ALICE AND KEV

Beginning this June, English game design student Robin Burkinshaw began a blog about Alice and Kev, two homeless characters she created in The Sims 3. Alice was then a little girl and Kev was her rambling, volatile father, and they lived together in a park.

As Burkinshaw tracked their daily doings, the characters did a lot of weird, surprising things that made them seem truly alive. You had to admire Alice's resourcefulness as she found places to sleep and stuff to eat, and Kev was almost a Dickensian figure, a grubby man who could be hateful and brutish to his daughter one moment and an endearing, comic blowhard the next. You had to hate him for the way he treated his only child, but there was still something charming about the heedless, crazy way he charged through life.

The Alice and Kev blog was really funny, but it was also unexpectedly heartbreaking at times. Alice was a naturally sympathetic character who had to grow up much too fast, taking care of a perpetually childish father who never appreciated anything she did for him. The story made you look at homelessness from a new angle, even as you knew that these characters didn't actually exist at all, they were just a bunch of zeroes and ones on a hard drive on the other side of the world.

The story of Alice and Kev reached its end today, on a perhaps inevitably bittersweet note. But if you can't bear to say goodbye to these characters just yet, Burkinshaw has made them available for download in your copy of The Sims 3. The idea sounds a little creepy somehow, like learning at the end of a production of Death of a Salesman that you can take Willy Loman home with you and set him up on a cot in your garage. But it's also sort of sweet. Alice and Kev began their virtual lives without a home, and now they'll have homes in hard drives all over the world.

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