Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006)

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Making Happiness in West Egg and Simburbia: An Inquiry into Consumption in The Great Gatsby and The Sims / Shawn Thomson

<1> At the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway reflects of his journey to the East: “this has been a story of the West” (184). Nick never explains exactly how this is the case, particularly odd since all the action takes place between Manhattan and Long Island. Nick’s hesitant explanation for this puzzling conclusion lies in the western origin of the central characters of the novel and their inability to adapt “to Eastern Life” (184). But the characters seem a part of, if not overshadowed by, the riotous world of West Egg. Only Tom Buchanan rejects this world from the outset, and he cannot settle down anywhere. The novel is about this social and cultural dynamic at the core of West Egg. And only with the last seventy years behind us can we understand how this novel dramatizes the enthusiastic push to new land and developing frontiers. West Egg to Gatsby offers all his dreams in one immense down payment. He becomes totally invested in his home, his furnishings, his car, and his clothes.

<2> Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, picks up and runs with this desire to put stakes in the ground, build anew, and create a personal identity through commodities that fill and decorate the house. Wright’s previous title, SimCity, received criticism for privileging white middle-class values while marginalizing the concerns of lower classes, although the objective of the game was to create and improve an entire city. By adding sports arenas and parks to attract a higher class of people, yuppies, the player succeeded in raising property values and thus in collecting more taxes to build more arenas and airports to create a truly utopian city. The net effect of these improvements was to drive out the nameless poor and create an urbanity that would be home to a prosperous homogeneity. Since Will Wright launched The Sims in February 2000, it has become the world’s most successful PC game and has sold over 24 million units, including eight millions units of The Sims, its core product (<www.thesims.com>). There are expansion units that add more adventure and interactions, allowing players to date, to vacation, walk their Sim dog in the park, and throw wild house parties. In addition, the game utilizes the web by allowing players to download new objects and to exchange photo albums and family stories. (and now there’s Sims Online…)

<3> T he Sims picks up where Simcity left off, zoning off a piece of undeveloped land covered with scrubby pines and seemingly no value. It is very clearly the landscape of the Southern California Dream of suburban verdant lawn and big new homes. Where once there was scrub brush and desert, or in some cases citrus gardens or Joshua tree forest, the developers survey, bulldoze and build. Stuart Davis states of this suburban sprawl: “Developers don’t grow homes in the desert . . .they just clear, grade and pave, hook up some pipes to the local artificial river (the federally subsidized California Aqueduct), build a security wall and plug in the ‘product’” (4). The freeform world of both the Jazz Age and the DotCom explosion create surreal intoxicated hilarity, and both The Great Gatsby and The Sims allow the participants to immerse themselves in the experience. Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, affords us some distance from this world and critical insight into the excesses of this culture. In contrast, The Sims reinforces what Peter Plagens has called the “ecology of evil” and promotes a certain libertine democracy. The very players who buy and play The Sims are the suburban dwellers themselves. This self-referential experience does not allow for critical distance but reaffirms a certain wasteful organization of resources and encourages a self-satisfied materialism.

<4> The Sims begins with creating a character. The player chooses its gender (male or female), skin color (white, tan, or mocha brown), body size (adult to various stages of adolescent), outfit (casual to stylish), and head appearance. By manipulating the character's levels of neatness, outgoingness, activity, playfulness, and kindness, the player creates the personality of the character, or simulated person. The Sim is also given a brief biography, a chosen career, and a home situated in a suburban neighborhood. Sims can be created as a facsimile of a known person, such as an uptight co-worker, a slacker ex-boyfriend, or a famous performer such as Elvis. Setting up a Sim in its new home and controlling its every action, from going to the bathroom, to showering, to sleeping, and cooking and eating three square meals a day, forces the player to walk in the Sim’s shoes, to understand the regimen of a Sim’s daily life and the habits of this peculiar thing. Some players become bored by this potentially tedious and depressing fall to the bottom—a life of seemingly zero expectations in a shabby efficiency home. But within the virtual world of The Sims, the simulated person soon takes on a life that transcends the rule-governed world. As the Sim interacts with the things and people of this world and begins to satisfy its basic needs, start a career, put money in the bank, expand the house, and acquire friends and make love, the player experiences a freedom that is liberating. A sense of belonging to a human environment perfectly suited to the desires and needs of the individual emerges. The player finds perfect freedom in the coded world of The Sims, a release from burdensome codes of behavior and checks upon desire reinforced by social pressure and human realities.

