A few days earlier I posted an article about a blog designed to be a journal of two homeless sims – Alice and Kev. Apparently news caught around to other gaming sites as CrunchGear has interviewed Rob Burkinshaw, the creator of the Alice and Kev project.
Tell me about the project? What was the inspiration?
It began simply as an unusual, more challenging way of playing the game. I took screenshots as I went, as virtual photography is something of a hobby of mine, and posted them at the Quarter to Three games forum in order to show my friends what I had been doing, and to encourage them to do the same. People liked it, and started asking me to move it somewhere more accessible so that they could link their friends to it, so I set it up with its own blog.
The idea for playing The Sims as a homeless person began with the challenges that people would come up with on forums for Sims 2 for different ways of playing the game. The most common was the ‘legacy challenge’, where people would try to play a single family through ten generations. Another was the ‘poverty challenge’ where you would start with a single sim, remove all of their money, and then try to build them up to be successful from there. You couldn’t actually survive like that in The Sims 2, so it was mostly just a very hard way of playing the game as you had to manage your tiny funds to build your sim a basic house as soon as possible. I liked the idea, though, and felt so sad for my little person as they struggled to survive those first few days without a home. I knew it was going to be one of the first things I tried when The Sims 3 came out, and it turned out to play very differently, as the new features of The Sims 3 actually allowed you to legitimately survive and play as a homeless person.
It wasn’t started as any kind of social commentary, or social experiment, but I guess part of the reason I found the idea of that way of playing interesting is that homelessness is something I think about. I’ve had some very interesting conversations with sellers of The Big Issue over the years I’ve been working and studying in Cambridge.