Simulacra

One thing I find interesting is our fascination with "reality."

Recently, The Sims has been attracting media attention because of the insights it purportedly provides into our own society. Most notably, everyone's favorite over-generalizer, David Brooks, had a piece in the New York Times Magazine. He writes, in part,

I confess I sometimes don't know whether to be happy or depressed when I dip into Sims world. Sometimes you get the sense that these Sims fanatics are compensating online for the needs that aren't met in their real lives...But the other and more positive sensation you get in Sims world is that some mass creative process is going on, like the writing of a joint novel with millions of collaborative and competitive authors.


Time also searched for deeper meaning. "The Sims Online might be exactly what America needs right now: a virtual sandbox where we can play out our fantasies and confront our fears about what America might become."

The paradox is that people are fleeing reality for virtuality at the same time that they are embracing reality television. Even more confusingly, movies like The Truman Show, eXistenZ, Dark City, The Matrix, Star Trek: Insurrection, Vanilla Sky, and The Thirteenth Floor all dealt with the concept of reality, mostly suggesting that real reality was preferable to any conjured virtual reality, no matter how much better the latter might be.