Point, click, socialize!

Woodrow Ngogn is blubbering again.

“Bwa ha-hoo-hoo,” the pixilated approximation of a grown man snivels, as a cartoonish thought balloon that contains a crude line drawing of two heads—one male, one female—appears above his head.

You might think that Woodrow, an Isaac Hayes-look-alike who dresses like Mister Rogers, would be happy, what with his wife Brünhilde, a semi-trashy blonde in biker chick-style leather-and-denim jeans, providing him all that loving companionship.

But no. A mouse click on a nearby bookshelf, which should motivate Woodrow to study cooking (so he won’t set fire to the kitchen next time he tries to make dinner), instead triggers a pop-up window. “I’m too depressed to study right now,” it reads.

Then Brünhilde arrives home from her job at some corporate headquarters. A click on the toilet, then the bathtub, then the refrigerator, then the phone to invite the Booligans over, then the TV, and soon Ms. Ngogn, the harried executive, is relaxed and happy, chatting in incomprehensible gibberish on the phone while watching cartoons.

If you understand what I’m talking

about, you’re also probably hooked on The Sims, one of the more addictive computer games to hit the market. The Sims is the creation of game designer Will Wright, whose previous contributions to the genre—SimCity, SimCity2000, SimCity 3000—turned gamers into armchair architects and city planners. While those games were essentially complex animated versions of a Lego set, the gamer gets a more godlike perspective with The Sims.

Certainly, aside from Aleister Crowley, Anton LaVey and a few other black-robe types, most religious authority figures warn us mere humans against the perils of playing God. Bad idea, they intone darkly, understanding that we of the flesh can get intoxicated on raw power quite easily.

Until computer games came along, that wasn’t much of a problem for me.

Two years ago, a new PC I’d bought came with something called Microsoft Age of Empires. But the thrill of building a civilization up from Fred Flintstone level, then fighting off the neighborhood-bully Babylonians or marching my drones over some pixilated hill to bonk those pesky Hittites, lost its allure after a few dozen hours.

A few other, non-deity-perspective games not-so-briefly caught my fancy, too—as scientist Gordon Freeman dodging mutant crabs and worse through the bowels of a destroyed nuclear test site in Half-Life; as intrepid “archaeologist” Lara Croft eluding that nasty Werner Von Croy and his ninjas in the Tomb Raider series.

And if I hadn’t gotten one of those ominous Microsoft “This computer has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down” messages when I tried to load a holiday gift, Tomb Raider Chronicles, right before it wiped out everything on my hard drive, I might still be following Ms. Croft’s latest adventures. Instead, I’m playing The Sims, which I got in a straight-across trade at the computer store.

Here’s how it works. Upon entering

the innocuous suburb where The Sims takes place, which you view from above and at a 45-degree angle, you can choose to adopt one of the existing Sim families or create one anew. The second option is better, for simulated social-engineering purposes, because it gives you the opportunity to throw a bunch of seriously incompatible people together and see what happens. Hey, just like real life! Make one Sim an Oscar Madison slob and another a Felix Unger neatnik, or make one a nice-guy überslacker and another an overly aggressive prick, then sit back and watch the fur fly.

That done, the next task is buying a pre-existing house, or building one from zip and going shopping to fill it up with cool stuff. The catch is that you have a fixed amount of money, so if you build some monstrous monument to Philistine bad taste—which gets much easier after loading the game’s expansion pack, Livin’ Large, with its much more vibrant rococo options—or if you get a little out of hand at the SimCity mall, your Sims may starve to death. It isn’t pretty.

After a couple of failed experiments, in which my Sims were soon wandering aimlessly around their rather large houses bellyaching and peeing on the floor, I figured out that it might be better to start out simple—one man, one woman, zero kids, small house.

Enter Woodrow and Brünhilde.

I’d originally envisioned a much more debauched lifestyle for my Sims—kinky sexual episodes, mate-swapping barbecue parties, fisticuffs, ridiculous drunken soliloquies—but Team Ngogn didn’t seem to want to cooperate. Oh, if you really worked at it, as our household 7-year-old did, you could find a way to kill your Sims off in revolting fashion: Build a small house, then have one Sim set off fireworks in the front room, which typically will precipitate an impromptu cremation episode complete with a very scary Grim Reaper stopping by, and not for afternoon tea. (An experimental “Las Vegas House of Death,” with four identical brothers who looked like Siegfried & Roy times two, each of whom possessed his own grand piano and fireworks, turned into quite the flamboyant spectacle.)

Woodrow and Brünhilde, however, are so terribly bourgeois. At first they’re a bit temperamental, but after getting them jobs by picking up the newspaper, and after learning how to manage their moods, the experience isn’t so frustrating.

Each Sim has eight indicator bars—for “hunger,” “energy,” “comfort,” “fun,” “hygiene,” “social,” “bladder” and “room”—which range in color from green (copacetic) to red (jinky). Let’s say that Woody just got home from work; his “hunger,” “bladder,” “hygiene” and “energy” indicators are bright red. Click on the toilet, he takes care of business—make sure he washes his hands afterward—then click on the refrigerator and select, say, “cook dinner.” Woodrow will whip up some tasty victuals, and if you’re lucky and he hasn’t studied his cooking, he may set fire to the kitchen, which may result in a visit from the fire department (if he calls them) or the Grim Reaper (if he doesn’t). He’ll probably leave his dish on the floor to gather flies; leave it for the maid or have him pick it up. Then, to alleviate that uncomfortable “skanky” feeling, click on the shower stall or bathtub to get his “hygiene” meter in the green. Then, put him to bed, or have him pound some espresso, to restore his energy.

The other indicators are more difficult to manage. “Room” means prettying up the pad with nicer furniture, art and accoutrements; “comfort” means getting back rubs or kicking back on the couch; “fun” can range from basketball to computer games to TV. Most of them involve buying more stuff, a central theme of The Sims.

“Social” is more nebulous. Other Sims in the neighborhood stop by, and you must get your Sims to schmooze them so you can invite them back. It helps to have a hot tub, a cool TV and/or stereo, a pool table, a pool, a barbecue grill—you get the idea. You can also build up social points by having your housemate Sims kiss and hug and talk often; just don’t let them play in the red vibrating bed with the heart-shaped headboard, or a baby might show up. In The Sims, babies spell trouble.

Perhaps the most surprising

thing about playing The Sims is that, after a while, it’s easy to get obsessed with keeping your Sims happy. You want them to succeed. You want them to make lots of friends, have swell dinner parties and succeed in their jobs so they can afford to buy more nice things. You want to learn all the nuances to balancing their lives for maximum happiness. You want them to grow—to boost their creativity by playing guitar or piano, to expand their logical faculties by playing chess, to buff up by working out, to study cooking and mechanics.

And you don’t want to see them suffer. You don’t want them to get into fistfights with the neighbors. You don’t want them to knock back too many cocktails—although, try as you might, it’s impossible to get them drunk; after 20 virtual Hennessy and Cokes, Woodrow still seemed quite sober the other night. And you don’t want them to get so busy shooting pool or gazing at the aquarium that they lose their jobs and, not long after, starve.

It’s a funny thing, playing God.