I Still Can't Quit 'The Sims'
Welcome to Memory Card. Here, we embark on one final—maybe even fatal—playthrough of the forgotten games of our past. Just like the old days, we might pull some all nighters, we might lose a friend or two, we might resort to eating too many Hot Pockets. Let's see how far we've come. Or regressed.
I scarcely remember life before The Sims. When it hit shelves in 2000, I was just seven years old, and I fell hard, beelining home from school day after day to post up at the family desktop computer and lose myself in this bizarro virtual suburbia. Back then, a typical day’s work involved seducing the maid, shooing away the tragic clown that bedeviled lonesome sims, and cheering when a simmified Drew Carey crashed my most off-the-chain house parties. Two decades and innumerable expansions later, my sims have raided ancient tombs, built rocket ships in their backyards, been abducted and impregnated by aliens, even tracked down Big Foot—and somehow, I still haven’t done it all.
For many adult simmers, the story is much the same. They’ve been playing—and playing, and playing—for years, graduating from the original franchise to its dozens of sequels and spin-offs. There’s no such thing as a casual relationship with The Sims. Players must tinker endlessly with creating their families and constructing their homes, then play through the generations ad infinitum. As a sandbox game with no real end goal, the carrot dangles forever out of reach, driving us to stick around through just one more career advancement, one more aspiration goal, one more simulated day. We can go months without thinking much about it, only to fall back down the rabbit hole for one all-consuming week.
Somehow, the vortex of The Sims has long been a constant in my social life. My earliest memories of the game involve bellying up to the family computer alongside my older brother, who insisted on furnishing the enormous living rooms of his wealthy sims with 20 big-screen televisions; I tried and failed to reason with him, arguing that simple-minded sims could only watch one television at a time. On the much-anticipated release dates of new expansions, my preteen friends and I would beg someone’s mother to drive us to Best Buy after school, where we could each spend our scraped-together allowances on the latest pack, then race to our respective homes and call one another during the slow torture of installation, babbling about all the new gameplay features we planned to explore.
When I went away to college, ready to put childhood pastimes aside, I discovered that many of my new friends were lifelong simmers, leading us to while away many a rainy afternoon playing together in the dorms. Later, when I graduated from college and moved to New York City, my roommate and I often celebrated the end of a grueling workweek by ordering pizza and simming side by side on our lumpy couch. Even now, with all the simmers in my life scattered to the winds, I always smile when I receive a Snapchat of someone else’s computer screen, peopled by sims doing what they do best: having nervous breakdowns, wetting their pants, palling around with the Grim Reaper.
If I’ve learned anything from this little community, it’s that there are many kinds of simmers. There are the taskmasters, like me, who govern their sims’ lives on a strict timetable, wringing every possible milestone and achievement out of them. There are the chaos agents, who view the game as a vehicle for interpersonal drama, sending their wayward sims pinwheeling through cycles of social destruction that include infidelities, broken marriages, and secret love children. There are the sadists, who delight in racking up causes of death both quotidian (drowning, electrocution, starvation) and comical (shark attack, time travel anomaly, murphy bed blunt force trauma). There are the mirror image simmers, who resurrect their real lives and loved ones within the confines of the game, inserting their “simselves” into an optimized virtual life. There are the cheaters, who “motherlode” their way into palatial McMansions, and the non-cheaters, whose Sims shower on their front lawns for lack of funds to build bathroom walls.
Every simmer gets something different out of the game, whether it’s escapism, wish fulfillment, revenge, or an outlet for creativity. When time in reality begins to crawl, as it does on long flights and during the coronavirus quarantine, I can always count on The Sims to suck me in and spit me out five hours later, every bit as dazed and confused as a sim hacked up by a Cowplant. And it provides a comforting illusion of control—if my own life feels impossible to master, the best solution is to micromanage some virtual people. In good times and in bad, as a child and as an adult, the game is always there to stroke my Type A tendencies, providing an outlet to control everything from reproductive decisions to the tassel color on the curtains.
Even so, it's the moments where the game spins out of control that make for the most memorable gameplay. As a taskmaster, my plans for my sims are as endless as CVS receipts. But as they say, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." As much as the game indulges my management impulse, it also checks that impulse by reminding me that even the most successful sim can be crushed to death at any moment by a meteor hurtling toward the earth's surface. My sims can be robbed, fired, or killed in freak accidents at a moment's notice. The slings and arrows of real life aren't quite so theatrical, but the game's duality as both a source of control and an agent of chaos makes for an often hilarious reminder to loosen my grip on the wheel.
The list of what I’ve done in The Sims is endless, but perhaps the list of what I haven’t done is the more interesting one. I’m woefully inexperienced in the supernatural realm of the game, where vampires, mermaids, werewolves, witches, and warlocks reign supreme. I haven’t opened a veterinary practice, haven’t operated a five-star restaurant, haven’t created a wormhole and stepped through into a hidden alien world. Maybe I'll manage to pull some of that off, or maybe my sims will die in a kitchen greasefire just as soon as their restaurant gets up and running. Check back with me in my old age, dear reader—I’ll still be playing away at The Sims 20, trying like ever to cross everything off my list.
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