The Sims 2 and C. S. Lewis on Friendship

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960)

 

Days out with Friends = Best Times Ever.

Wouldn’t it be convenient to be a Sim sometimes?¹

Imagine being able to change outfits merely by twirling oneself around three hundred and sixty degrees; or to buy or sell any household object within the space of an instant; or to come away from a few minutes looking at oneself in the mirror sporting whichever hairstyle one chose, regardless of the length, colour, or other characteristics of one’s previous style.² Imagine being able to enter into any career path one desired merely by taking a look at a newspaper or browsing the Internet. Imagine being able to buy a property of one’s own after only a small chunk of one’s adult life spent earning and saving – oh wait, that one’s not supposed to be unrealistic, is it? Sorry, fellow millennials…

But in any case, my point is that when the creators of the Sims built this little virtual world, when they devised and arranged its structures and functions and possibilities, they had to decide how to render all these elements of the human experience in simplified, gameplay-friendly ways. On the Sims 2, a full Sim lifetime lasts about seventy days of Sim time; spending time playing a musical instrument builds a Sim’s skill in painting at the same rate; only electrical or plumbed household objects can break, and they are always repairable. There are only a certain number of variables to be exploited. Dig down to the core of the Sim world and it’s nothing but zeros and ones: everything ultimately has to be definitive and quantifiable. And one of those things is interpersonal (inter-Sim-al?) relationships.

The system on the Sims 2 works in terms of scales numbered from -100 on the left to 100 on the right. When two Sims first meet, each considers the other as a neutral acquaintance, sitting at zero in the middle of the scale. Friendly interactions between the two will increase that number, unfriendly ones reduce it. It’s possible for the relationship to be an imbalanced one: one Sim may like another as far as, say, seventy, while the latter only likes the former as far as, say, forty – but imbalanced relationships are quite difficult to build because most interactions have a mutually similar effect on both parties involved. What makes the system particularly interesting to my mind, however, is that for each acquaintance a Sim has, there is displayed not one scale but two. The top one is called the ‘daily’ relationship bar, the lower the ‘lifetime’ one.

Two Sims become ‘friends’ – a state of affairs represented by a single, pale blue smiley face – when each likes the other as far as fifty on the top, ‘daily’ bar. This is a pretty easy thing to achieve: it takes only a few hours of a Sim day to stack up enough positive interactions to get there. (Worth mentioning here is that an hour of Sim time is a minute of real time, but, given the length of a Sim lifetime, equates to about half a month of a human lifetime.) The number then slowly decreases over time, and so the relationship has to be regularly maintained by further friendly interactions in order to keep the blue smiley face in place. But that said, Sims hardly notice when they gain or lose a friend (except for the fact that if either Sim is getting close to dipping below fifty, the other party tends to start making passive-aggressive comments in the top right-hand corner of the screen³).

What goes on in the ‘lifetime’ bar is a somewhat different affair. Here a mutual fifty makes two Sims ‘best friends’, represented by a pair of bright green smiley faces, and requires a lot more time. A few Sim hours’ worth of friendly interaction might push the scale one or two points to the right, but it will take many days – the equivalent of as many years of a human lifetime – to reach the requisite fifty. When a Sim makes a best friend, the event is deemed worthy of record in his or her list of memories; the same is true if that Sim ever, by repeated negative interaction or neglect of the relationship, ceases to be a best friend. The single blue smiley face is ephemeral; double green smiley faces mean a lot more.

 

So the selected Sim is both friends and best friends with (and, incidentally, married to) the Sim in the picture. Thanks to Sims2Guy at strategywiki.org.

It’s a system I like, because it seems to me to be a reasonably good gameplay-friendly rendering of real human friendship in that it distinguishes between caring for someone on a ‘daily’ level and caring for him or her on a ‘lifetime’ level. Admittedly, the fact that the amount of time invested in the relationship is the key distinction between the one and the other doesn’t match up entirely with real life: much as that’s a factor, I tend to feel that the kind of interaction, rather than the length of it, is the key quality that determines what kind of relationship we build with someone in the real world. Still, Sim conversations are uniformly pretty unsophisticated, consisting as they do of a sequence of seemingly random icons in alternately uttered speech bubbles – “Ghost!” “Sumo wrestler!” “X-ray!” “Ladybird!” “Missile!” and so forth – and so let’s simply focus on the distinction between the idea of ‘daily’ and ‘lifetime’ levels of friendship. I actually think it’s quite remarkable that, in all its necessary oversimplification and blunt categorisation of the uncategorisable human experience, the Sims 2 has nevertheless articulated, albeit imperfectly, something quite profound about the nature of friendship. Compare the following nuggets of what C. S. Lewis says in his section on friendship (φιλία, philía) in The Four Loves:⁴

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had to … We not only had to do the things, we had to talk about them. We had to plan the hunt and the battle. When they were over we had to hold a post mortem and draw conclusions for future use … In fact, we talked shop. We enjoyed one another’s society greatly … [this is] something which is going on at this moment in dozens of ward-rooms, bar-rooms, common-rooms, messes and golf-clubs. I prefer to call it Companionship – or Clubbableness.