<5> The rules governing a Sim’s behavior reflect the utopian suburbia of the 1950s. Just as the fictional world of “Leave It to Beaver” avoids the real threat of a city full of menacing street gangs, divided ethnic communities, and traffic jams, the world of The Sims creates a world free from “those people’s” problems. The Sims does not allow same-sex romance or gay marriages, domestic violence, or child abuse, nor does it show Sims having sex, though intimate male and female partners do sleep in the same bed and share bathrooms. Nudity does exist, but the naughty parts are blurred from the player’s view, although if it were unblurred it would be microscopic. Yet within this sanitized framework, the reality of what happens in the world of The Sims is anything but conservative. Money becomes the release from morality. Fed by a heavy dose of Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics, The Sims unleashes a libertine impulse. The world allows and even, in its rewarding of points for an intricately complex web of social relationships, encourages communal living, hot tub parties, free love, and polygamy. In addition, the criminal world and various subcultures such as mystics and artists become appealing avenues for personal growth and offer their own financial rewards. In fact, quite early in the history of The Sims, gamers bent the rules of the game to indulge even further, forming bedroom cults, arranging perverse sado-masochistic chambers in their homes, hiring kinky French maids in various states of undress, and hacking into the program itself to transform the cartoonish slap fights into Sim on Sim bloody murder.

<6> The power of easy money in a boom economy liberates the self from history. The world of Gatsby releases individuals from tradition. Consumption drives the hilarity of this party; Gatsby’s free flowing champagne served in “glasses bigger than finger bowls” (51) simulates a sense of happiness. Intoxication achieves a sort of escape and abandonment from social order. The flappers, performers, and merrymakers of Gatsby’s party seemingly come out of a character generator similar to that at work in The Sims. They are given short bios and quirky personalities. Gatsby’s party frees the characters from their traditional roles and identities. They try on and act out in a new skin. Nick describes the riotous world of Gatsby’s parties: “By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz and between the numbers people were doing ‘stunts’ all over the garden while happy vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky” (51). Improvisational jazz and classical Italian intonation exists side by side. The openness toward experimentation and largess pictures an America that no longer recognizes clear distinctions between high and low culture.

<7> The Great Gatsby anticipates the suburban world of The Sims. The commuting town of West Egg provides a new beginning and instant clout. Despite the occasional delay crossing the Queensborough Bridge, West Egg exists as a perfect suburbia: new houses with big roofs promising more than they could ever possibly deliver, views of the bay, and easy access to the city. West Egg threatens to undermine East Egg’s prominence by isolating it from the newly emerging cultural diaspora of the city. West Egg’s freeform vitality stirs in Tom a fear of the city as a place of wasted energy and deviant behavior. Tom credits the author of a book who predicts the end of WASP homogeneity in the country: "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things" (17). Tom’s sight of blacks in a car on his outing to the city reaffirms his worst fears of a poly-ethnic metropolis. This event forces him into further isolation; his home becomes the last bastion of propriety and quality in a world in which new homes are erected with ease and shoddy grandeur.

<8> This same fear, affecting Tom and Daisy’s isolation into their countrified East Egg home, escaping the formlessness of a free market society and the threat of a greater urbanity, informs the suburbanites’ drive to settle in ever widening circles around city centers. West Egg ushers in a cycle of overdevelopment and crisis. The great rush for a new home on a verdant plot of land in new suburbs, with names such as Antelope Valley or Walden Pond, leaves older suburban settlements struggling for a new identity after their optimistic outlook on neighborhood living takes a sharp turn for the worse. The idealism of the suburbs collapses by the appeal to set up in the newest home with the newest strip malls newly plugged into the great urban grid. Monster development projects, some instant edge cities of their own consisting of 35,000 units, force these older, historic suburbanites to confront the unimaginable: traffic jams, smog, lowered property values, rising crime rates, and a general sense of imprisonment. Stuart Davis writes of the problems facing late twentieth-century Los Angeles, as its suburbs encroach upon the Mojave Desert:

the worst popular fears of a generation ago about the consequences of market-driven overdevelopment have punctually come true. Decades of systematic under-investment in housing and urban infrastructure, combined with grotesque subsidies for speculators, permissive zoning of commercial development, the absence of effective regional planning, and ludicrously low property taxes for the wealthy have ensured an erosion of the quality of life for the middle classes in older suburbs as for the inner-city poor. (7)

