Sunday 15 September 2002

Pic of the day: "Say, haven't I seen you in another life?" (Tove here is actually a Tarot-reading New Age chic in the game, too. She was that even before this bizarre bug happened ...)

Love is a bug

Watching him from the dance floor, she could see him talk with the red-haired woman. His movements, everything about him was so eerily familiar, as if they had been best friends forever. And yet she knew they had just recently met. Why then was it as if a long lost love was coming back to her? Even just staying in the same room with him, her feelings for him were growing all the time. It felt as if she was not learning, but being reminded how to love him. As if he had always been a part of her life, unknown to her ...

And what's even more surprising, this happened not in some cheap weekly or an even cheaper Harry Potter fanfic. Oh no. It happened in The Sims (with all expansion packs up to Vacation). I had started a new small Sim family, a single mother with a girl, and moved her into the neighborhood. Great was my surprise when I checked her relationship status with a certain nerdy neighbor and found that she had a long-term friendship of nearly 100, even though they had just met. For some obscure reason, it seems the long-term value started out at 100 rather than 00. This is the first Sim I have seen it happen to. It was not reciprocated, by the way. Though he is warming to her now. ^_^

***

From Hot Date onward, Sim relationships are a lot more complex. There is a short term friendship value and a long-term. If short term is higher, as in a growing relationship, it converts to long-term at a rate of 3:1, once an hour I think, but only if they are in the same house (including downtown). If the relationship is fading, it converts back, at the same rate. Building up a relationship takes a lot more time than it did in the unmodified game; but once a relationship is established, it is also much more durable. A beautiful song by Chris de Burgh comes to mind:

It would take much more than this to break
a love so long in the making;
it would take much more than talk or dreams
to shake so strong a foundation ...
more than this.

The song deals with the issue of jealousy, obviously, but it does so in a cozy and rosy way. Chris de Burgh goes nicely with Sim love. Not sure about the real thing ... I seem to know less and less about that with each passing year.

Yes, it is a bug. And I suspect this is also the case when it happens in real life.

Yes, I understand that some people experience this in real life. They meet someone, and it is as if they have known them forever, and just had forgotten. Being together, it all comes rushing back to them – even though there isn't actually anything to rush back. Some think they have been lovers in an earlier life, or that they knew each other in the before-life ... the spiritual realm or something. Psychologists think they have built a kind of ready-to-use dream mate which then is triggered by a real person ... something that person does or says, or even the way they look or smell. If this happens to both of them, that's great, I suppose. That's not likely, of course. So, like my Sims, there may be some need to convince that other person. Luckily guys are fairly easy to convince ... Or at least Sims are.