Emerging Stories in the Sims

(repost from Medium, as I figure out my blogging situation!)

I’ve been spending a lot of free time playing the Sims 4 again. I’ve downloaded a fair number of gameplay mods (adding mental health, menstruation, more relationship dynamics, etc.), and I’m trying some historical challenges (e.g., play from the 1890s to modern time). The creativity of creators for this game is just astonishing.

In all this play, I’ve noticed that there are two main kinds of storytelling that players engage with in the Sims 4:

• Directed
• Autonomous

Directed storytelling is as it sounds — the player directs the events that happen. They control the traits and moods of the Sim characters and they orchestrate events that they’ve planned out in advance. In this style, the game is a stage, and the storytelling is constrained by that stage in some aspects (e.g., the possible animations and actions), but beyond that it’s reliant purely on the player’s imagination and skill with the tools of the stage. Every Sim is controlled by the player as they act out a script. There is some allowed randomness here as the game simulates the created relationships, but primarily, the story is player-directed.

Autonomous storytelling is what I’ve learned that I prefer. This method is reactionary to the autonomous actions of the Sim characters. The game itself allows autonomy to be turned on or off, but there are also many mods that can impact autonomy, whether overall or for specific kinds of actions. The Sims themselves “decide” what they want to do, who they want to talk to and flirt with, whether they want to paint or sleep or play with their children. Here, the player primarily reacts to these autonomous actions and may occasionally intervene to help the Sim accomplish what they seem to want, but the director is really the Sim itself. There is no game entity fully controlled by the player or representative of the player. Stories emerge from the game character.

She’s not so pleased with her husband right now

Back in 2012 when I was still dissertating, I spent a lot of time thinking about “emergent narrative.” The idea at the time was that games allow players to create stories about their experiences that are separate from the game narrative and are constrained by the possibilities of play within the game. Someone may be playing World of Warcraft and join a player event where gnomes run across the continent and tell a great story about their level 1 gnome and the dangers she faced in this journey. This player-created event uses the systems of the game (levels, races, locations, enemies) to tell stories of brave, tiny gnomes. (Blizzard eventually added this event officially in-game after consulting with the player-creator). It is not game narrative per se, because the story of gnomes running across the world isn’t part of the game’s story as designed, but it is still a narrative of the gameplay. This is emergent narrative, and on which diegetic level it exists remains a question to me.

I think the Running of the Gnomes, as it was called, is a mix of Directed and Autonomous emergent storytelling. In World of Warcraft, autonomy systems are very primitive. Typically, NPCs simply walk a predetermined path and enemies spawn in set locations and follow predictable behavior. The gnomes are purely player-directed, but the drama of the story arises from a combination of game actors — tigers pouncing out of the jungle to devour your level 1 gnome — and player actors — at the last second, your friend, a mighty dwarven warrior, slices the tiger in half with its axe.

Lots of gnomes, lots of pink pigtails

This adjusts our schema to now be:

• Directed. Dollhouse-style play.
• Autonomous. Reactionary play.
• Hybrid. Player actors responding to game actors.

Where hybrid primarily differs is in its inclusion of player actors. I believe this category is the one traditionally meant by “emergent narrative,” but it felt limiting to me. The Sims doesn’t have any game narrative, so all stories must emerge, but those stories are not typically about the player’s experiences. They are about the characters’ experiences. The stories are idiosyncratic to the players, since they observe or enact unique character stories, but they are not about the players. In fact, ideally the players are invisible in the stories that result.

That said, the Sims 4 does allow hybrid emergent storytelling as well. Should a player create a Sim of herself and only control that character, responding to those around her, that would fall into the hybrid category. However, all Sims in a household are played characters, so this would be difficult to accomplish in most circumstances.

Possibly in this year 2023, there are more interesting theoretical frameworks of emergent narrative to work with, but Medium is for sharing half-baked thoughts, right? (edit: it’s not for sharing half-baked thoughts, I think actually.)