Why do people love life-simulation games so much?
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is a Nintendo life-simulation game released last month. The game is a follow-up to the original Japanese-exclusive Tomodachi Collection for the DS in 2009.
In its debut week, Tomodachi Life topped the UK video game charts and sold over 3.8 million copies in its first two weeks.
Essentially, it’s a mix of everyone’s favourite Wii feature, making your own ‘Mii’, and then creating your own universe around it.
Games like Tomodachi Life, The Sims 4, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, even Minecraft and Roblox, allow players to create and customise humanoid avatars while completing mundane, sometimes trivial tasks that we would probably complain about doing in real life.
Cooking, cleaning, going to work, completing home renovations, planting seeds and harvesting crops–all activities humans have been doing for thousands of years. Yet somehow, in a virtual frame, it becomes endlessly engaging.
All of my friends are talking about Tomodachi Life. Making their own avatars and celebrities/fictional characters, humorously engage with one another; Voldemort, Joe Biden, the entire Knicks team, Spiderman, all interacting in one universe.
It’s blown up on social media, similar to the way Animal Crossing did during the pandemic. My Animal Crossing phase was serious, but I think when everyone was locked down, we needed that escapism.
Games where you can play God certainly enact some questionable choices, but ultimately, people love the freedom of living life unconfined by the real pressures of society.
Is the current political and economic state of the world causing people to fall back into life simulation games again?
These games provide reprieve from the daily horrors of news cycle. Among the never-ending juggle of work, study, basic needs and social interaction, it makes sense why we all crave escapism and life-simulation games like this.
We want a utopian mirror to retreat to when real life feels too much.
I’m so eager to jump on the Tomodachi Life train, though I have no time to properly dive into it, and I think that, in itself, proves my point exactly.
Read more about Tomodachi Life here.
