30 Rock: a nod to two generations of gamers

For those that missed it, 30 Rock subtly covered two decades of gaming in a scene last week — Tina Fey's character went from imitating Mario in Donkey Kong to drawing a life lesson from The Sims about 30 seconds later. She starts by admonishing Alec Baldwin for being too Irish:

Be Italian for like one second: "I'm-a Jack, I don't know who-a my father is, I'm-a so emotional I'm going to smash-a these barrels..."

And then seconds later she shares what she knows about fatherhood:

Look Jack, I don't have a lot of personal life experience, but if I have learned anything from my Sims family... when a child doesn't see his father enough, he starts to jump up and down. And then his mood level will drop... until he pees himself.

Seriously, who on the 30 Rock staff is playing The Sims? I honestly can't name one person who's played it, but apparently it's the best-selling video game franchise of all time with over 100 million copies sold (I'm guessing mostly in Japan). I'll confess I was addicted to Sim City 2000 in high school, but only because I was a master of civic orchestration. And because you could raises taxes to 20%, and then cut it to 19%, and they would cheer. Every time. Heh heh, stupid Sims.

Btw, if you haven't seen The King of Kong, I highly recommend it. Now there's a story of heroes and villains...