Today's random rambling

Posted Saturday, 17 May 2008

Well, after a long time playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl (according to the Wii console, I've played for an accumulative total of 71 hours and 43 minutes), I've finally tired of it, for the time being, and have gone back to The Sims 2. I've decided to put all thoughts of crooked old EA out of my head whilst I play any EA game. But, I digress.
I've gone back to my mostly-finished neighbourhood, called "Tokaimachi" (that's a synthesis of the Japanese words for "city" and "town"). In Tokaimachi lives a teenager called Charlie Martin (I used Charles Martinet's likeness , hence "Charlie Martin").
Now, in the neighbourhood story, Charlie's origins are shrouded in mystery. Legend has it that a man (presumably his father, though no one is absolutely certain of that) moved into Tokaimachi and bought an empty lot, where he built a small house. Shortly after the last brick was laid, however, the man disappeared. The house, though structurally sound, is not entirely finished, and is lacking in wallpaper -- however, it is fully furnished and connected to Tokaimachi's power and water grid. Now, although the man who purchased the lot has vanished, Charlie remains in the house as its sole occupant. To add to the mystique, the man moved into town wearing a black fedora hat... Charlie now wears that exact same hat!
In reality, the original Charlie Martin was an adult. When I moved him onto the lot, I used a cheat code to de-age him back into a teenager. As the adult Charlie's hat is also available to teenage Sims, I decided to have him keep the hat.
Now that you know who Charlie Martin is, I can continue on with my story. I decided that I wanted to have a teenage girl living in Tokaimachi -- one whose background is equally as unclear as Charlie's (I made her into a teenager the same way I did with Charlie). I had a deuce of a time trying to find a place for her to live, since I'd just built two other houses -- one for a novellist called Atlas Conyngham, and one for a musician called Junichi Uematsu... it's slim pickin's in Tokaimachi for new Sims moving in.
In any case, I found an empty lot (the last one, I might add), moved the girl in (her name is Hélène St-Lucien, by the way), and built the house.
So, I intended for her to become Charlie's girlfriend -- I was trying to contrive a way for them to meet. The game seemed to be reading my thoughts, as Hélène had autonomously invited Charlie back to the house after school! A fortuitous happenstance, indeed! See, whenever a kid Sim invites a schoolmate over after school, the two Sims get an automatic boost in each other's relationship scores.
Anyway, I had a thought just then -- why not write a story about Hélène and Charlie? I then remembered that my last attempt to write a story with The Sims ended with me giving up and deleting it, as there was no cohesive plotline, with so many twists and turns that I eventually forgot what the original point was supposed to be.
But then, I thought, "what kind of thing in real life has no real plot?" The answer was, a diary. Girls in real life often keep diaries, and, since life is not a film, there is never any third-person narrative and no plotline to speak of.
I got down to writing a story called, Hélène St-Lucien's Diary -- KEEP OUT! It's still a work in progress, though. I think I have roughly ten pages by now. Each Sim-day, I'll write a new entry, using a photograph that I took of something or other. I think that the most interesting thing about this project is that I am able to write like a teenage girl surprisingly well. Like any good writer, though, I tend to become the character for whom I write lines. Take that last sentence, for example -- writing as Hélène, I would say, "I totally become that girl".