Playing The Sims and Getting a Life

Sims 2 and being a child of divorce is my lore.

I’m the kid that spent a lot of time in my mother’s basement growing up, because I was also the kind of kid that ruined the nice things my mom bought for herself.

Side note: my mom is not a psycho who locks children in basements.

What I mean is, my mom, freshly post-divorce, wanted to do something nice for herself and therefore bought herself a brand new desktop computer for the basement so that she could play The Elder Scrolls and make OkCupid accounts. Enter me: the 4th grade youngest daughter (who very much embodied youngest sibling energy), who saw that new computer and thought “WOW this must be for me!”.

I immediately begged her to buy me the Sims 2.

But first, let’s talk backstory.

Due to being a new kid at my school, introverted, and weird in a decidedly not manic pixie dream girl kind of way -- I had absolutely zero friends. But I wanted them. I wanted them because 1. What kid wants to be a loser with no friends and 2. I knew my mom wanted me to have them. We had just upheaved our entire lives after my mom had decided that enough was enough with my dad sleeping around with Various Young Redheads. She had a new job and a fresh divorce, we had a new house, in a new neighborhood, and (the most relevant thing to me at the time) a new school.

For a while though, I was content to be friendless, in fact, I wanted everyone to know that I was absolutely never ever going to make a friend again ever. I wanted my whole family to know that all my friends were in the old neighborhood, at the old school, in the old life that we drove away from. I wanted everyone around me to feel as bad as I felt about my entire life changing around me. My inherent instinct was to cover my deep sadness with an iron wall -- if I didn’t care, it couldn’t hurt me. If I was angry and cruel to those who wanted to comfort me, I could ignore the fact that I needed comfort in the first place.

(By the way if you’re like “man, that kid was kind of a dick to her mom who got cheated on” -- HEY. I AGREE. BUT HEY.)

But eventually not having friends was undeniably fucking awful. My mom would cry about it, I would be bored as hell, and my older sister didn’t want to hang out with her asshole baby sister anymore, so I had no choice but to try and hunt down a friend. During sometime around the start of the school year, I set my sights on my prey, Katie, scribbling her Christmas list in a red ball point pen, because apparently we weren’t learning at school during that moment (???). Of the items on her list, which included a horse and a new kitten, was “THE SIMS 2: HOLIDAY EDITION”.

Katie played the Sims 2, and because I didn’t have an original thought of my own, I also needed to play the Sims 2. This belief intensified after a few trips to Katie’s mom’s basement, where I got to experience the gameplay for myself. I longed to have my own copy of the game, so I could murder my sims in swimming pools and have infinite cheat code money (shout out to rosebud and motherlode, my MVPs). To a 10 year old kid who felt like she had no control of the world, a virtual space where I could play god made my mouth water.

One day sometime later, I whined mercilessly at my poor mother as we pushed a cart through Sam’s Club, talking about how fun it would be to create virtual families and how I would never again ask her for anything in my whole entire life. That fateful day, she was buying the brand new Elder Scrolls game Oblivion, which she had been excited about for months. I intended to use this as a perfect opportunity to beg and grovel for a game of my own.

I insisted that if she could get a video game, that I could get a video game, because I had nothing if not audacity as a broke 10 year old speaking to her mother. But, because she is an angel, she actually considered it.

We had a brief conversation regarding the rated T for Teens rating that went something like this:

Mom: Hmmm, I don’t know about this Brooke, this is rated T for teens and you’re 10.

Me: But Oblivion is rated M and that’s worse.

Mom: Yes, but I’m an adult.

Me: So, you’re just never going to play it if I’m around?

I think at this moment, my mom realized how I was literally always around. During these tender post-divorce times, I refused to sleep in my own bed and instead littered hers with stuffed animals and slept curled next to her all night. When I wasn’t at school, I trailed behind her wherever she went around the house, talking to her in the kitchen and playing with my dolls next to her while she drew in a sketchbook (see: are we all remembering that I had no friends?). So, she either had to get really cool with me seeing M rated content, or she could never play her game. She picked the former! In a move that changed my life, she put The Sims 2 in our shopping cart.