<9> In both worlds the family and the elderly lose out to the desire and careers of the young. The family is horribly disjunctive. The Sims treats adolescents and infants as possessions of the married adult couple, and children do little more than eat, go to school, and read. Likewise, in the novel, Tom and Daisy's two-year old baby, the only child of the novel, remains unnamed and unseen. The baby is a symbol of the completion of marriage, although it is most likely a gesture on Tom’s behalf to appease Daisy after his scandalous affair in California. Nor are these worlds inhabited by the elderly people. In The Great Gatsby there are only two elderly people, Mr. Gatz and Meyer Wolfshiem. Similarly, the world of The Sims does not deal with the issue of the aged within the game. There are no rest homes, prescription drug programs, or HMOs or 401k plans.

<10> Both worlds exist as playgrounds for the young. West Egg and The Sims encourage behavior that flies in the face of convention. In fact, The Sims’s appeal to teens and young adult gamers, many of whom are female, suggests the appeal of this immersive virtual environment. The teens and young adults play house in a whitewashed world. Taking delight in every decision, as trivial or critical as it may be, allows the player to throw him- or herself into the materiality of the home and become emotionally invested in the social relationships. Selecting the home’s décor and furnishings, paying bills, prowling for potential mates in the neighborhood, and initiating sexual relationships are situations appealing to a young player’s curiosity about what is out there in the adult world. But this virtual play also reinforces the media’s packaging of adulthood as a competitive marketplace where one puts one’s assets to work and aims to show up the competition.

<11> The ubiquity of reality dating shows on television promotes a sort of zealous exhibitionism where one broadcasts one’s earnings, sexual proclivities, and fulsome attributes for the edification of others. Characters in these cutthroat programs must evince a dogged determination to position themselves as advantageously as possible, and there is but a single winner (sometimes, but not always). This openness of one’s thoughts, career prospects, and body to the viewer distorts the sense of the interpersonal, as what is seen is the actual thing itself. This same distortion exists in the characters attending Gatsby’s parties. Owl Eyes exemplifies a character whose singular attribute is magnified for comic effect. Similarly, two stage "twins" are described merely in terms of being in matching yellow dresses. The description of Catherine, Myrtle's sister, even looks like a pixelated Sim, with eyebrows drawn on "at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face" (34).

<12> A Sim can take on limited career choices that determine the hours spent at work and the wages earned. In order to climb up the corporate ladder and advance from the entry-level mailroom position to an executive of a mega-corporation, a Sim must arrive to work on time and in a good mood. In the game, a career offers opportunities to gain money and promotion and, thus, advancement in the game. In the novel, the criminal underworld is the only career fully represented by different levels of advancement. The Sim world provides an intersection of the competing middle class ideologies, the democratic beliefs that all the individuals have equal access to the opportunities and benefits of a free society and that in the free market an individual’s natural talents and work ethic will be recognized and rewarded. The sum and substance of these ideologies establish the home as a representation of an individual’s progress and success in the world. The new suburban home existed plugged into the grid, and its addition of second stories and collection of top of the line furnishing and fitness equipment speaks volumes of the habits of the highly successful Sim.

<13> The world of The Great Gatsby is also very much concerned with success and natural talents. Jordan Baker possesses natural physical talents that suit her career as a professional golfer. What she lacks in integrity and decency, she makes up for on the putting greens. Gatsby illustrates the vertical movement in a chosen career: Meyer Wolfshiem recognizes Gatsby's natural talent and charisma. Under his guidance, Gatsby rises from having nothing to becoming fabulously wealthy. The whole spectrum of the criminal world is represented in the novel. Gatsby's chauffeur is one of Wolfshiem’s protégé's; Slagle is a mid-level operator in Chicago; Gatsby organizes and controls various criminal schemes across the country; and Meyer Wolfshiem, who threw the 1919 World Series, is an untouchable criminal mastermind.

