Sul Sul!
I remember The Sims very fondly. From early childhood, the green plumbob seemed to follow my every action as though it was a tiny imaginary friend, just itching for the next time I would have access to my computer. My earliest memories of The Sims, in fact, come when I was barely tall enough to reach the top of the desk, even when going on my tippy toes. When Mom would take a break from real life responsibilities, I would watch, enraptured, as she played the game.
My eyes wandered the screen, looking at all of these imaginary people in all of their pixelated glory. A child sim walked up the stairs and disappeared off-screen. Gasp! How can she do that?! Just…vanish? An adult man with long, shoulder-length brown hair (who I imagine now to be the child’s father), was cooking dinner for the family. A dog on screen barks at another sim across the street. An adult woman in a sundress and curly hair was reading a book on the Living Room couch.
“Mommeee, can I- can I play dis?” I babbled at her.
Mom turned to me, dark bags under her eyes. She was wearing sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt, the washer upstairs loudly running. “Maybe when you’re older.” She answered after a long pause.
My eyes widened sadly, looking back at the screen as the dinner the father sim was making caught on fire. Mom’s eyes shifted towards the chaos, the fire alarm in the game blaring. The sims ran towards the stove, jumping around in panic as the orange blaze engulfed the counter and fridge next to it.
“FUB FUB SHATTA!” yelled the man on screen.
“…shit.” Mom muttered to herself.
“SHIT!” I repeated back, giggling to myself.
“Benjamin! No!”
Create-a-Sim
When I finally had the chance to play The Sims 3 for myself, I was nine, and was quickly introduced to the world of Sunset Valley. Sunset Valley is the starting world that every player gets when purchasing the game. When the game eventually loaded, my attention was brought to a cinematic overview leading from the ocean before going on land. In the background, soft guitar music played. Bright greens, blues, and oranges reflected onto my glasses; the lens scratched up from the lack of care I took (take) with them.
The game took a long time to load (as I had come to learn over the years, it always does) and I knew it would only be a matter of time before Mom would kick me off the computer. Realizing that the clock was ticking, I quickly entered “Create a Sim”. I was eager to garner any semblance of joy from this experience. After about thirty seconds of loading, a sim greeted me. “Dag dag!” a male sim waved.
But I didn’t want to play a boy. I had a vision in my head. Two women. Best friends. After that…I don’t know, I kind of just wanted to see what would happen. I created the first one, a brunette with long hair, jean shorts and a crop top. The colors were horrendous – a distasteful orange and brown for the shirt, a bright purple for the shorts and a crème color for the heels (just in case you forgot how old I was).
Not realizing there were other outfit categories, such as formal wear and swimwear to pick from, I moved on to the name. I named this sim “Sophia”. Why Sophia? In my mind, she looked like a Sophia. You would agree with me if you were there.
But then, I landed on the “life state” feature. This wasn’t part of my plan, but it happened to catch hold of my curiosity. I clicked on the tiny box with the male sim representing a “human”. There, a bunch of other tiny boxes with more artwork showed up. A vampire in one box, a fairy in another.
Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Ben, don’t click it. That’s not part of the plan. Stick to the plan. Why is your mouse going there? Ben, stop-
Okay, so Sophia ended up turning into a vampire at the last minute. As did my second sim, “Lilly” – given an ill-fitting flower to rest in her bright red hair. I’m not sure what compelled me to press the button. Maybe it was that mom was watching Twilight re-runs on the TV the night before and it sparked inspiration. Maybe because I wanted to see if it was possible to infect the entire town. Maybe pure curiosity overtook my brain. Your guess is as good as mine.
Over the following years, I would spend countless hours in Create-a-Sim, both in the Sims 3 and the Sims 4. It’s one of my favorite parts of the entire game – the ability to create anybody that you want. I feel as though that’s one of the factors that contributed to my decision to go into creative writing. The joy I would get in creating characters, no matter how absurd, comes from the same enjoyment that creating characters in my writing does.
But something I never had to come to terms with until I was older was how a lot of the sims I made were…the same. Not necessarily the same in tone. One sim I would create with a minimalist aesthetic, going easy on the make-up. The clothes would be muted colors. Another sim would have an artsy persona, dressing in bright colors and occasionally putting an apron on if I could just find the right custom content for them without it clipping into the entire outfit. Another sim would dress like they were straight out of the movie Clueless. And speaking of custom content, man have I spent hours (potentially days) sifting through fictional online stores to get downloadable content for my Sims. Sometimes, I could’ve sworn I spent more time “Custom Content Shopping” than I did playing the game.
Here’s the kicker though. Out of however many sims I’ve made over the past decade (my guess is around five million), very rarely did I ever make a sim that looked like me. Or, at least, a specific aspect of me.
