Some time ago, I conducted an informal little survey of my game developer friends, and The Sims was revealed as one of their favorite pastimes. It is also my dear wife's current obsession; since I made the mistake of introducing her to these ungrateful little critters, she has been merrily wasting away 4-6 hours a night in front of the computer, thus depriving me of my inalienable right to do so myself. This is particularly surprising, given the fact that she has never showed any interest in a computer game before, except for a passing tryst with some of Will Wright's earlier designs in the mid 90's.

As far as I can tell, the reason for The Sims' enduring popularity is that it is one of the few games about creation: players get to play not only God, but also parent, friend, seduction machine, architect, and a million other things, so much so that we end up desperate to give our virtual children the kinds of good, simple, Pleasantville-like lives we wish we could have for ourselves.

The Ultimate Creation
As I was thinking about this, I stumbled upon a book about the ultimate creative experiment: the Creatures project, a game series that made a huge splash in Europe and should have made a much bigger one in North America, because it featured the first successful large-scale experiment in artificial life.

Creation: Life and How to Make It (ISBN: 0-297-64391-6), by Creatures' designer and lead developer Steve Grand, explains how he defines life, and how he came about trying to populate cyberspace with entirely new genera of living organisms.

A warning: Creation is not a how-to book by any stretch of the imagination. Readers interested in technical details about the Creatures will likely feel cheated, since over 75% of the book is devoted to the author's definition of life and to the philosophy underlying his research:

Of the entire book, only 2 chapters really qualify as entity-building blueprints, and then only in the most general terms. Furthermore, despite its flowing style and occasional bursts of perfectly crafted off-beat humor, Creation can be a frustrating read, because the author felt compelled to justify his motivation in far more detail than was really needed. As a result, this is a book best consumed in small doses. Nevertheless, I believe this is an important milestone in our industry's history for several reasons, not the least of which is that artificial life may well be one of the breakthrough technologies of the new century.

But Why?
However, one question that my wife's love story with the Sims raised (and that Grand's book failed to answer) is: Why do we feel the need to create in the first place? What is it about the human soul that drives it to seek immortality in as many ways as it possibly can? And why does this primal urge occasionally express itself as a need to make computer and video games, even though we could be living much more comfortable and balanced lives doing something completely different?

I won't pretend to have the answer. At most, I may have identified a handful of hints that may or may not end up blurring the mystery even more. Or maybe I'm just full of it. (If so, please don't tell me.)

Defying Entropy
Let's face it: the big dirt nap at the end of the road is always gnawing at the back of our minds. We know we're going to end some day, but since we can't face that and maintain our sanity, so we do our damnedest to upstage the Universe and to outlive our own lives.

For some, religious beliefs are enough to solve the dilemma. Others seek immortality through their children, although anyone who thinks children can actually fight against the overpowering clutch of chaos has obviously never been to McDonald's on Sunday at lunchtime. Our solution is to build something, anything that could outlast us: a novel, a painting, or a game.

If there is one thing that all game developers have in common, despite our endless artist-programmer and designer-management quarrels, it is this thing that we can hold in our hands, show to the world and say: "Here, I made this." That is a defining moment. And it works: even the most jaded (and I defy you to find anyone more jaded than I am) can't help but feel a little shard of immortality creeping in when they see one of their games on a shelf or on a complete stranger's computer for the first time.

Power and Worth
Even those with little interest in the long-term fight against chaos (i.e., immortality) need some order and control in their daily lives. The problem is that people under 30 usually don't have a whole lot of either: they have to make do with the jobs the middle-aged don't want, don't often have time for vacation, lack the money to fill their homes with the stuff they want, and if they have kids, they don't even get enough sleep.

Some rebel against this by creating even more chaos, on the principle that, if they're going to live crazy lives anyway, it might as well at least be their own faults. But here again, creativity can provide a partial solution: when a game is done, it is done. It is a finite thing, immutable, complete, perfect; a little local victory over entropy. In a sense, the need to have created becomes stronger than the need to create itself.

Unfortunately, for game developers, this benefit of creation is quickly fading. In this era of never-ending series, patches, online subscriptions and the like, the creative act is never complete. Thus, the psychological rewards of having created become as futile as those gained by obsessive-compulsive cleaners who finish wiping their houses just in time to see specks of dust gathering again. David Brin (I believe) once compared novel-writing to walking from Moscow to Vladivostok on your knees, spending one glorious evening there once the book is complete, going to sleep in utter contentment - and waking up in Moscow on your knees. That metaphor explains the trials of the creative process, but at least the writer gets to see Vladivostok once in a while. In our case, the destination has taken up the habit of running away.

Conclusion
Again, I come back to a conclusion I derived from the examination of several unrelated phenomena over the years: we create to gain control over our lives, just like we start businesses, become freelancers, or join political parties for the exact same reason.

Life is an abnormality in the Universe; a local reversal of entropy, a temporary violation of the laws of thermodynamics. Well, good for us. Let's keep creating. If I have to go out (and somehow I'll never quite accept that as fact), I'll go out in a blaze of glory.

BIO
If you aren't really tired of FDL by now, don't say so in public unless you are looking for a serious beating. He's been the bane of the game industry for over 10 years, during which he cajoled and threatened his way into over 20 credits as designer, producer, programmer and writer. For some reason, magazine and book editors seem to like him; his Game Design Perspectives are available now from Charles River Media, and another tome called Secrets of the Game Business will be released by the same publishing house at GDC 2003. With the dozens of articles he has contributed to other industry publications and the roundtables he hosts at GDC every year, it is getting really hard to avoid him these days. But there is hope; FDL has been freelancing for 5 years, so we expect him to starve to death any day now. Visit his mediocre web site, http://pages.infinit.net/idjy, at your own risk.