<14> Nick, newly arrived to the Pandemonium of the East, enters into the bond market at the ground level. At first he is out of step with the flamboyant flappers and disgusted with the fabulous fortunes of the Jazz Age. Nick, like a newly created bachelor Sim, must abide by a strict regimen to achieve success in his chosen career. He commutes to work, takes dinners at the Yale Club, and, afterwards, dutifully studies investments and securities for an hour in its library. The background of Nick provides him with certain advantages; he has an Ivy League education, his family's seed money, the technical skills for this line of work and social connections. He takes a house in the West Egg, very similar to the Spartan efficiency unit a newly created Sim would find himself in, and hires a maid to provide his basic needs of cooking and cleaning so that he can concentrate on his career. Nick states of the rental a co-worker found: "He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month . . . I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove" (8).

<15> But despite the potential to rise in economic opportunity, not all Sims are designed to aspire to greatness. Many Sims take on careers such as an artist or palm reader that allow more time and opportunity to pursue counter cultural activities. This desire for alternative living surfaces throughout the novel. Mr. McKee, a photographer, plays the "artist game" and seeks out Tom for an introduction to the wealthy patrons of Long Island. Mr. McKee also represents a member of the gay subculture, a sexuality unrecognized by the society at large (mirrored in The Sims not recognizing a homosexual lifestyle). Furthermore, players often create Sims as experiments into human character gone wrong – those individuals with no work ethic, no abilities other than being able to take advantage of the kindness of others. The player takes grim pleasure in a Sim's moral depravity and self-destructive behavior. In The Great Gatsby, Klipspringer represents just this sort of worthless figure. He is a parasitic character who lives off the wealthy, moving from one accommodating residence to the next with neither a career nor useful skills.

<16> But if a Sim comes to life with no history -- a fresh start and a new skin in the virtual suburbs -- Nick carries with him a history that complicates his actions as well as plays a critical role in the disjunctive story. Nick's connection to Daisy, a second cousin once removed, and Tom, a college acquaintance, is essential for the story to play out and reach its tragic outcome. Furthermore, Nick's internal system of checks and balances, his Midwestern code of behavior, is out of sorts with the freedom of West Egg. His unwillingness to carry on affairs with the secretarial staff before he sets things right with a woman to whom he was nearly engaged suggests Nick's connection to a world outside the world of the novel: "But I am slow thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home" (64). Whether Nick lives by this code or compromises this code of behavior is difficult for the reader to know. As the narrator tells the story from his Minneapolis sanctuary of "wide lawns and friendly trees" (7), he is at once a voice of Midwestern values, but, at the same time, he projects himself into the freeform West Egg commuting town where his interior rules do not register.

<17> Nick's code of behavior is as real as any object in the novel, but very quickly it becomes exasperated, and Nick relinquishes a fixed identity for the freedom of the Jazz Age. After an encounter with a stranger to West Egg asking for directions, Nick recognizes that he has become a part of this world: "And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood" (8). The novel reflects this ceaseless recycling of self wherein the nested or lived experience in the riotous West Egg is framed by a consciousness from without in the decent world of Minnesota. This opposition of seemingly open-ended experience and interior rules does not readily create a reliable narrator. But rather the ambiguities, missteps, and contradictions create a sense of entanglement and play. Nick is disgusted by Gatsby's shallow materialism and criminal schemes and simultaneously enchanted by Gatsby’s ostentatious display and blind faith. Nick is, in Jordan’s word, “careless.” The extent of his carelessness and implication in the tragic outcome of the narrative is left deliberately ambiguous by Fitzgerald. For, at the same time, Nick is the only character who defends Gatsby, understanding the failed idealism of his single purpose, and Nick is among the few characters who attend Gatsby’s funeral.