There’s a slider in the Sims 3 and the Sims 4 that allow you to affect the character’s weight. This was a big change from the Sims 2 that had three pre-determined weight sizes to choose from: “fit”, “normal”, and “fat”.
Yeah, I’ll just let that sink in for a minute.
Are we good? Okay. So, anyways, as I was saying: there were sliders to affect the character’s weight. But for some odd reason, I would never hold the button down and slide it over to the right, making the character bigger. Instead, I would only make the character smaller. The only time I would ever make a character appear “bigger” is to add muscle to the Sim, but that would be it. The right side of the weight slider was collecting dust over the years.
It’s not that I would never create myself in the game. The Sims would even advertise the game by encouraging players to create themselves. So, I did.
An idealized version of myself.
I was never great at creating real people in The Sims, so I’ll cut myself slack as to why my face wasn’t a complete carbon copy to the one in real life. I would create myself as an adult. My dark hair remained the same. I kept wearing glasses, knowing that I would most likely continue to have issues with my eyesight. But that was never a big insecurity of mine. My weight was something I always wanted to change. It was something I expected would change. So, I changed it.
Elementary school Ben, middle school Ben, high school Ben. They might have grown in maturity, but the way they would make Sims Ben were all the same. Surprisingly, as I got older, I let myself sit the reticle in the middle of the “weight” slider. I gave myself muscle. I made myself attractive. Or at least, what society would deem attractive.
But it wasn’t me.
One of these days I should go in and make myself for how I actually am. It would be good for me. And it won’t sting as much as younger me probably thought it would.
Skills
Throughout my time playing the game, one of my favorite skills in the game has been, ironically enough, the writing skill. All you have to do to start achieving skill points in the writing skill is by clicking on a computer in game with the Sim you want to gain this skill and tell them to “practice writing”. Eventually, after a certain point, you can have them write novels for royalty checks. You can even name the novels and give them summaries. The books will be available for purchase at the bookstore in game, which I always found to be a neat detail.
I’m not sure when I started doing this, but later in my life, I would mostly have a sim that wouldn’t have a “job”. At least, not set in the game. Instead, I would have them live at home and write the entire day.
Wouldn’t that be amazing? No responsibilities? No distractions? Just a computer and a dream. No writer’s block to think of.
I say this as I return to this piece ten months after my initial draft.
There are other skills in the game as well. The athletic skill can be completed by any number of activities: working out at the gym, swimming in a pool, going on a jog, watching a fitness channel on the TV. The cooking skill can be accomplished by cooking any meal. The painting skill can grow overtime by continuing to paint on an art easel.
As I play the game, I usually go in with the expectation that my Sims will live well-balanced, accomplished lives. When they die, they’ll leave the Sims realm with many skills. It doesn’t necessarily matter which skills; it could be pertaining to the playthrough I’m on. But they’ll be maxed out on the cooking skill, the athletic skill, the painting skill, the charisma skill, the logic skill – and yes, the writing skill.
But as I play the game and watch carefully as I speed through my sim maxing out the writing skill, I begin to have questions. The matriarch of my virtual dollhouse is writing her tenth novel, and I begin to feel guilt. Why is it that I’m caring so much about pixels on a screen writing her book when I could be busy writing mine?
Every Sim is Queer
Did you know that? Did you know that every sim is canonically bisexual in the game? Gay marriage wasn’t possible in the first installment of the Sims, but every installment following allowed for it. As such, it’s possible for every sim to romance…every sim. Gender is not a deal breaker for any of them.
I remember the first time I discovered this. I was still in elementary school. I was at my dad’s house and had brought a disk of the game over, installing it on his computer as well. It was a stormy night, and he was asleep, so I had no worries at all about being disturbed.
Despite never really creating men in The Sims 3, I had gone in that night with a different mindset. Because I was the only one awake, I had allowed myself to do something I felt was dirty. Something that I felt was wrong and inappropriate. Something that I would be embarrassed about if I was caught.
I created two men. One of which vaguely looked like me, though I don’t think I processed that at the time. I clicked the check mark when I was done and had the option to go to the family tree. I was curious whether I could make them husbands.
The Sims 3 allowed me to.
I was shocked. I never thought the game would let me. But it did. My eyes widened. I quickly entered the game and moved them into a pre-made house, not wanting to waste any time building a house for a save file I knew I was going to delete before I went to bed anyway. What would happen if Dad found it?
After a few seconds of the game loading (Dad’s computer was in better shape than my mom’s), it was time. I took control of the sim that looked like me, clicking on the other man. And then I hesitated for a moment when the “Romance” option was amongst the wheel of interactions I could click.
The two sims started talking on their own, as “Free Will” was an option in the game that was on by default. With free will on, my creations had no limits for conversation. A speech bubble popped up above one of their heads, indicating they were talking about llamas.
