In the video game world of “The Sims 3,” the economy doesn’t hurt so much. Sure, the virtual person you create and anoint with five character traits to get through life can lose his job, home and girlfriend, but you can always create another and find a new destiny.
That kind of control of the uncontrollable makes the $50 game one of the year’s most eagerly anticipated — especially among the hard-to-reach female gamers — as it lands in stores Tuesday for PC, Mac and iPhone.
The latest edition of the game “looks really cool,” said 12-year-old Madison Stratton of suburban San Diego, who says her parents let her work and play on the computer 15 hours a week. “You can make the people look however you want them to, have any goals, and the people are way more detailed in how they look. They can be tall, skinny, short, have glasses or whatever.”
That’s among the differences in this installment of the series, which made its debut in 2000 and has become one of the best-selling PC games ever, along the way duplicating even the tedium of life.
In discussing the best-selling game, “It is clear that even the most mundane forms of labor can be made to seem fun,” writes Valparaiso University professor Michael Longan in Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, as he discussed geography in video games.
“It’s a simulation of everyday life itself,” said Scott Steinberg, publisher of digitaltrends.com. “Who could resist the chance to reshape the world in their own image? The game is, quite literally, whatever you choose to make of it.”
While total control would be boringly predictable, “The Sims” manages to leave in the element of surprise, said Elizabeth Parmeter, editor in chief of gamingangels.com.
“‘The Sims’ has always appealed to me not necessarily because of the gameplay itself,” she said, “but because it never takes itself too seriously. I mean, there’s robots and aliens and ghosts and vampires, and the managing of a Sims life can really be secondary to the overall creativity a player can unleash in the game.”
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egwinn@tribune.com
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