It is not often that a mere model of real­ity can man­age to move someone mired in real­ity, but this is quite something.

Wel­come to the tale of Alice and Kev.

Alice and Kev have no money at all and live home­less in a park.  They are a father and daugh­ter who sleep on a park bench and have to steal most of their food.

Kev is hot-headed, mean-spirited, and inap­pro­pri­ate. He also dis­likes chil­dren, and he’s insane. He’s basic­ally the worst Dad in the world. He is a hor­rible human being… His daugh­ter Alice is a kind-hearted clumsy loser. With those traits, that Dad, and no money, she’s going to have a hard life.

Noth­ing unlike count­less oth­ers suf­fer­ing on the streets?  This is dif­fer­ent, Alice and Kev don’t actu­ally exist.  This is an exper­i­ment in play­ing a home­less fam­ily in The Sims 3.

I cre­ated two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an aban­doned park, removed all of their remain­ing money, and then attemp­ted to help them sur­vive without tak­ing any job pro­mo­tions or easy cash routes. It’s based on the old ‘poverty chal­lenge’ idea from The Sims 2, but it turned out to be a lot more inter­est­ing with The Sims 3’s liv­ing neigh­bor­hood features.

I have attemp­ted to tell my exper­i­ences with the min­imum of embel­lish­ment. Everything I describe in here is some­thing that happened in the game. What’s more, a sur­pris­ing amount of the inter­est­ing things in this story were gen­er­ated by just let­ting go and watch­ing the Sims’ free will and per­son­al­ity traits take over.

Mod­elled so closely on real people, the Sims vir­tual suf­fer­ing and their small snatches of pride at achiev­ing some­thing, any­thing, such as hav­ing a bath, man­age to move the heart.

We are just like those Sims who walk by these two every­day, we don’t see the des­pair being played out around us.  It is a sad indict­ment of the world that a story of two ima­gin­ary com­puter gen­er­ated home­less people flashes around the net, where the real story of the home­less is kept away from our eyes, by none other than ourselves.

I already give a reg­u­lar dona­tion to Shel­ter.  Read this tale and won­der if you should too.

Alice and Kev

The story of being home­less in The Sims 3

http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/

Regards,

Basho

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