and so far it’s been incredibly depressing and surprisingly eye-opening for a story about people who don’t exist.
Kev has traits of being both “inappropriate” and “insane” which causes him to do things like approach strangers in his underwear, and constantly hurl insults at his poor daughter. So far, the only meaningful conversation he’s had with anyone has been a ghost in a graveyard. And she disappeared when the sun came up.
Alice on the other hand had “good” and “clumsy” traits. She’s constantly depressed from being verbally abused by her father, and she’s constantly exhausted from having to sleep on a park bench every night. She’s made friends here and there who have let her stay in their house, but since she’s so clumsy, she usually ends up breaking something and they kick her out.
I highly recommend going to the site to check out the complete saga for yourself, it’s an incredibly interesting exercise, if not thoroughly depressing.
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[...] The sad story of being homeless in The Sims 3 – [Double Kill] [...]
Paul,
This is intriguing. What an interesting idea–to have people identify with the less fortunate, instead of striving to be rich/famous/real housewives/whatever. It really reinforces the idea of insanity at the root of so many of these situations.
Some questions: What happened to Mom? Does the school not notice what’s going on?
Even more provocative than the story line are the comments, very few of which seem to take this seriously, or make it a matter of concern.
What do you make of all this?
I’ll assume that mom died in childbirth. Park benches can’t be very sterile.
I’m guessing the average commenter on the site doesn’t exactly grasp the larger social implications of an experiment like this. Everyone’s not as classy as True/Slant patrons out there on the internet.
Fascinating. This just got added to my list of reads, and of recommendations. I wonder if similar experiments could be done. Life as an illegal immigrant, ex-criminal, etc. I know some of the people this experiment is based upon, and it sounds like it is fairly accurate.