Why people have been obsessed with playing 'The Sims' for 20 years

The video game's lasting appeal transcends the perverse puppeteering it facilitates, writes Paula Andropoulos

01 November 2020 - 00:00 By Paula Andropoulos
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'The Sims 4 Snowy Escape' is due for release on November 13 2020.
'The Sims 4 Snowy Escape' is due for release on November 13 2020.
Image: Electronic Arts

Hello. My name is Paula Andropoulos, and I'm a Sims fanatic.

I am prepared to confess that I've played every iteration of this canonical life-simulation game since its inaugural release as a CD rom and, in a somewhat humiliating turn of events, I haven't yet outgrown my affection for this nerdiest of pastimes.

I'm not alone in my juvenile attachment, however. This year, The Sims franchise celebrated its 20th anniversary; the game is available for Windows, Apple, and Playstation players, and hordes of YouTubers and Reddit-obsessives have made a veritable career of dissecting the ins and outs of the game's evolution.

The main premise of The Sims is that players can create and then orchestrate the lives, careers, and romantic attachments of their characters, which they can also elect to murder in a variety of sinister and hilarious ways. (Sims can, for example, perish from pufferfish-sashimi poisoning.)

But for many Sims players, the game's appeal transcends the perverse puppeteering it facilitates: it also enables them to act on their latent architectural aspirations.

Players can design, erect, and furnish residential houses, parks and restaurants. You can customise terrain, landscape gardens, and share your creation on the Maxis gallery, which allows players to upload, compare, comment on and exchange their original builds.

Some of the more adept Sims builders reconstruct real-life historical buildings; others veer into the realm of the fantastical, or compete to see how efficiently they can create tiny, eco-friendly residences that are still viable as living spaces. For some of the more gifted players, this niche mode of meta-architecture has actually burgeoned into a real-world career.

Take "Lilsimsie", for example. This 21-year-old YouTube megalith (real name Kayla) has over 1m subscribers who devour her daily content on Sims-specific building techniques and renovations (watch her videos here). She has a podcast, an avid Twitch following and a reported networth of $1.2m, which makes her substantially more wealthy than your average, university-sanctioned architect.

WATCH | The trailer for 'The Sims 4 Snowy Escape'

Under lockdown, people have embraced The Sims as a means of sanitary homebound escapism. It's not hard to unpack the appeal of the enterprise. After all, under the auspices of the game, you can create your own very attractive avatar, amass a considerable amount of cash ("Simoleons") and pursue your dream career.

You can have affairs and beget children aplenty (the gestation period for Sims is about three Sim-days, which I think amounts to about 15 human minutes.) You can commit crimes without threat of reprisal. You can build a robot butler. And you can mastermind and finesse the mansion of your dreams, replete with swimming pool, pond and indoor sauna.

In the spirit of architectural initiative, I attempted to build a home for my avatar, a buxom glutton with literary aspirations. The problem is I have no spatial perception, either in life or onscreen. My house is rudimentary, it has some obvious practical defects, and it looks a bit like a Soviet-era municipal structure.

But the fun is in the endeavour, and my onscreen-proxy is guaranteed not to judge.


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