Simulacra, Simulations, The Sims 4
Simulacra, Simulations, The Sims 4
Becca Young
When I was young and in control of nothing, I loved The Sims. My cousin had shown it to me, for the first time, in her house’s fall-chilled sunroom on a boxy Windows 2000 computer, and I was hooked. I loved the pixelated world, the homes that fit on grids. I loved the outfits, the relationships, the heart bed. I loved the controlled chaos. I went home that night and begged my parents until they relented and took me to Best Buy for a box set.
From there, an obsession grew. First the original Sims, looking up cheats and using my allowance on expansion packs; and then The Sims 2–fuller, richer, with 3D graphics and a new, complex wants and needs system. I played through summers, through school years, buying game guides from Barnes and Noble and downloading houses off the online gallery, building families based on Legally Blonde, She’s The Man: I wanted everything. So I jailbroke the game, pulling up need bars and skills, aging Sims up and down, re-setting their goals.
There’s a popular notion that play is like practice. Child psychologists and evolutionary biologists have said that children use fake kitchen sets and plastic food, baby dolls, construction kits to emulate the lives they see adults living above them; object relations theorists posit that children play with dolls to process the guilt, anxiety, and pleasure of living in an uncontrollable world. Play is utilitarian, in this way—children play for a reason, play to rehearse for the “real world,” as though children live in a fake world of color and noise, as though the world of adults is more real than the world of a child.
When I was young, I certainly felt that way. I had never kissed a boy, never made any money, never looked through a telescope. I felt so lost in my childhood; I knew there was more for me, a bookish, anxious, high achiever, in adult life than there was in the world of the child. I would chafe at my limited motor skills, my childish handwriting. I would obsess over learning to ride a bike, to dive off a diving board, wanting so desperately to be there already—to already know how to live life perfectly, instead of sitting in the imperfection of adolescence. The Sims was where I could watch, God-like, as my commands were actualized in lives that I could only dream of leading. My Sims would be perfect—they would unlock all the hidden objects, master all the skills. My Sims would max out every career, live in the biggest house, have five kids who all went to college. My Sims would live out the happy life that I hoped to one day live.
If play is like practice, then I was practicing for a perfect, controlled life. Everything my Sims did was a means to an end—socializing to gain aspiration points, working to unlock rare objects, playing to boost the “fun” need. Everything my Sims did was quantified, life as a math problem, play as a tool for winning the game. And just as concerned parents say that first-person shooters promote violence, that games teach children how to live, I learned from The Sims that life was about optimization. I wanted to be perfect, be skinny, have a hundred friends by using only perfect interactions. If my Sims gained weight, they could run on a treadmill for seven hours and transform into a “fit” body type, so I exercised diligently, two hours a day, three hours a day, confused about why my body wasn’t doing the same. When my Sims socialized, their “social” bar filled up, but their “fun” bar stayed the same—when I went out to see friends, I felt loved and accomplished but drained, unable to understand my time as “fun” because I was too busy tracking if my conversations were gaining or losing me friendship points. My years of playing gamified life were rupturing my ability to connect to the material world.
I’m afraid I’m not the only one. The optimization culture that has defined the last two decades—the approximate lifespan of The Sims franchise—has transformed play from a joyful expression of pleasure to a program to follow. What used to be hobbies are now “side-hustles,” what used to be social outings are now content for social media. Leisure time is “self-care” that makes us more productive, and children play to “practice” adulthood. Meanwhile, life simulation as a genre has flourished: Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the highest grossing video game of 2020, Stardew Valley is one of the best-selling indie games of all time with over 30 million downloads. Disney has released their own life simulator, Dreamlight Valley, as has Sanrio, with Hello Kitty’s Island Adventure. The popularity of life simulators feels like a natural extension of a culture that lusts for control in an uncontrollable world; Polyester Zine recently published a piece on using The Sims to “manifest your dream life,” calling play a means of “programming your subconscious” to achieve your goals. Three years earlier, Wired published an article titled “‘The Sims’ Made Me Realize I’m Ready for More in Life,” about a woman who decided she wanted to start a family after giving her Sim a boyfriend. Her thesis? The Sims can give us “mindfulness and clarity” if we start taking our play more seriously.
But can we play more seriously? What is play, if we’re doing it to manifest, to achieve our goals, to study our habits and desires? If we take play seriously, isn’t that just work?
In David Graeber’s essay “What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun,” published the same year, incidentally, that The Sims 4 released, Graeber writes that the scientific obsession with the utility of play ends up eliding the purpose of play at all. He describes the presence of play in animals as an “intellectual scandal”—if animals have evolved to optimize their survival, then why would they expend energy on a seemingly purposeless action? And if the logic of Darwinism has driven our understanding of human behavior (because humans are, at the end of the day, just animals, of course), then why would a human play?
