The Sims, a Media Event (Score 1)

"With more than 18 million units sold, The Sims' ethnomethodology-in-action is a financially lucrative and sociologically instructive game-cum-commentary. When read critically, The Sims' representations of social significance illuminate the conventions of Western cultural valuation via the accumulation of personal property. Demonstrative of the Culture Industry's ability to market Americans their own day-to-day lives as new and exciting, The Sims also reinforces certain gender, racial, class, and body image stereotypes.

"We come to an appreciation of The Sims as less a videogame -- which are effectively seen alternately as puerile bloodbaths and degrading, prurient peep shows by the general public -- and more as a widespread way in which millions of mature Americans are enthralled by Simulations of their own mundane lives. A perfect, seemingly innocuous way to sell consumers what they already know; an enormously profitable, explicitly manufactured, overtly normative 'game.'

*Taken from a short-ish essay I wrote last semester to get into the Media Studies major at my University.