Esraw is freneshay. My shuno!

I have been born amidst a shower of flowers and fireworks. I have lived a long life, a full life, with highs and lows, victories and defeats. I have died -- oh, how I have died. I have met my end through starvation, and I have passed on from disease. I have been burned, drowned, electrocuted, and eaten alive. I have begged for my life and had my pleas granted; begged and been refused. I have been a successful doctor, an actor, and a mad scientist, a chief of police and a criminal mastermind, a self-employed painter and sculptor, a politician, an entrepreneur, a professional athlete -- the master of many trades. I have married for love and for lust and for money, been divorced, abandoned, and widowed. I have fathered and raised dozens of children, and mothered many more -- eleven, in one instance, with eight different men. I have been my own child and my own grandchild and thus I am my own grandpaw. I have slaved in a windowless workhouse, been an exploited child labor -- and the Fagin who lived on the sweat of innocents -- and I have been a serial killer. More than once, in fact. I have simply been myself, in one way or another; myself regardless of the variety of attributes and proclivities that have come and gone like the tides, or perhaps like clouds scudding haphazard across a spring sky.

You see, I play the Sims.

It is a remarkable game. It has something that no other computer game has, in my experience: the goal of the Sims is to tell a story. It is not to conquer the world, nor to destroy it, nor to survive its destruction at the hands of pig snouted leather-clad spiky-tailed alien zombies armed with a mini-gun and chainsaw boots. When you play it, you do not have to jump and duck and dodge; you do not have to drive or shoot or fight, not with lightning fast carpal-tunneling button presses, nor with mind-bendingly elder-mockingly complicated finger combinations. In the Sims, all you have to do is -- live. That's, um, all. You can do it however you choose: comfortably, indifferently, ambitiously, madly, truly. You write the script of your own life, set your own goals, and then pursue them or ignore them as you like.

Wait a sec. I was talking about a video game, wasn't I? But you see, that's the point: the Sims gives us the same opportunities we have in life, except unlike life, it gives us the chance to stop what we are doing if we find ourselves unhappy with life's path, stop and take a new route, try something else. In the Sims one can throw the whole deal on the scrapheap -- and yet not face the generally final consequence that decision carries in our non-pixellated world. True, the Sims is a game, and so it has the usual trappings of electronic entertainment: there is a heck of a lot that is fun to look at, but little substance beneath. It can be staggeringly repetitive. There is a heavy emphasis on simple pleasures, on electronic pastimes and sports and silly physical games, on socializing, food, sleep, excretion, sex. Much of one's life is spent pursuing romance, maintaining friendships, avoiding enemies or punishing them for slights both real and imagined. The loftier are one's goals, the harder it is to balance day-to-day living with the pursuit of the laurel wreath.

Wait a sec. I was talking about a video game, wasn't I?

I was going to go on about this game, because it truly is remarkable in its subtlety, its cleverness, its tranquil ambitiousness. My wife and I have been playing it for years, and we will play it for many more years to come. We love it. I love it. It appeals to my fascination with the complexities of life, with the difficulty of dancing your joys while climbing the ladder of success while avoiding the mines that are buried all around us. It appeals to my sense of irony and my sense of humor, to sit in my house all full of geekery like Simpsons talking watches and a Sigmund Freud action figure squaring off against a Star Wars stormtrooper, with my nerdish mind and bookish soul, and try to think and act and live like a beer-swilling girl-chasing jock. But most of all, it appeals to the storyteller in me. I use the Sims to explore my curiosities about the one place I can never know: the inside of another person's mind, the shape and color and texture of another soul. My Sim characters aren't just one-dimensional cutouts, oh no: my Sims have a backstory, and contradictory desires, and strange psychological profiles full of neuroses and obsessions and phobias. True, I lean towards the darker aspects of humanity in my Sims -- I once played as an alcoholic misanthrope, and took great pleasure in denying him all meaningful contact with his neighbors -- but that is because I myself have never had enough of courage, nor of courage's easy substitute anger, nor of anger's easy substitute fear, to be -- bad. Naturally I wonder about the parts of life I do not know.

I was going to go on about how the Sims is a writer's dream, an artist's perfect canvas inasmuch as all art is about storytelling, which it probably is (I suppose I already have done so, to some extent, but when I say "Go on" I mean pages, not paragraphs). But in writing these words down, and drawing these parallels between the Sims and my three-dimensional un-pause-able life, I realized something: I shouldn't be limiting the praise of the Sims to its utility for writers and artists. We are all storytellers; we tell our own stories through our actions, through our memories, through our dreams. It would do all of us good to do it consciously: to decide, in advance, exactly where life's path will lead us, and then watch eagerly as that path unfolds just ahead there, moving in the direction we expected, or in wholly new ways, leading us to entirely new paths to entirely new destinations. This is in some way what we as humans are meant to do: we are meant to find truth, to discover beauty, and when we cannot find it, to create it ourselves.

And then I realize: why limit ourselves to a video game? What, really, does the Sims offer us that we cannot have in life? I said before that the Sims gives us a chance to start anew when we don't like where things are headed -- but why can't we do that in life? I mean it: why can't we give up on a bad round and start over again? We all know that people have managed to do this, that Paul Gaugin was a lawyer before he moved to Tahiti and started painting full-time, that Ronald Reagan was an actor first and a politician second, that George Washington fought for the British before he fought against them and Benedict Arnold the reverse. On a seemingly small scale, there are millions of people who change their focus from family to career and back again, or that change from work to welfare and welfare to work. The small version of life in the computer lets these things happen faster, and with less heartache when things go categorically and catastrophically wrong -- it is a game, after all -- but is it really the computer that lets us perceive life in this way, lets us see time speed by or slow to a crawl, lets us skip through the bad parts and pay attention to every detail of the good times?

Maybe not. Maybe we could take the same pleasure in examining our human lives as I do the lives of my Sims: deciding where we want them to go, taking the small steps that we hope will lead them there -- always seeking new experiences, new ways to live, from what we have tried before -- and laugh when the steps meander off the path, laugh and then look around, see where we are, and think to ourselves: "Okay, where can I go from here?" Maybe we could make ourselves into characters, protagonist, antagonist, and foil, then plan the themes, lay out the plot and the climax and the conclusion -- and make our lives into the stories we tell. Maybe we can be our own Sims.

Maybe we can be our own art.