I’ve always enjoyed dabbling in The Sims.  Since the first game’s release, I’ve made it a point to periodically check in on the series, see what’s new, and enjoy playing with the dollhouse I never had as a child.  So, out of boredom, I installed The Sims 3 a few days ago to try it out.  And I’m honestly a little bit disturbed.

The new personality engine is smart.  And not just kind-of-clever-but-still-only-capable-of-putting-out-three-character-types smart, but really, surprisingly, occasionally frighteningly smart.  Let’s take the doppelgänger I made of myself in the game, Leon.  After fussing with the appearance for longer than was probably necessary (nose size and hair were the two sticking points, and the hair is still more Robert Pattinson than Yoel Roth, but whatever), I got to pick five dominant personality traits that would define my Sim.  And they were:

  • Perfectionist
  • Snob
  • Genius (I couldn’t resist, especially given my line of work)
  • Neurotic
  • Great kisser (or so I’ve been told; and now you know)

I dropped my Sim into a house and, with minimal guidance, sat back and watched what happened.

And what happened is: Leon started acting like me.  He would start worrying at random moments about not completely closing a faucet in the bathroom.  While cooking, he would constantly fear fire.  He became inordinately stressed out by household dirt.  Regardless of what people would say or do to him, he would never become particularly angry or upset — just increasingly stressed.  And, most surprisingly, he turned gay.

I’ve always been pleasantly surprised by The Sims‘ handling of same-sex relationships, but I’ve never quite figured out how the game manages them internally.  In The Sims 2, you had the ability to create same-sex couples in the family creator, which would establish a monogamous unit that operated more or less like a straight couple.  (My favorite Sims that time around were a lesbian couple.)  And I’m pretty sure that you’ve always had the ability to flirt with the same sex in an attempt to “forcibly” (read: by means of heavy player micromanagement) establish a same-sex relationship.  But I’d never before had the game actually create a gay couple of its own volition.

Within five minutes of arriving at a public space, my Sim met Jared.  As they were chatting, I noticed that one of Leon’s short-term goals involved finding out if Jared was single.  When the conversation moved from the park in town to my Sim’s home, a new goal popped up: a first kiss… with Jared.  Over two or three Sim days — and again, without much encouragement from me — my Sim found himself with a boyfriend.

This blew my mind.  First of all, kudos to Electronic Arts for taking a progressive but entirely logical stance towards same-sex relationships in The Sims 3.  But second, how exactly did my Sim end up being gay?  I see two possibilities:

  1. A random number generator somewhere rolled the dice and decided that Sim-Leon would be gay.  This could be made even more elegant internally if real-world demographics on the prevalence of gay males in the population were used to create those probabilities.
  2. The confluence of the five personality traits I selected somehow added up to “gay.”

To be honest, I don’t know which is more convincing.  On one hand, the random-number-generator explanation is the simplest and, at face value, probably the most likely.  But on the other, what’s the chance that the very first Sim I make, with the intention of mimicking myself, would end up being gay?  The odds are against it, to say the least.

But if The Sims actually does have some internal mechanism for translating arbitrary personality attributes into sexualities, that’s kind of problematic in its own right.  What do the traits “snob” and “perfectionist” tell us about what Electronic Arts thinks a gay man is?  I’d be curious to know what went into creating what can’t be called anything other than a gayness algorithm.  At the very least, it’s a fascinating bit of machine intelligence.