The recently released game The Sims 3, which allows people to create virtual characters, is now populated with a homeless father-daughter duo created by a British game designer. What prompted Robin Burkinshaw to bring poverty to this fantasy world?
Last week,
The Sims 3 became the online home for two new characters. Not unusual, except these avatars are homeless and poverty-stricken. Known as the first homeless characters on
The Sims 3 platform, Kev and Alice wander around this virtual city, sleeping on benches and digging through garbage bins. Kev, the father, wants to be a romantic "heartbreaker" while the daughter Alice is carefree and often embarrassed by her father's grubby lifestyle.
Behind these engrossing and bizarre characters is Robin Burkinshaw, a 24-year-old student of games development at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK. He has played every series of
The Sims franchise, and recently dove headfirst into the latest installment,
The Sims 3. He's not alone -- The Sims 3 sold 1.4 million copies since its June 2 release, making it the most popular PC game launch ever for publisher Electronic Arts.
For every move he made with Alice and Kevin, he wrote about it on a Wordpress
blog. It's like reading unfiltered commentary of a sports event; the captions of screenshots describe what occurred with the homeless duo. A sample caption: "Alice and Kev are ejected from Zedadias’ house, and are left on his front lawn in a foul mood. Even Alice’s patience runs thin when the passing paperboy complains about the smell."
Courtesy Robin Burkinshaw
The father looking for garbage in the virtual world Sims 3
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So what gave Burkinshaw the idea to create homeless characters in a game where people like to accomplish more imaginative feats? Is he saying something about poverty issues or social gaming? DigitalJournal.com spoke with Burkinshaw to learn the process and purpose behind Alice and Kev's hobo lifestyle.
DigitalJournal.com: What prompted you to create Alice and Kev?
Robin Burkinshaw: For
The Sims 2, players would come up with their own 'challenges' for different ways to play the game. One of them that I took part in was the 'Poverty Challenge' which involved creating a single sim on an empty plot of land, removing their money, and then trying to build them up to be successful. The
Sims 2 didn't really adapt to that very well, but I still enjoyed it. Partly because it made what was ordinarily quite an easy game into something very difficult and challenging, and partly because I just felt so sorry for this little person I was controlling, and wanted to help them.
When the release date for
The Sims 3 was approaching, I knew that one of the first things I would do is try that way of playing again. What I didn't expect was how seamlessly
The Sims 3 would accommodate sims with no home, or how well it would unintentionally model the self-perpetuating consequences of that situation.
DigitalJournal.com: Being homeless in Sims doesn't like a lot of fun, or very enriching. Why did you choose to make your characters homeless? Are you trying to make a comment on real-life society in some way?
Burkinshaw: My intention was never to make a comment on real-life society to others, but maybe part of it was to explore that situation for myself. The Sims series is often described as a virtual dollhouse, as it's a medium for some quite sophisticated roleplay. It does let you act out or explore social situations in much the way that a child will play use pretend play in order to better understand the adult world.
I would disagree that playing as a homeless person, or with a dysfunctional family isn't any fun. When you play these games in the optimum way to make your sim as successful as possible, it can quickly become boring as you eliminate all conflict and struggle from your digital character's life, and the underlying rules of the simulation begin to show. By starting a character in the worst possible situation I could imagine, I have pretty much ensured that my game will always be interesting and dramatic, even if it's not happy. And if I do manage to drag Alice out of poverty, I can imagine it's going to feel pretty good.
Courtesy Robin Burkinshaw
Kev, as a homeless man in Sims 3, tries to talk to other characters. But he's naked and talks "madness," according to the other avatars
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DigitalJournal.com: Tell us about the reactions you have received from other "characters". Have you received sympathetic or angry reactions?
Burkinshaw: In their attempts to survive, Alice and Kev are often taking liberties with the hospitality of the non-player characters in the neighborhood, which can generate some angry reactions. If they were to befriend their neighbours, and ask permission before making use of someone's bed or shower, they would enjoy much more acceptance.
But their situation is often so dire they don't have the time to try to cultivate the friendships that would make their long-term situation easier. They have to get food and a place to sleep, and any activity that isn't going to get them immediate help with those goals is a luxury. It's just one example of those self-perpetuating consequences I was talking about, that probably mirrors the real world to some extent.
DigitalJournal.com: Why did you decide to blog about Alice n' Kev?
Burkinshaw: I started out just taking screenshots to show my friends what I was doing in the game. Virtual photography is a kind of hobby of mine, and I enjoy setting up good angles for screenshots when I play games. Images from my
Eve Online screenshot gallery have been used in PC Gamer magazine and on the Rock Paper Shotgun PC games blog.
So I was showing friends at the
Quarter To Three forum that I frequent what I had been doing in The Sims, trying to encourage them to post some images of their games as well. My short updates about Alice and Kev became quite popular, and I started getting requests by email from people that I put the story somewhere easier to link to, so they could show it to their friends. I spent most of last Tuesday afternoon setting up the blog, and it went live that evening. I've been a little astonished how quickly it has spread across the Internet, and I've just heard that there's already been an article about it in a UK national newspaper.
Courtesy Robin Burkinshaw
Sims 3 homeless character Kev
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DigitalJournal.com: What do you hope followers of your blog/characters will get out of their adventures?
Burkinshaw: Most people seem to feel a lot of empathy towards Alice, even to the extent of one person emailing me to ask me to upload a copy of her to the Sims website so that he could download her, put her in his game, befriend her and feed her, just because he was feeling so protective of this sad little game character.
The comments on the blog, and discussion of it elsewhere on the web do suggest that it makes some people think about the difficult lives that others can have in the real world. For me, playing it has given me a desire to go out and get a copy of
The Big Issue this week, which is a charity magazine sold by homeless vendors in the UK. It would be nice if it inspires others to do the same.
I also like that it seems to be encouraging a lot of people to go out and buy
The Sims 3, even those that would never have thought about getting the game otherwise. Particularly among gaming enthusiasts, The Sims sometimes has an image of being a game only played by women, or only by non-gamers who don't know any better, when the figures show it's a game with almost universal appeal played by both sexes equally. I think the blog is managing to communicate some of that appeal to those that would normally dismiss the game.
For info on Burkinshaw, check out this site. For the blog on Alice and Kev, click here.