To this day, I don’t think I have ever been more excited for anything than I was to play The Sims 2. I immediately dove into the unhinged shit: making families have 8 babies at once, never putting a goddamn roof on any of my houses, and locking away people I didn’t like in a room with no doors -- classic. I invited Katie to my house to play, and the two of us soon spent everyday together switching between our family households (hers with normal storytelling and effort, while mine was low effort and, once again, with eight million babies).

Katie and I became inseparable, staying up until the wee hours of the morning drinking birch beer and watching our Sims become eaten by the Cow Plant. We started recording our Sims Stories and had a brief stint making reality tv shows for Youtube (in the days when 11 year olds could just, like, do that), featuring our sims with dialogue done in a Silent Film-Esque manner with black walls of text following the actions of the characters.

From a storytelling perspective, The Sims is a powerhouse of possibility. To this day, if you’re a writer, I recommend using the game to visualize your characters (I do). It’s also great if you have an itch to write a story but don’t feel like doing the writing part (I also do this).

A year or so later (I don’t have the exact dates and I’m not looking it up), The Sims 3 came out, and our initial skepticism of the game (how could they top Sims 2?) was quickly replaced with awe for the open world format. We begged our parents for every new expansion pack. We created long lasting Legacy Families (aka when your Sims have a large family tree), we created ourselves and then made ourselves marry the Hemsworth brothers (who we also turned into mermaids, because who wouldn’t turn the Hemsworth brothers into mermaids?), we created the cast of Twilight -- there was nothing we weren’t capable of.

If we fast forward to the time when The Sims 4 came out, I was a senior in high school and didn’t really pay it any mind, mostly because they ditched the open world concept and I couldn’t imagine playing any other way. Besides, at that point Katie and I were barely playing the game as is. It’s not that our love for it wasn’t lost, but rather we were all consumed by the things that college bound teenagers are consumed by. Where were we going to school? Who did we have a crush on and how could we make them love us? Would we ever see each other again in the fall?

Once I moved to Penn State, I was navigating life without my best friends, my family, and The Sims. An overloaded schedule didn’t allow time for gaming, and I quickly put ideas of relaxation and gaming to the wayside. While being a college freshman was an adventure in debauchery for some, I saw the price of tuition and immediately felt the pressure to perform well. I didn’t feel as though I could waste a minute after everything my family sacrificed to get me where I was.

Years go by. My junior year of college, my then-boyfriend-now-husband got a job across the country in Arizona. Both of us hyper independent, if not semi- reckless, children of divorce, it seemed obvious that we would simply fly across the country with all his things in a single checked bag, and figure out the rest when we got there. After landing, we secured an apartment, bought a used car (which we had no business doing), and used our remaining cash on a wifi router and an air mattress. A busy day! Do not recommend!

With nothing else to do, sitting on the floor of his apartment with the remains of a burrito dinner, I downloaded The Sims 4 on a whim. Cue hours of playtime and egregious back pain from sitting on the floor.

But then I flew back to Pennsylvania to finish my degree and forgot about it. I would pick it up briefly on a winter break at home, or after talking to Katie about “the good old days of a (motherfucking) open world” (#loveyouSims3). I graduated college. My husband moved to Maryland. We got engaged and bought a house and adopted four cats and got married. I got a life.

During this time, I also found a hairdresser that I adore, and one day while she was wrapping my hair in shiny foil she asked, “have you ever played The Sims?”

It’s a little funny to think about how The Sims, a life simulation game, has followed me throughout my life. Do I know that, at the end of the day, it’s a silly little video game? Of course. But, I truly do believe that it’s the silly, consistent things that can offer you the most support and comfort. If I’m stressed? I’m not diving into something deep and analytical and “thought daughter”-esque. I’m playing the fucking Sims. What you do to relax doesn’t have to be cool or productive, it just has to help you relax. Whether it’s The Sims, or meditation tapes, or binging a tv show all day on your day off -- don’t let anyone else, or yourself, think that you “don’t have a life” or are lazy because something you enjoy doesn’t produce a profit or increase a skill. I, for one, love being lazy, and I know that someday I’ll be fist-deep in a Cheeto bag at my desk in the retirement home, 20 generations deep into my next Sims legacy, totally and utterly relaxed.