Just curious! Do men and women play Sims 3 differently?

[samoht04]

I get bored of one sim cause if they work they spend ages where you just sit there waiting and when tehy sleep but with multiple sims they don't have the same schedual so they dop things at different times. If you understood that the you will realise I prefer families. 

[e^(pi*i)]

I'm a guy, and I prefer families. I usually play single sims, though, because I like to make one person and follow them through their coming into being and hoping they'll start a bit of a legacy. Unfortunately, what this usually means it that I'll get them to go out with one person and be like "The first person someone dates isn't going to marry them." so I get them to break up. I do this maybe once more if I can, but then I realize that I've expended all of the appropriately aged and gendered people that are also single in the game, so I get bored and start another. I only recently realized this, so I just started a couple, and it's going great. I like it because you don't sit around all day and study, and, when you do, it's actually interesting because you so rarely get to between caring for the babies. Never enough time, as opposed to single sims where you forever have too much time.

[Chsharpe]

I play families. I tend to start the game off with my sims having the life I have and then I go on with their kids making them do what I hope my kids will do.

[Lilygirl]

I'm female and I play with families. I usually create one Sim and then have them get married and start a family pretty soon. I find 1 or 2 Sims gets boring really fast! Like by week 2. And I create either a male or female Sim.

[Tayena]

Female here and I play with both options, but I chose the playing with families in the poll. When I play, I generally create one of the characters that I have in my head. Then I play with them for a while, until I either get bored of playing with just one sim, or I feel that she has grown up and accomplished enough to be able to settle down and raise a family. I become way too attached to sims and treat the game like it is a story or a movie. But yeah, in the end I always end up playing with families. To me, its sort of the natural flow of where the sims life goes. Unless there is an unfortunate accident.

I suppose I love playing the sims, mainly because I can create little stories and things.

[chihuahua0]

I'm a male (surprise surprise) and in most of my saves in both The Sims 2 and The Sims 3, I play families. Unfortuantely, I hadn't got close to the third generation yet. 

[Glic2000]

I'm male and I prefer playing more than one Sim.  One at a time depresses me, possibly because I live alone in real life.  I prefer the game to be different from my real life:  I like to have a few Sims in the house and I find the female ones more interesting than males.  I also like scenarios where there's some conflict, or at least, contrast, between the different members of the household. 

I think one of the most interesting ways of starting a new game is to have a single parent and a son or daughter.

I love building houses!  It definitely takes practice.  My best advice in that department is to just look at houses in real life (or photos on the 'net) and use those for ideas or references. 

[athena]

I'm a female, obvious from my name and I play more families than singles. In response to the post made by Metropolis Man, I do like playing Diablo (it was my first favorite game before Sims stole my heart away). I also like playing Tomb Raider and the latest versions of Command and Conquer as well as Spacecraft and Warcraft. But 90% of my game time is in Sims 2 or 3.

Part of the fun in Sims (starting from Sims 2) is the ability of the characters to have children and watch them grow, hence my proclivity to families. My free will is always turned high, sometimes I just sit back and watch the Sims do their own thing and it is fascinating to see how they conduct their own virtual lives. I only interfere with the Sims lives if I am on a challenge or a legacy.  My Sims are created based on fictional characters (mostly from TV or the movies or books) and I would play out their lives the way I thought these characters would be if they had a plot/life different from what was written about them.  My houses are based on model houses I have seen in interior decor/architecture magazines. I find it fascinating that I can simulate these houses in the game and have Sim characters live in it. I'm not too much into the Adventures and tombs because there are enough of those in the other games cited above (I just do the tombs because one of my Sims have this LTW of being a Great Adventurer -- the one I named after McGyver, the TV hero)   

[Alexandria_]

I'm a female, and I love playing families. Toddlers are my favourite age for Sims!
At the moment I'm not playing with too many kids (okay.. well too many to me is eight or more when focusing on an adult Sim.. I'm used to having 10+ children!) because I'm just finishing out trying all the new careers and professions on Ambitions.
I'm then going to try and complete every life-time wish in alphabetical order.

Then back to having lots and lots of kids!

[Nicky]

I'm female and enjoy playing with families. My main thing on Sims 3 at the moment is collecting. With a family you've got more sims, hence more collectors. One of my favourite things is to have the child of the family go to the park after school, do its homework and then whiz around town on its bicycle finding gems and rocks. Super cute!

I also get a big kick out of looking at the family tree of a big, multi-generational family. I always keep the heirs and kick out the spares so it's cool to see what they get up to outside of the family home. It's disappointing when they don't have any children. Or become vampires. The worst.

I go through phases though. Sometimes I'll quickly build a tiny but functional house to maximise gameplay time. Other times I'll wanna dress sims and become a stylist, moodlet-managing my pain away in order to fit in more makeovers*. Other times I'll get a hankering to do a bit of building.

*This is sometimes necessary though. I bought some clothes at the Sims 3 store and now it seems everyone in town is walking around in flippers or wearing a coconut bikini instead of a normal shirt.

[Anushka]

Haven't seen this topic before but I like it and was wondering about the same thing.
I'm a female but I never play families. Dynasty is my first and probably last multigenerational game in Sims, if I don't find some other challenge that include families. I was so disappointed with vanilla Sims that I uninstall it week after getting it! It was too boring, after I collected everything, perfected garden and aquarium and wrote and paint and wrote and paint etc. Only thing I loved about it was building. WA brought me back and since then, I always create one character, adventurous by template. My favorite game of all times would be GTASA (and I hate GTA IV for being so gray) and Diablo II. I'm very very surprised to see so many fans of this game, since I never met anyone liking it! All my friends find it boring, with poor graphic, to repeatable etc. Honestly, I never expected to see any fan of this game, not to mention this many!
Back on topic, I'm married with a child for a few years now, but that didn't change my game style, I put my son to sleep by driving in GTA and listening in a car radio (or by watching intro to SidMayer CivIV). In real life I lived alone almost a decade, and love it, and also am adventurous by nature too, so I guess I play myself in Sims. That's why I probably never marry and have children, since I have that in RL and love what I have.  

[Pam]

My favorite game of all times would be GTASA (and I hate GTA IV for being so gray) and Diablo II.

Did you know that Metro is a big fan of Diablo II and is also a moderator on a Diablo II forum? 

[Anushka]

Yes, we exchange PM few days ago and I checked that site too. It did surprised me a lot to find a fan of 2 of my favorites games ever! And here I see many others like that game too. Very strange since I still have it installed but never in all those years thought of searching for other fans, now when I saw into what it developed I'm stunned, but Sims are still current occupation No1. Thanks for directions Pam!

[inclement]

Well, I'm female, but I can't select either option. I play both ways.

Same here. It depends on what I'm doing with the family.

I also play when I can, but I play World of Warcraft primarily, so unfortunately, Sims has to fit around WoW.

[Nilla]

I don't quite know what to vote here either. I'm female and I have two basic way's of playing sims: either doing challenges or playing multiple households. In regular gameplay my sims usually have children but rarely more than two and I tend to switch house just after a child is born to avoid the baby to child stages or just age them up early.

I never have just one sim in the household because my game doesn't fast forward very well so I tend to keep some awake while some are sleeping. Also my favourite game type in general are single player RPGs so I have plenty of games to focus on one character and to go around killing monsters in. For some reason I never tried to play Diablo II yet but after checking some videos after reading this I think I might try it sometime. My favourite of all time games are TES Morrowind, Sims 2 and Civilization III and I’m currently playing Sims 3 along with Fallout 4.

Back to the thread question: how about the option "families but without actually raising children"