Why do
people play computer games? To fulfil fantasies. To escape reality. To be the
action hero they can never be or solve puzzles and gain prizes and visit far
off lands or other worlds.
The Sims is a series of sandbox games, where
players create virtual people, place them in houses they create and give them
skills, desires and fears to see what happens. The first iteration of The
Sims was released in 2000, though it was preceded by SimCity, which
first debuted in 1989.
There is no
plot to The Sims and no particular goals, though the fans in the community
define challenges to make game play more interesting, like the Dumpster
Challenge or the 100 Baby Challenge.
Frenzy
Theatre’s MOTHERLOD_^E, named after a cheat in the game that gives you
extra money, recreates the game live on stage with a video feed of the player,
Sarah, projected onto the back wall. She is living in her childhood bedroom –
both as a teenager, and later, after they have to return to living at home as
an adult.
If only
life was as easy to navigate as this simulated world and there were cheat codes
so you didn’t have to go home to your parents.
The theatre-makers
have gone to a lot of effort to create a basic house from the game, the set
laid out like a full floor plan, so we can see the living room, the kitchen,
the bathroom, the bedroom and a room that contains just an easel so the
characters can up their artistic skill.
The set is
impressive but not nearly as wonderful as the performances by the ensemble
playing the in-game characters. They move in a bouncy walk and turn at 90-degree
angles. They never stand quite still, but hang, waiting for their next command or
interaction. They speak in one-liners that feel oh-so-very written, because every
move is determined by a Player and an algorithm.
The cast is
impressive because every move and pause and replayed-gesture feels right. I don’t
think you even need to have played The Sims to understand the
limitations of human figures in a video game. It’s uncanny and even uncomfortable,
but this production knows the details and confines of the game and uses it to
their theatrical advantage.
Take, for
example, the moment the character of the Grim Reaper appears, floating along,
her cloak billowing-out around her. Or when the Player leaves the game on pause
and one of the actors has to stand still in a goofy, grinning pose for minutes
at a time. We are fully immersed in the game-inside-the-show.
Outside the
game, though, is the thinly-sketched player named Sarah, who first played The
Sims while she was in high school and boots up her old computer to dip her
toe back in when she returns home, unemployed. Like the characters in her game,
Sarah is looking for work and having relationship dramas and nothing really fits
together.
One of the
major problems with the production is that Sarah, ironically, is on screen and
the audience doesn’t really get to know her. Her DMs occasionally appear on two
screens that sit to the extreme sides of the stage, meaning the audience has to
keep turning to read them to understand what’s happening in the “real world”. I
found this particularly difficult in the front row.
The
real-world queer community, in our reality, has embraced The Sims
because it’s a way to be out before coming out. The game itself is progressive
with its use of pronouns and allowing characters to be gay, lesbian or bisexual.
Sarah is queer and she’s having problems with Juls, one of her friends from
high school, who she might also be in love with? It wasn’t clear to me. Their
other friend Becs is trying to bring them back together, but most of it is left
oblique.
What
becomes clear over the course of the show is that Sarah is frustrated with the
game. Perhaps it doesn’t scratch the same itch as it did when she was in high
school. Perhaps, now that she’s out of the closet, The Sims doesn’t need
to act as a place where she can be herself.
More
likely, in a real-world where Millennials can’t hope to own properties and often
have to have side-hustles to make ends meet, maybe Sarah can’t enjoy a
fictional utopia where you can gain skills quickly, get pregnant and afford a
home.
Motherlode’s highlight is its recreation of a
world, playing to an audience that understands Simlish (the in-game language)
and semoleons (the in-game currency) and a wealth of other in-jokes that
non-players like me didn’t get. But it relies too heavily on these recreations
to carry the show. What are we to take away from the play, if we don’t have insight
into Sarah and why she has become so disaffected with life and The Sims?
In the end,
I know there is an audience for this show that will laugh all the way through,
at the delightful jokes about the game that makes fun of their obsession. I
just wish the theatre-makers could look outside the live-action simulation of
simulations and dig a bit deeper into why people are drawn to this world and
what might push them away.
Motherlode is hilarious and the ensemble is outstanding but it needs to find focus and define the character of Sarah much better.
See this simulation of The Sims at Theatre Works until January 14.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
Photos: Daniel Rabin
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