Wrimmingfun as an Art Form

wrimmingfun: writing + simming = so much fun

Recently, after I’d been enthusiastically sharing my experiences wrimmingfunning with one of my closest friends, she shrugged, tried valiantly not to roll her eyes, and said, “Tell me about something real. Tell me about something related to you and the earth.”

I thought of my garden and the pansies growing in containers–how the orange, yellow, white, and violet pansies each have a different aroma and how the violet can look blue or black depending on the light. I thought of my cello, and the bow angles needed to produce a focused sound when playing Bach’s second prelude in D minor. I thought of the low D in that piece, and how I feel that note vibrate through the spaces in my bones, all the spaces between the cells in my body, and how the vibrations pass through me, through the house, and then they are gone.

How is the ephemeral nature of a pansy’s violet, of the low D of a cello, more real, more lasting and more of this earth, than my Sims and the stories which my Sims and I produce through wrimmingfun?

Aren’t my Sims, too, essentially, composed of alternating pulses of energy, just like the pansy’s blue-black-violet and the cello’s low D?

Aren’t these products of wrimmingfun more lasting, more real than the scents of pansies or the colors of their blooms or even the petals of the flowers, which will be part of the compost that enriches my garden within six months? Compared to pansies, the notes from my cello are gossamer wings, disappeared into the air within minutes, if not seconds. My Sims and my Sim stories last longer than that.

This same friend has often suggested to me that I rework my wrimmingfun into novels or short stories. Yet, with the exception of the Super-Short “Spring Again for the First Time,” this is not possible. If one takes the Sims and the Simming out of wrimmmingfun it becomes wrfun–which doesn’t contain enough vowels to be even a made-up word! Many fine and talented storytellers do use Sims as a means of illustrating their stories, and these stories can exist very well without Sims. This is writing that happens to use Sims to produce the illustrations. This literature would lose nothing if an artist, instead of a computer game, were to produce the illustrations.

In true wrimmingfun, Sims and Simming are integral to the creative act. My Sims and I co-create our stories. Sometimes, I will have an idea or an idea or theme will wish to be expressed through me, and my Sims will cooperate and create with me the situations and interactions that allow for the explorations of this idea or theme. Other times, it is my Sims who seem to have the ideas or themes that need to be expressed, and in these cases, I will follow them, observing and listening to them, so that I can tell the stories that are asking to be told.

My talented friends and colleagues who are co-hosting and co-producing S-GAS all create wrimmingfun (in addition to possibly also creating works of literature that is not wrimmingfun). To me, as a writer, reader, and Simmer, distinguishing between wrimmingfun and other forms of literature allows me to honor the integrity of wrimmingfun as an artform that is real and valuable, in and of itself. This is an artform that is more than the sole efforts of the Simmer and writer, for it is a true collaboration between Player and Sim.