<18> The simulated person is the event produced by the interaction of Sim-specific variables, ceaseless calculations of Sim happiness, and object-oriented behaviors. But the player imparts to the Sim a life and story, a reason for being, and a motivation for getting through the trials and tribulations of Sim life. As one player put it, "The Sims is designed such that the more imagination you bring to it, and the more you are willing to explain and push beyond its apparent limits, the more you get out of it" ( Computer Gaming World 68). If Nick reflects the conscience of a game player who cannot let go of his identity and fully immerse himself in the freedom of virtual game world, Jay Gatsby represents a complete surrender of the self to the intricate code of the game world. From the outset, Jay Gatsby is an invention or construction of the low-born Jimmy Gatz. Nick states of Gatsby: "So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end" (104). The seventeen year old can hardly hope to attain the prodigious wealth and social position of Tom Buchanan by an honest living. He creates an identity that has no morality, a libertine who Nick states "represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn" (6).

<19> Jay Gatsby becomes a sort of Super Sim—a configuration perfectly calibrated for Gatz to take full advantage of the freeform Jazz Age unburdened by any moral rectitude or judgments. On two occasions Gatsby is likened to a mechanical object. Nick describes him early in the novel as a sensitive instrument: "If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away" (6). There is something precise and seamless about the invented Gatsby. His gestures and language are perfectly synchronized with the world he both emulates and inhabits. He collects friends and acquaintances to attract the single object of his desire, Daisy. His house is a beacon to Daisy: " it was a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden" (9). The display of wealth and the extravagant parties are a way for Gatsby to pull Daisy toward him. His popularity and ostentatious parties advance his objective, drawing the East Egg residents to his home.

<20> If Gatsby manipulates the freeform world of the Prohibition era to recapture the past, Sims build wealth and influences neighbors to achieve a level of success the middle class finds increasingly more difficult to realize. Most simulated people's palatial estates, as pictured in Sim family albums, demonstrate that the objectives of the game, despite its appearance of freeform play, involve acquisition, consumption, and display. Sims are acquiring things for their own sake or intrinsic material valuation, not to better the community or for any extrinsic good. Players seek to acquire the most expensive consumer goods and enlarge the Sim’s home in a gaudy and excessive manner as to rival Hadrian’s Villa. And even Nick finds something noble and heroic in Gatsby's ability to play out his dream. Gatsby’s immersion in his fantasy exempts him from Nick’s damning judgment of the riotous East.

<21> The worlds of The Sims and The Great Gatsby are social environments where friendships are maintained, violence breaks out, and romance blooms. When Sims are invited to come over, the stage is set for human interaction whereby Sims form bonds, make love, or slap each other silly. In both The Great Gatsby and The Sims everything depends on crossing lawns and telephone invitations. Gatsby and Nick crossover each other's lawn to socialize and create one of the most significant friendships in any language. The phone initiates social interaction in both worlds. Daisy says to Nick, "In fact I think I'll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I'll sort of--oh--fling you together" (23). And during Nick's visit to the Buchanan home, Tom receives a call from Myrtle. In addition, the great moment of Daisy and Gatsby's meeting takes place in Nick's home: "He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths so that he could ‘comeover’ some afternoon to a stranger's garden" (83).

<22> In The Sims, friends and lovers provide Social Needs points; thus, a successful Sim will populate his or her house with many other Sims to elevate the Sim's ability to satisfy this need. Friendships can be attained by socializing with another Sim, and, if the friendship is mutual and the Sim is of the same sex, the Sim can ask the Sim to move in to her or his household. If the Sim is of the opposite sex, the Sim's attention can turn to romantic interaction, and this interlude can earn Fulfillment points. The Sim can then propose to the potential partner, and a marriage can be performed. The partner's last name is changed, and the Sim’s worth is added to the household owner's bank account (it might be worth mentioning that both men and women can propose). In The Great Gatsby, the marriage at the center of the novel is similarly stripped of its idealism, becoming in the end only contractual agreement. Daisy, the prize of high society, and Tom, established Old Money pedigree, gain specific advantages by the transaction. After wedding day jitters, Daisy finally surrenders to family pressure and values the privileges Tom’s name provides. Gatsby, Daisy’s true love, has nothing and cannot reenter into high society after World War I, and so he sets upon a quest to regain Daisy’s love.

