Welcome to the third installment of Design A Day. A bit of business first. I’m hoping to switch over to a morning publication schedule on Monday. The evening updates are a chore after a hard day at the bit mill.

Today’s cultural mashup: The Sims meets Brothers Quay .

Here it is Friday night, and I’m feeling like a good and cheesy horror movie. But first some back-story.

When The Sims first came out, I played quite a bit of it. I will spare you the dreadfully funny story where my Sim did the most amusing thing in response to an unusual stimulus, but suffice to say I was a player. And then one night, at one o’clock in the morning, I suffered a small existential (or perhaps non-existential) crisis. One o’clock in the morning, I am sitting alone in my home, dirty dishes sitting in my sink, washing make-believe plates for my little homunculus. I quietly laid aside the mouse, and never played again.*

Though he rarely gets credited, Philip K. Dick invented this genre in 1964 in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, with Perky Pat. Mars is colonized, just barely, by workers who live in terrible conditions. To escape, they take a drug called Can-D, which translates their consciousness into small human facsimiles, including the eponymous Perky Pat. The dolls (think Ken and Barbie) live in a glamorous scale model homes with classy miniature accessories, and while on the drug, the user lives as their doll, escaping the grinding dullness of their actual lives. Anticipating the Sims Online, the colonists could share their Perky Pat experiences as a group.

So perhaps it is not a surprise that I look on the Sims phenomenon as somewhat sinister. Which brings me to my current jones for a horror movie, which I will instead sublimate into this today’s design, a survival horror game based in a normal suburban development: Most Accidents Happen At Home.

You’ve heard of the Uncanny Valley by now, or you just haven’t been paying attention. I think there is a sociological analog, where we like normal human social interactions, and we like reasonably normal simulation of human interaction, but get too close without nailing it, and we start to crawl out of our skins.

It’s what makes the normal looking people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers so creepy. Their interactions are just slight wrong, and it drives us crazy.

So this one is easy, it’s the Sims:

Stripped of Humor

Much of what makes The Sims bearable is the humor. Tragedy is getting hit in the face with a frying pan. Comedy is someone else getting hit in the face with a frying pan.

Realism Increased

Both in the visual representations of the avatars and environments and in the interactions between the characters. Additionally, the environments all age and decay, subtly, over time.

Characters Never Speak

The funny pseudo-language, the thought bubbles, gone. The avatars speak only through their actions, which are frequently inscrutable. Ideally the game is a MMO, the only MMO where direct character-to-character communication is expressly forbidden.

Incidents of Gruesome Home Accidents Increased

This one goes out to anyone who has ever set their Sim on fire cooking dinner. Each Sim home in Most Accidents Happen At Home would be equipped with a variety of power tools, rusty mowers, dull knives and slippery bathtubs.

The Score

Just about anything by John Cage:

(Concert for Piano and Orchestra from Atlas Eclipticalis )

* This is not an isolated incident. I have spoken with two other people who quit for similar reasons.