Time does weird things. Weird mysterious things that I can't figure out. But let's talk about The Sims 3 for a moment and who crashed my party.

Guess who's coming to dinner after the jump.

During an informal dinner gathering (i.e. filling the social and hunger bars at the same time), a baby appears in the vicinity of Harlan Whyte's front door. Does it belong to someone here? Is it selling something? Was it delivered? Is this the new way babies are born in The Sims 3, as if they were ordered from kozmo.com?

After watching it crawl around a bit, it occurs to me I can click on the baby to check its name and thereby figure out who it belongs to. The baby's name is Nicole Fugger. Therefore, she is clearly the daughter of Chuck Fugger, who is in the kitchen chatting with someone while Nicole waddles in and out the front door.

Chuck isn't just some random NPC. When I first got The Sims 3, I invited several friends over to make up their own characters to help populate my town. Among those characters was Chuck Fugger. Then I rolled up my own character, scientist Harlan Whyte, and started playing the game. In the previous Sims games, while I played Harlan and he advanced through life, time would be frozen for everyone else. Nothing would happen to Chuck Fugger while Harlan aged and eventually died. Chuck would still be a young adult, lo, those many days later.

But in The Sims 3, time passes for everyone. As Harlan ages, so too does Chuck. And that's apparently not all Chuck does, considering the little bundle of joy waddling about underfoot. My curiosity is piqued. What's Chuck been up to?

So I save my game and go to the "Edit Town" option. From here, I can make another household active, which means I'll then be in control of the sims who live there while everyone else in town functions according to his or her free will. I select the Fugger household, which I now see is inhabited by Chuck and Nicole Fugger. There is no sign of a mother. Sure enough, Chuck and baby Nicole are going about their business in the house (which seems to be exactly as it had been left when Chuck started playing as a young adult; the ability to buy new things isn't a facet of a sim's free will).

But how can I figure out what Chuck's been up to? Specifically, with whom did he hook up? The Sims 2 had a history panel that recorded significant events in a sim's life. The Sims 3 has no such thing. I can click on Nicole and look at her family tree, but it consists of two people: Nicole herself and her father Chuck. There is no record of her mother. Did Chuck adopt? Did the mother die? Has Chuck Fugger been so promiscuous that he doesn't even know who the mother is? I'm not satisfied with any of these theories, so I'm instead just going to posit that Nicole Fugger sprang from her father's forehead. It's a Sims 3 version of immaculate conception.

Up next: videogames within videogames
(Click here for the previous Sims 3 game diary.)