A few seconds went by before I finally had the guts to click on the romance option. A new wheel popped up with more options. “Flirt”, “Embrace”, “Pickup Line”, “Flirtatious Joke”, “Whisper in Ear”, “Hold Hands”, “Leap into Arms”.
“Kiss”.
I felt my cheeks getting warmer as the storm raged on outside. I looked over my shoulder every now and then, hoping nobody would walk in on me. After the two men kissed, the sims walked inside the house. The one that looked like me left the conversation to go watch TV, while the other sim went off to look at a “new object” – which was just a toilet. I had other plans in mind though.
I instructed the two men to walk over to the bedroom. A bit blunt of my child self. But I needed to know whether the game allowed for it.
At least, that was the excuse I used. I totally wasn’t gay; this was for science.
I clicked on the bed and told both sims to “relax”. They did as such. But eventually, one of them got off the bed. I told him to get back on. Then, the one who looked like me got off the bed when the other man got back on. When I managed to get my look alike back on the bed, the other sim got distracted by something shiny and wanted to go look at it, getting off the bed.
This went on for three in game hours.
When I finally figured out how to turn off “free will” (I promise, I gave it back to my Sims when they learned how to behave), they were both laying on the bed. I told them to cuddle, since that’s how you initiated it. And then, I was amazed…the “WooHoo” option showed up. An action that I thought only men and women could do in game, where they jump under the covers, and they move and giggle for a little bit before coming back up.
Oh. My. God. Two men can fucking WooHoo in the Sims 3. This called for a celebration! My hypothesis worked! My science experiment was a success!
What didn’t need to happen was me clicking the “WooHoo” button eight times. That was a bit overkill.
As funny as this story is, looking back on it, nothing about what I’ve said so far is inherently “wrong”. At least, not in the way that I thought it would be when I was nine or ten, or however old I was. What I do find wrong is what I didn’t do.
It never translated to my “real” saves.
Any of my actual games, where I played families or long term, never had a gay couple. I would never introduce gay characters or storylines for whatever reason. It was never part of my “fantasy”. It was just something dirty I saw that I would hide behind mysterious, one day in-game save files that would soon be deleted and lost to the void forever.
Just like my weight, my queerness was something that could be “changed”. In the Sims, I could be anything, even something I’m not. Being queer was something I toyed around with from time to time in the game, but it was only ever a “toy”. It was never something to be taken seriously. It was never something to be open about.
When I had to come to terms with the fact that…no, having two men make out in the Sims 3 and have an unrealistic amount of sex for twenty-four hours in game is probably not the sign of someone ready to date a woman, I had to mourn something. I had to mourn the loss of what would be a “normal” life. I had always imagined myself having a family. Becoming a father, raising kids. Having a wife, even if I imagined her as more of a “best friend” than I did as a romantic partner.
When I played the Sims 3 seriously, my games would reflect my mourning. Despite knowing that there’s nothing wrong with being queer. Despite knowing that you can have kids and have a family while being queer (and coming to terms with that even as young as an elementary school kid), I couldn’t get past that while playing the Sims. Every couple, every family, every lineage would be the same straight, heteronormative family tree. And all with pixelized smiles behind a picket fence.
Not one sim. Not a single sim would be allowed to romantically engage with someone of the same sex. I wouldn’t dare let them. I was a tyrant on their souls. Marriage was between a man and a woman. They would have kids. Family holidays. Close familial bonds.
Everything that I desperately yearned for.
Dag Dag!
I still play the game. Not as much now that I’m in college. But I have had a lot of time to think about what the game means to me. Memories and nostalgia have flooded in. Instead of doing college schoolwork, I look at the Sims 3 icon on my desktop and imagine escaping into the game to do my virtual children’s schoolwork.
Those vampire sims that I talked about earlier? As I was writing this, I was attempting so desperately to remember how their story ended. If I had continued playing their save file. And then I remembered that I didn’t because they died. The sun had gotten to them, making them effectively immobile. They couldn’t get blood from other Sims, making my plan to infect the entire town a failure.
And then the game crashed. The Sims were lost to time. It wasn’t the only time the game crashed on me. The game crashes a lot.
Like, a lot a lot.
But I still have fond memories sitting in my room and playing the game. It gave me my love for creative writing. I have so many stories that I’ve told in the game, so many fictional families that I love. All of which are just for me.
As I sit here, writing this paper in sweatpants and a stained t-shirt, I look back at Mom playing the game when I was a little boy. I look back at how she was ignoring her responsibilities for an hour. One would think she was being irresponsible. But just a year ago, I was working on this piece for the first time for an Intro to Nonfiction creative writing class. My first draft was a week late.
We’re all trying our best. Not all of us can have maxed our skill points in every category and amazing relationships with everyone when bills are due the next day. And it’s not like there are cheat codes here to save us.
In a way, I’m happy there aren’t any.
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