Last week, Stephanie Douglass rocked the Peter Sagal-hosted The Moth GrandSLAM. She followed up that win with thoughts about the fifth installment of the SimCity computer game, to be released in 2013. The game will reportedly be notable because it will be the first that allows multiple players playing together (online), and will include an environmental theme.
Douglass -- an apparent fan of the Sim universe -- has a few strong feelings on these changes. Read an excerpt or listen below:
“In this month of record-breaking temperatures, and news that the Swiffer Wet Jet may exacerbate asthma and disrupt hormones, it’s good to know that there’s a place we can go where none of our actions have any real consequences. An ultimate judgment-free zone. A place where everybody knows your name, because they’re programmed to. A place, like SimCity.
You know this place. You were sent here by your non-existent softball ability and fluorescent plaid skids in the 5th grade. And a part of you never left because you, the kid who couldn’t get Chrissy Werner to pass you an English ditto even though you had grown up across the street from her, you could be the mayor of this town. You could build empires, sensible small town and medium-sized empires, where everything you did mattered, but only within the cuddly ombre boundaries that really didn’t matter at all.
And that was safe. Because every time you tried something in your non-Sim City, it failed. You sucked at smiling, at cigarettes, at not eating tear-drenched baloney sandwiches alone in the teacher’s lounge. But the Sims, they could love you for who you really were, because of course, they cannot love.
Maybe it was 1989’s SimCity, or 1993’s SimCity 2000 or 1999’s SimCity 3000. Or, if your compulsive escape from any meaningful interaction with your age-assigned peers continued and was more recent, 2003’s SimCity 4 or 2007’s fraternal twins, SimCity DS and SimCity Societies.
Maybe you even scoffed at the egg-baby assignment in sociology because you had been keeping a family alive for years since 2000’s The Sims.”
stephanie douglass.mp3
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