<23> Sims communicate through iconic speech balloons which appear in comic book fashion above their heads. The icons signify the desire of the Sim, their attraction to or annoyance of another Sim, and their general state of mind. At Sim gathering places, players use these signals to strategize their social interaction and mine each meeting for its maximum of Social Fulfillment points. In like manner, the social component of The Great Gatsby structures the novel. It moves from one social setting to the next, each more chaotic than before. From Nick's arrival at the Buchanan's elegant home to the turbulent party in Myrtle's apartment to the riotous affairs at the Gatsby mansion, the novel demonstrates how social relationships are fraught with tension and duplicitous motives. On the surface, Tom and Daisy's East Egg home seems a perfect seat of marital bliss and comfort, but Tom's adultery and Daisy's sadness reveals this marriage to be anything but a happy affair. Surrounded by warm colors, and open to the breezes blowing off the sound, the house possesses a fragility as if these occupants cannot bear the pristine position in the world they occupy. Tom’s “cruel body” (11) needs outlet in a more physical and unpretentious world. And Daisy becomes a fixture of this place with no connection to anything real and sustaining. Nick’s description of his impression of Daisy and Jordan sitting on a couch suggests the ungrounded reality of this place: “The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon” (12). The solitary couch suggests a home of little meaningful interaction. In this home, Tom and Daisy’s identities conform perfectly to the rigid architecture of the established seashore home. Only in leaving the East Egg do Tom and Daisy recognize their desire for growth and intimacy and fulfill these needs outside the conservatism of the old home.

<24> In contrast, the party at Myrtle's apartment shows the level of mean-spiritedness and violence at the surface of social interaction. The comical interactions and competing desires mirror the social world of a Sim social gathering. Mr. McKee is there to exploit the opportunity to socialize with a wealthy East Egger; Myrtle is showing off her catch; Catherine, her sister, is attempting to push the relationship between Myrtle and Tom into something she can bank on; and Tom is there to get drunk and get loose. Within this tight space, competing desires come to a head when Tom strikes out at Myrtle and breaks her nose. This level of violence cannot happen in The Sims. In an interview, The Sims’ creator, Will Wright, states of this programming of violence to an acceptable level:

One of the social interactions is a slap. Our initial slap was a “knock your head off” kind of slap. It was fine, except when you saw a husband slapping his wife; it was a “break your jaw” kind of slap, and a lot of people were uncomfortable with that—it was just too gritty and realistic. (Computer Gaming World 71)

It is just this grittiness and reality Tom wants. He needs to express his cruelty and strike out. He cannot reside in the comfort of his home but must be a bully and set loose his libido.

<25> In the world of The Sims, there are large social gatherings such as weddings where the whole neighborhood shows up. This creates seemingly endless opportunities for dysfunctional behavior. Sims are creatures of appetites and desires. They seek out the objects that satisfy their most immediate needs in order to achieve happiness. But in large Sim gatherings unrest soon escalates as Sims compete for the last slice of pizza or the control of the stereo. Each object in the game possesses it own behaviors. Sims do not as much eat a pizza as the slice of pizza tells them how to eat it and bequeaths its happiness points upon the Sim. Steven Johnson writes that the “Sims themselves are like little wandering processors executing programs embedded in the objects around them” (82). To a Sim the objects occupying space exist as quotients of happiness. Sims live in what Will Wright calls a “happiness landscape” as Sims will be attracted to certain things like pinball machines if they desire entertainment or the bed if they desire sleep. The successful Sim will carefully utilize the architecture and furnishings to maximize the Sim’s happiness. Gatsby’s parties, too, spiral out of control as the revelers attempt to satisfy desires at cross purposes with others or become so punch drunk as to make a complete mess of things. The parties attract a reserved East Egg contingent that condescends to the West Egg new money, various second and third-tier entertainers, drunkards who crash in the driveway, and British businessmen looking for easy money. Like Sims the partygoers are not ones to turn down an opportunity to socialize, especially when the liquor is paid for. Nick states of the crowd: "Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks" (45).

<26> The abundance of objects occupying the Gatsby mansion and the power these objects have over the partygoers suggests a “happiness landscape” in operation in Gatsby’s home similar to the object architecture of The Sims. Nick marvels at the orange juice machine: "There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed by a butler's thumb" (44). The juicing machine wrests the butler’s thumb from his control, essentially calling him to perform the operation of pressing its button. The machine represents the wonders of an age of seamless stainless steel where art meets industry, form follows function, and the pedal hits the metal. Like all the objects in the house, the juicer keeps partygoers animated and desirous—need follows fulfillment; each object broadcasts its power to satisfy, and the individual succumbs this latent desire or surrenders outright to a drive. The state of hilarity exists as a state wherein the interior code, the self-imposed checks and balances, lose touch with reality, and the very reality itself drives and compels the individual.

