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The possibilities when you play with life are simply endless.
-Rachel Franklin, The Sims 4 Preview
So it's time to reconsider games, to recognize what's different about them and how they benefit-not denigrate-culture.
-Will Wright, designer of The Sims
Online environments are rapidly changing our understanding of what it means to construct a life story and what identity itself might come to mean in virtual worlds. In auto/biography or life writing studies,1 the growing interest in forms of online media representation is a reflection of a wider cultural investment in online and visual identifications, and in the creation of life stories and identities in new media. That investment, however, raises a question for me about the nature of auto/biography scholarship. Could it be that the conventions about terminology and the scholarly assumptions about connections between lives and narratives are creating a problem in auto/biography studies, with its twin emphases on the importance of "life" and "writing"? Can newer media teach us anything about what "life" looks like when the first person becomes an avatar who both is and is not the player of a game? Should we even refer to the activity of world-building in a game as writing, or as narrative at all?
This essay poses a direct challenge to the field of life writing by asking us to rethink "life" and "writing" as automedia, which describes the enactment of a life story in a new media environment. I propose to retool Sidonie Smith and Julia's Watson's discussion of automediality in Reading Autobiography, where they characterize it as a theoretical concept from Europe which recognizes that the choice and materiality of a medium constitute the subjectivity rendered within it (168). Automediality has been used in this manner to discuss selfrepresentation in contemporary art practice, for example. I think that this concept has enormous potential if we consider it in light of developments in digital environments. Automedia, I suggest, could also name a new methodology for understanding how digital and/or online interfaces work within the area of auto/biography studies.
With a case study from the sandbox game2 series The Sims, one of the bestselling video game series in history with 174 million copies sold (Gaudiosi), I will think about what it means when terms like...