I’ve put countless hours into the different Sims games. I remember reading about the first Sims game in a magazine in my high school library. I fell in love from that moment on. I loved creating stories. I think part of the reason people love the Sims is that it’s a modern day role-playing game. It lets us live out our fantasies and sometimes our nightmares. I’m disabled, and I think, if I take an honest look at myself, I have to admit that strengthens the appeal for me. I get to role-play as an able-bodied person.
I played the Sims 1 and 2 on PC and the Sims 3 on console. I had a blast, but I must admit that it started to appeal to my love for grinding in RPGs more than my love of telling stories. “ oh I’m going to combine this career with that aspiration and this family life and see how much money I can make”. “ Let’s queue up those social interactions so I can talk my boss into a raise”
I’m playing the Sims 4 now and something has started to happen that I don’t remember happening before. I’m starting to connect with them in a different way. Not that I didn’t care about them before. If I didn’t care on some level, I wouldn’t bother to play the game, and I don’t overly care about them. I’ve spent hours researching how to anger a sim to death, , but things happen that affect my decision making. I had two soulmate sims. I aged them both to elder at same moment because I couldn’t bear to see one moping around the house for days without the other.
I watched child Sims playing pirates at the park when an old lady suddenly dropped dead. The kids gathered around crying and then begin to talk to and pester the Grim Reaper until he left. Then, they returned to their pirate game, but the moments between the yelling were far more subdued than before. I imagined they were pretending to save the old lady from some creature from the deep.
I have plans for this child. He’s going to grow up spoiled to become a womanizer and squander the fortune his dad made from nothing. His dad literally made it from nothing. I wasted every last cent of his dad money, I did not allow him to build on his own lot. He had to save up enough money to buy a house while being homeless. He’s a best-selling author who’s going to die of old age before his son is a teen
This brought about the most gut wrenching moment of all. The child woke up with a monster under his bed. I tried to talk the monster because I have high social skills, but he went running into his parent’s room. The dad sprayed under the bed for masters, and the child hugged him. My heart broke more than any Sims game has ever been able to do it before because I knew his dad only had a few days to live.
