I'm in the shower when I realize that a videogame is trying to change the way I look at the world. I'm thinking about the impending death of my first Sims 3 character, an evil genius named Jurgen Rampage who has, in his life, risen to the top of the criminal underworld, been to prison twice, become a chess master, married a romance novelist, had a daughter, and beat two women and one man senseless for criticizing him while I left him alone to go to the bathroom. Jurgen is currently eighty six days old (or roughly fifteen hours, real world time), has mastered all of his important skills, and spends most days either playing chess with his teenage daughter or tinkering with household objects to make them indestructible. He's getting old, in other words. The little green bar that represents the days he has left until he dies is getting distressingly close to full, and I'm worried—genuinely worried—that there's nothing I can do to slow its tireless march toward the right side of the screen. Jurgen might be a pretend psychotic miscreant, but I'm the one pretending him, damn it, and there's so much more I want to do with his life.

I remember, as I'm washing my hair, that the game provides several ways to prolong the lives of your characters. Jurgen jogged over seven hundred miles as a young man, which bought him a few more days, but I fear the more direct solutions may be out of his reach. Gardeners can grow life plants to add days or death flowers to bargain with the reaper, but Jurgen wouldn't know what end of a shovel to use to plant a seed and he doesn't have the time to learn. The scientists who live down the road seem to think they can bring someone back to life with a sample of their ashes, but I'd rather not put poor Morgan Rampage—Jurgen's honour roll student daughter, his pride and joy, the person he gets positive “moodlets” just from speaking to—through all the grief (ie: negative moodlets).

“Hm,” I say to myself as I lather the disgusting lump of gristle I call my body in cheap soap. “Hmm.”

Through his constant chess-playing and shrewd manipulation of other criminals, Jurgen has developed the ability to “tutor” other Sims—or, in practical terms, to pass on those skills he's most acquainted with very quickly to others. He might not have enough time left to grow magic flowers, but certainly he'll be able to pass on his skills as a master logician to his daughter, maybe even teach her how to repair the toilet when it breaks. Certainly he could continue working for a little longer, maybe invest in a few businesses so that one day she might have the resources to grow those plants or—at the very least—live as long and accumulate as many “lifetime happiness points” as he had.

In the Sims 3, all of these desires, anxieties, skills and experiences are abstracted into slow-filling progress bars, cleverly written status effect notifications and brilliant plethora of “success” sounds that constantly reassure and encourage the player that, yes, they're doing well, they're making progress and they should continue playing. But part of the game's appeal is how relevant all of its systems—as lighthearted as they are—can actually be. My father couldn't see a comforting blue bar above my head indicating the steady improvement of my math skills when he sat down with me, every day for an entire week, with a pack of playing cards and a foolscap list of problems I struggled with at school. My mother wasn't rewarded with a pleasant chiming sound and the ability to pick one of my personality characteristics when she used what little money we had to sign me up for a children's art camp. But they both did these things, and I am who I am today because of them.

Now, I don't want to insult my parents—or, indeed, humanity as a whole—by saying a series of colorful progress bars and a running total of commodified happiness is anything but a cutely reductionist way of representing deep, complex psycho-spiritual needs, just in the same way Slaughterhouse Five can only convey the barest glimmer of Kurt Vonnegut's suffocating existential grief after witnessing the fire bombing of Dresden. But as someone who grew up bathed in the phosphorescent glow of televisions and computer monitors, it is a good example of “terms I understand.”

So I let Jurgen Rampage go gently into that good night, content in the fact that very little progress would be lost to attrition when Morgan eventually took control of his estate (and that his ghost would probably come back to comically haunt his neighbors). I don't even take his ashes to the scientists down the road for reanimation, as most of the gameplay features I still want to try are more easily accessible to younger characters—those with more time, fewer responsibilities and different interests. And I wonder, watching Jurgen's hilariously overblown death sequence while my hair dries, exactly what kind of Sim Morgan will turn out to be.