<27> The fastidiously organized and elaborate architecture of the home reinforces Gatsby as an Oxford man. Owl Eyes states after taking a volume off the shelf from “the Merton College Library”: "It's a bona fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too—didn't cut the pages" (50). By partaking in the hilarity of Gatsby’s party the throng completes the illusion; they have eaten Gatsby’s fruit and drunk his wine, thus become put under his spell. The intoxicating Dionysian effect of the party distorts their perception. Owl Eyes, who has been drunk for a week, cannot quite grasp the meaning of his discovery. His realization of the artificiality of this world is not a sobering indictment; for, instead he arrives at a dizzying quintessential endgame where fact and fantasy play out. There are seemingly no ragged edges to the illusion, only uncut linen paper.

<28> When Daisy enters the Gatsby’s mansion, she becomes the source of happiness itself. Nick states, "I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes" (97). The acquired objects and architectural elements impress a mixed crowd of socialites and merrymakers, but take on new meaning as the object of Daisy’s combined senses. Daisy’s level of engagement with this world determines its worth. The second instance where Nick describes Gatsby as a mechanical object appears after he has shown Daisy through the various "Marie Antoinette music rooms and Restoration salons” (96) valuable for their surface elegance: “After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock” (97). In Sim terms, Gatsby’s level of happiness has extended into the red zone—it is truly off-the-scale happiness. When a Sim reaches a peak of happiness it may bellow forth a jumbled note of glee. At this moment in the novel, Gatsby realizes the dream he has directed his life to achieve. He took little pleasure in his world for it all was an assemblage bought and furnished to draw Daisy to his doorstep. But as Daisy walks through the house and touches and squeezes these objects, Gatsby experiences his world anew. As Daisy immerses herself in the material of the home, the objective reality gives way to a metaphysical experience. As Gatsby tosses about his beautiful pastel shirts, Daisy sobs and states: "it makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before" (98). Daisy’s connection to Gatsby transcends personal history. The lushness and richness of this world allows the shared emotional content of their lives to surface and unify.

<29> But from a middle distance Gatsby’s Oxford man identity and lavish mansion does not hold water. Picking up on Gatsby’s contrived use of the “old sport” trope, Nick sees through Gatsby’s artifice very early in their relationship. Similarly, Tom, threatened by Gatsby’s attention toward Daisy, criticizes Gatsby’s excesses and poor taste and exposes Gatsby as a gangster. He calls Gatsby’s car a “circus wagon” and states of his free lifestyle: "I know I'm not very popular. I don't give big parties. I suppose you've got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends—in the modern world" (137). Tom’s criticism not only reveals his own insular existence in the Old Money enclave of East Egg but also points to a broader criticism of the modern age.

<30> The “happiness landscape” that underpins the Sims’ behavior takes hold in this freeform modern world. Gatsby’s parties show a society driven by consumption and desire. Nick is critical of this society when he characterizes Gatsby’s mansion as a "huge incoherent failure of a house" (188). The house holds no order or ethical dimension—it is out of history, pushing beyond sustaining humanistic principles. Gatsby’s mansion makes no sense to Nick who carries with him the idea of the home as a sober home, a quiet and reserved space removed from the competing desires of the marketplace. The Sims locates the marketplace in the home, codifying the transition from market and culture to a commodified culture. The houses of The Sims reflect this distortion. Players put fish tanks on the front lawn to give their Sim a small jolt of “fun” before they head off to work or create a trash pit in their backyard so their Sim does not have to spend time and energy taking the trash to the curb.

 

Works Cited

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso, 1990.

Fizgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Johnson, Steven. “Gaming’ Evolutionary Leap.” Wired March 2002: 78-83.

Lombardi, Chris. “The Sims.” Computer Gaming World May 2000: 64-76.

Plagens, Peter. “Los Angeles: The Ecology of Evil.” Artforum Dec. 1972.

“The Sims.” www.thesims.com Electronic Arts. February 2003.

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