This Companionship is, however, only the matrix of Friendship. It is often called Friendship, and many people when they speak of their ‘friends’ mean only their companions. But it is not Friendship in the sense I give to the word. By saying this I do not at all intend to disparage the merely Clubbable relation. We do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold.

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’ …

In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? – Or at least, ‘Do you care about the same truth?’

I liken Lewis’ Companionship or Clubbableness to the single blue smiley face of Sim ‘friends’, and his Friendship to the double green smiley faces of Sim ‘best friends’ – and the point I mean to emphasise is this: Friendship is not just Companionship in greater intensity, that is to say, one doesn’t make a Friend by being merely Companionable. You can have all the positive interactions you like with a person, but if they’re only ever taking place on a ‘daily’ level, then you might be pushing the hundred-point limit in the top bar, but you won’t have accrued more than a couple of points in the bottom one. I’m sure we all have people we see regularly, and chat to, and feel positively about, because we come across them merely by going about our business, and they share some part in that business – but we’ve never hit Friendship with them. They’re single-blue-smiley-face friends. Once time passes and distance elapses and shared interests dissolve and interactions tail off and the number slips lower and that smiley face disappears – not that we much notice when it does – we see this person again and find we’re nothing more than acquaintances now. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We don’t have to be ‘best friends’ with every single person we meet. It’s not a slight on someone’s character to fail to reach that point with him or her; it only means we haven’t found that magic ‘What? You too?’ trait in one another, the thing that takes us beyond the ‘daily’ interests in front of us and into matters of ‘lifetime’ importance. The single-blue-smiley-face friendship is in itself a good and valuable thing.

But equally, we’re missing out if we never reach double green smiley faces with anyone; if with no one does our conversation ever move beyond the mundane shared task in front of us and into the realms of what is dear to our imagination; if none of our interactions ever shovel more than a point or two into the ‘lifetime’ bar. Friendship is a different thing to Companionship, and there is in it a joy unlike anything else. I am extraordinarily grateful for the double-green-smiley-faces Friends God has put in my life. I wouldn’t be doing them justice if I were to put them in the same category as my single-blue-smiley-face Companions, much as I don’t disparage the latter. They are a blessing of a quality all their own.

To finish with another snippet of Lewis:

When two or three or five of us, after a hard day’s walking, have come to our inn, when our slippers are on and our feet spread out towards the blaze, and our drinks are at our elbows, and the whole world and something beyond the world opens itself to our minds, and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for any of the others, but all freemen and equals as if we’d just met half an hour ago, while nonetheless an affection mellowed by the years is there and fills up the chinks, then we may well wonder whether on the natural level there is anything better than this.⁵

Footnotes

¹ Throughout this post, my Sims references pertain to the Sims 2, which is my favourite installation of the series and the one which has had the greatest impact on me as a person. You can still get hold of copies over ten years after the game was first released: https://uk.webuy.com/product.php?sku=5030930043209#.Wc_zujCX3IU.

² That last example reminds me of a rather funny multiple-costume-change scene in an episode of The Strangerhood, which is a great little comedy webseries produced entirely using the camera function on the Sims 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipNPktZPkVg&list=PLUBVPK8x-XMgXaMMMqQi0b8FaGMqgq3pC. Apparently there is now a second series. I must get round to watching it.

³ OK, so I went a little meta there – on which note, I’ll take the opportunity to introduce you to another brilliant Sims 2 webseries which could win all sorts of prizes for meta-ness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpjzg9DUEz0&list=PL4883046C390F83E8. Please don’t be put off by the terrible opening sequence.

⁴ Worth getting hold of: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/C-S-Lewis/The-Four-Loves/9002029.

⁵ That’s from the radio broadcast version of The Four Loves, available with delightful visual accompaniment at the ever-talented pen of the CSLewisDoodle YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hM4izbColg&t=1425s.