My sister recently tagged me on a Facebook video commemorating the first series' release over 17 years ago and I just had the urge to let this all out.
I first saw The Sims game being played at a local computer shop at my hometown when I tagged along with my cousin who at that time was playing his lame-ass paladin Ragnarok shit or whatever.
I was completely mesmerized. This girl was trying to buy a new refrigerator for her Sims who I guess broke up and were trying to work things out but judging by the lack of progress of selecting "Make Out" command option, things weren't working out. And so I thought, "Wow. This is literally a digital dollhouse game on your computer." And I wanted it. I needed it. I had to have it.
Mind you that this was a time when personal computers were just becoming all the rage and we just had an Intel Pentium III installed with a whopping 2GB storage and 128MB RAM installed at our house. Meets. Minimum. Requirements. Fuck yes.
So I haul my ass off to the nearest pirated PC game shop after I saved P250 pesos off my daily allowance to buy the base game. Needless to say I became the kind of addict that even coke whores and meth lab druggies would be shocked to know just to what extent this game became an integral part of my life.
I lived Sims. I breathed Sims. I've probably logged in more time playing the game than I did my homework. This was around gradeschool and in retrospect I think my life would have gone a different direction had I paid a little more interest in school after having graduated second overall, to the dismay of my parents who inspected Sims Expansion Packs entitled "Hot Date" and "House Party Stuff" like they were porn magazines designed to corrupt children straight to Satan.
After a while though, and for the 574th time that I managed to move in multiple iterations of Betty and Bob Newbie and Bella and Mortimer Goth to the big-ass and poorly decorated mansion at the end of the Sim neighborhood's cul-de-sac (WITHOUT ROSEBUD !;!;!;!;!;!;!;!;!;!;!;!;!;!,!;!;!;!;!;!;! CHEATS) , and going through all the expansion packs up to Superstar waiting for about an hour to load Commercial neighborhoods on my trusted PC, the initial allure of setting Sims on fire and deleting pool ladders and bargaining with the Grim Reaper eventually lost its appeal. This is what I did. All. Summer. But right before I got bored out of my mind to actually pursue other more, I guess "beneficial" interests (at this point tou somehow learned how to play the guitar and the birth of primogenitor Social Media sites like Friendster and Multiply provided a welcome online-journal kind of a distraction), Sims 2 came out. And it. Was. Glorious.
360° rotation. Generations. More wardrobe choices. You can make your Sim fat. You can sculpt different noses and faces. THERE WERE SO MANY WALLPAPERS TO CHOOSE FROM. You can even play with genetics at the CAS (Create-A-Sim) page and make a baby from the different configurations of the parent Sims' physical traits. You can choose their favorite color, their favorite food, and at this point having been acquired by EA Games, Maxis introduced moods and Lifetime Achievements and memories and subsets of platonic and non-platonic interactions (Woo-Hoo in bed. Woo-Hoo in elevator. Compliment to death for a career promotion), and different roof tiling and dynamic landscape tools and custom brushes and YOU CAN EVEN CHANGE THE DEFAULT MUSIC FOR EACH Buy / Build mode (hello Justin Timberlake's What Goes Around Comes Back Around Sexyback-bringing album).
I was hooked again. It became an immersive world that had so many dimensions to gameplay and the expansion packs brought Pets, and a devoted community of Sims addicts started creating mods and third-party editing applications that could let you play around who was related to who and having an affair with which Sim and edit memories and a thousand different ways to generate NPC's. There were even hilarious Machinimas (animated web series created with the Sims 2 engine) that spun off of the base game's now more elaborate back stories. I was abusing what little processing power my mom's Compaq Intel Centrino laptop had just to render a barely playable game with its graphics card. But I soldiered on. Day in, day out. Even forayed into SimCity4 for a bit (but that quickly lost its appeal after you figure out the optimal zoning allotment to avoid traffic and have progressive taxation). I xerox copied architectural books and floor plans to replicate houses on Sims. It got to a point where me and my youngest sister would literally bargain and negotiate computer use time so she could play with the houses that I built for her anyway. I was a child entering adolescence who had a debatable (un)healthy interest in a computer game, pixels on a screen, like any other teenager around this decade.
And then my mother died.
Not long after that, Sims 3 came out and with it literally a million ways to customize every single aspect of the game play that my mind could possibly dream of, and Sims could, for the first time, go out of their lots and buy cars and interact with the world. Community lots. Parks. Cafés. Your on museums. Your own overly-decadent libraries with elevators and toddler daycare. Hot Dog stands. Sim-Paris. Sim-Egypt. Sim-China. And missions and tasks and collectible gem stones and playable career paths like Interior Designer and Stylist and Tattoo artist. The expansion packs even became so cartoonish that you dealt with vampires and werewolves and ghosts and fairies and aliens and cyborgs and time travel. Anything was possible.
This game wasn't just an addiction for me at this point. It became my salvation.
You see, after all the years that I've holed myself off civilization and boarded myself up in the computer room of a new house we moved into after my mother was buried, I've come to realize that it wasn't the gameplay or the hard-core beta testing cheats and the shiny new couch and fire alarm-outfitted outdoor grill that fueled my obsession with this game. It was, quite simply, the idea of control.
This game offered a world that allowed me to exercise precise manipulation of pseudo-autonomous characters and building of elaborate back stories that grew my legacy family into a multi-generational mini-city with complex webs of social connections and narratives that would put telenovelas to shame. I would build houses that were all art deco, a mansion that was Victorian and modern at the same time, a worn-down wooden house that had fifteen dogs and cats and cockatoos, and an ultra-tacky house complete with an aquarium with sharks and rare goldfish inside.
"Sims" stood for "simulation", after all.
And I simulated endless scenarios and iterations of worlds within worlds that I had complete control over. I insulated myself against my mother's death with a universe that had no semblance of illness, no concept of undoable consequences, no death, no God.
In this game, I was God.
In a sense, Sims became an endless reprieve of negating the truth of grief and loss in the real world through thousands of endless possibilities within the game. It became the addiction that I would have otherwise found consolation in what I can only imagine, as a fourteen year-old dealing with the death of a parent, would have been actual drugs, or bad company, or worse, self-harm.
To say that I owe my life to this game is an understatement. Over time I have learned to slowly integrate myself back to society as my Dual Core Dell laptop brought me more frustrations in loading save points that became 6-gigabyte files, and college paper due dates demanded more time and effort, and suddenly the opposite sex was becoming populated with humans that resembled the very construct of a man's man that I was simulating in the game, physically at least anyway.
Over time I've learned that control is, in all reality, nothing but an illusion that presents itself as a decoy to the harsh reality of randomness and hazardous choices that supposedly autonomous real humans assert with ripple effects on everyone, whether I liked it or not.
And over the past two decades I've learned to let go of things that I can now only wish had a different end result.
But who's to know. Maybe we're in an actual simulation made by a ruthless God with a twisted sense of humor. Maybe we're not.
All I know is Sims 4 sucks balls, and EA games, fuck you for bringing loading screens back.
I know this isn't the typical kind of posts here but this has been really therapeutic to write. Thanks for reading if you're still here.
Submitted February 08, 2017 at 07:22PM by jsscstm http://ift.tt/2k2NH3Z thesims
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