Life, Graeber argues, is the means to its own end. Play, fear, pain, joy—to be alive is to experience it all, and to try to control life is to sink into a vacant simulation. Some people torture their Sims, just like some children rip apart their dolls, but a Sim can always be reset, remade, or replaced. If we learn from playing The Sims, then we’re learning that life is a game that can be won—that caretaking is about earning points, that emotions block or allow certain actions, that if you learn the right cheats, you can get infinite money or eternal youth. We are learning that the stakes are low—you can build a boyfriend, drown him in the swimming pool, then build another—and that play is a utility that keeps your Sim able to eat and sleep and labor. We are learning that having perfect control is the point of life, and that our only pleasure is in accomplishment.
In the decade or so since I would lock myself in the basement and build Total Drama Island characters as college students in The Sims 2, the franchise has developed into a four-generation, offshoot-sprouting phenomenon. The Sims is now listed as the 9th best-selling franchise of all time, above The Legend of Zelda and Assassin’s Creed, and one of the all-time highest-grossing franchises at an estimated $5 billion in sales since The Sims’s release in 2000. The Sims 4 is the best-selling game of the franchise, its success augmented by both its transition to free-to-download in 2022 and an expansive network of content creators who make their career promoting and playing The Sims 4 on Twitch and YouTube.
But lately, The Sims 4 community that historically upheld the franchise has soured. Videos like “How EA Killed the Sims Franchise” and “10 Reasons Why the The Sims 4 feels So Boring” have proliferated on accounts that previously made Sims fan content, and even creators who are part of EA’s Creator Network are beginning to grow critical. The game is buggy, the packs are expensive, new features don’t work, and EA refuses to fix them. The game is sanitized, the game has too few features distributed across too many packs, the personality system is convoluted. The Sims 3 was better, The Sims 2 was better, The Sims was better. I can never tell if these are the real reasons, or if The Sims was just more interesting when we were younger, when we knew so little about the world and needed so desperately to have a life we could contain and manage. I still boot up The Sims from time to time, but never find it nearly as engaging as I did back then, when I had never done the things that I directed my Sims to do, never gone to a club or worked a career, had a pet cat.
A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon playing bastardized ping pong in the park with my boyfriend’s friends. I’d been nervous to meet them; they were the kind of old friends that are like family, that were in all his stories, and who appeared by all accounts to be way too cool to hang out with me. But when we arrived, my anxiety was quickly relieved by their immediate warmth and goofiness. We opened some wine, broke out the paddles, and we played ping pong. None of us, of course, knew how to play. So we made up the rules—two points for hitting your boyfriend with the ball, three points if you get the tree behind you. It’s still in play if it bounces on the ground only once. At some point, someone threw in an extra ball. I’d been so afraid to meet them, preparing my cool anecdotes and building my defenses so that I’d make a good impression, and instead was confronted with a truly strange, unruly game of ping pong. It didn't work at all. At the end of the day, as we were leaving, one of them mentioned that she loved The Sims. We decided we would play together next time.
From there, an obsession grew. First the original Sims, looking up cheats and using my allowance on expansion packs; and then The Sims 2–fuller, richer, with 3D graphics and a new, complex wants and needs system. I played through summers, through school years, buying game guides from Barnes and Noble and downloading houses off the online gallery, building families based on Legally Blonde, She’s The Man: I wanted everything. So I jailbroke the game, pulling up need bars and skills, aging Sims up and down, re-setting their goals.
There’s a popular notion that play is like practice. Child psychologists and evolutionary biologists have said that children use fake kitchen sets and plastic food, baby dolls, construction kits to emulate the lives they see adults living above them; object relations theorists posit that children play with dolls to process the guilt, anxiety, and pleasure of living in an uncontrollable world. Play is utilitarian, in this way—children play for a reason, play to rehearse for the “real world,” as though children live in a fake world of color and noise, as though the world of adults is more real than the world of a child.
When I was young, I certainly felt that way. I had never kissed a boy, never made any money, never looked through a telescope. I felt so lost in my childhood; I knew there was more for me, a bookish, anxious, high achiever, in adult life than there was in the world of the child. I would chafe at my limited motor skills, my childish handwriting. I would obsess over learning to ride a bike, to dive off a diving board, wanting so desperately to be there already—to already know how to live life perfectly, instead of sitting in the imperfection of adolescence. The Sims was where I could watch, God-like, as my commands were actualized in lives that I could only dream of leading. My Sims would be perfect—they would unlock all the hidden objects, master all the skills. My Sims would max out every career, live in the biggest house, have five kids who all went to college. My Sims would live out the happy life that I hoped to one day live.
