Video Games as Bourgeois Fantasy

It is hardly insightful to call ‘The Sims’ a bourgeois fantasy. Much of the joy of the game stems from living out consumerist dreams: building the perfect house, purchasing the perfect car, wearing the perfect clothes. On another level, the world of The Sims is extremely atomised. Each Sim is the classical ‘economic actor’, governed by a series of universal needs which drive all external relations (even the pursuit of friendship which fulfils their ‘Social’ requirements).

But I would argue that these factors are in fact peripheral in the appeal of The Sims; the central enjoyment of The Sims stems from fulfilling the fundamental bourgeois fantasy, that is, the direct, unaltered relationship between effort and success. If your Sim wishes to reach the peak of a career, they need merely find a job in the newspaper (unemployment being a matter of choice in this world), and then apply themselves to the career. The harder they work, the greater their career success. Should they need additional skills, they may simply dedicate themselves to learning, and in no time achieve mastery. With sufficient effort, a Sim can go from mail room clerk to CEO before they reach old age.

The Sims thus presents a linear relation between effort and success. No structural barriers exist in this world. If they apply themselves, there is nothing to stop the poor, or women, or ethnic minorities from achieving greatness. The world is purely meritocratic. The implication, of course, is that those who do not succeed have failed because of their own slovenliness.

While particularly obvious in The Sims, this effort/success equation underlies the appeal of many other video games. ‘Dark Souls’, one of the most critically acclaimed games of recent years, is consistently praised for its ‘fairness’. In this context, fairness means that each time the player fails, it is through their own lack of skill or attentiveness. Again, the underlying value here is that success is the product of effort, and failure the product of a lack thereof. In a broader sense, most role-playing games possess a linear relation between on the one hand practicing a skill, killing enemies, or completing quests and on the other hand increases in level. Indeed, ‘idle games’, such as ‘Cookie Clicker’, are in many ways a pure representation of this trend. Time expended relates visibly, directly and mathematically to success.

Now it should be obvious to readers of this sort of publication that despite the meritocratic promises of capitalism, effort does not in reality equal success. Class, gender, racial, and other barriers stifle upward mobility, entrenching inequalities. Proving this point is not the purpose of this article. Rather it is to suggest that in a capitalist society in which the vast majority of people are promised, and then denied, meritocracy, it is hardly surprising that art should create fantasy worlds in which the effort/success illusion can actually be experienced.