If play is like practice, then I was practicing for a perfect, controlled life. Everything my Sims did was a means to an end—socializing to gain aspiration points, working to unlock rare objects, playing to boost the “fun” need. Everything my Sims did was quantified, life as a math problem, play as a tool for winning the game. And just as concerned parents say that first-person shooters promote violence, that games teach children how to live, I learned from The Sims that life was about optimization. I wanted to be perfect, be skinny, have a hundred friends by using only perfect interactions. If my Sims gained weight, they could run on a treadmill for seven hours and transform into a “fit” body type, so I exercised diligently, two hours a day, three hours a day, confused about why my body wasn’t doing the same. When my Sims socialized, their “social” bar filled up, but their “fun” bar stayed the same—when I went out to see friends, I felt loved and accomplished but drained, unable to understand my time as “fun” because I was too busy tracking if my conversations were gaining or losing me friendship points. My years of playing gamified life were rupturing my ability to connect to the material world.
I’m afraid I’m not the only one. The optimization culture that has defined the last two decades—the approximate lifespan of The Sims franchise—has transformed play from a joyful expression of pleasure to a program to follow. What used to be hobbies are now “side-hustles,” what used to be social outings are now content for social media. Leisure time is “self-care” that makes us more productive, and children play to “practice” adulthood. Meanwhile, life simulation as a genre has flourished: Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the highest grossing video game of 2020, Stardew Valley is one of the best-selling indie games of all time with over 30 million downloads. Disney has released their own life simulator, Dreamlight Valley, as has Sanrio, with Hello Kitty’s Island Adventure. The popularity of life simulators feels like a natural extension of a culture that lusts for control in an uncontrollable world; Polyester Zine recently published a piece on using The Sims to “manifest your dream life,” calling play a means of “programming your subconscious” to achieve your goals. Three years earlier, Wired published an article titled “‘The Sims’ Made Me Realize I’m Ready for More in Life,” about a woman who decided she wanted to start a family after giving her Sim a boyfriend. Her thesis? The Sims can give us “mindfulness and clarity” if we start taking our play more seriously.
But can we play more seriously? What is play, if we’re doing it to manifest, to achieve our goals, to study our habits and desires? If we take play seriously, isn’t that just work?
In David Graeber’s essay “What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun,” published the same year, incidentally, that The Sims 4 released, Graeber writes that the scientific obsession with the utility of play ends up eliding the purpose of play at all. He describes the presence of play in animals as an “intellectual scandal”—if animals have evolved to optimize their survival, then why would they expend energy on a seemingly purposeless action? And if the logic of Darwinism has driven our understanding of human behavior (because humans are, at the end of the day, just animals, of course), then why would a human play?
Life, Graeber argues, is the means to its own end. Play, fear, pain, joy—to be alive is to experience it all, and to try to control life is to sink into a vacant simulation. Some people torture their Sims, just like some children rip apart their dolls, but a Sim can always be reset, remade, or replaced. If we learn from playing The Sims, then we’re learning that life is a game that can be won—that caretaking is about earning points, that emotions block or allow certain actions, that if you learn the right cheats, you can get infinite money or eternal youth. We are learning that the stakes are low—you can build a boyfriend, drown him in the swimming pool, then build another—and that play is a utility that keeps your Sim able to eat and sleep and labor. We are learning that having perfect control is the point of life, and that our only pleasure is in accomplishment.
In the decade or so since I would lock myself in the basement and build Total Drama Island characters as college students in The Sims 2, the franchise has developed into a four-generation, offshoot-sprouting phenomenon. The Sims is now listed as the 9th best-selling franchise of all time, above The Legend of Zelda and Assassin’s Creed, and one of the all-time highest-grossing franchises at an estimated $5 billion in sales since The Sims’s release in 2000. The Sims 4 is the best-selling game of the franchise, its success augmented by both its transition to free-to-download in 2022 and an expansive network of content creators who make their career promoting and playing The Sims 4 on Twitch and YouTube.
But lately, The Sims 4 community that historically upheld the franchise has soured. Videos like “How EA Killed the Sims Franchise” and “10 Reasons Why the The Sims 4 feels So Boring” have proliferated on accounts that previously made Sims fan content, and even creators who are part of EA’s Creator Network are beginning to grow critical. The game is buggy, the packs are expensive, new features don’t work, and EA refuses to fix them. The game is sanitized, the game has too few features distributed across too many packs, the personality system is convoluted. The Sims 3 was better, The Sims 2 was better, The Sims was better. I can never tell if these are the real reasons, or if The Sims was just more interesting when we were younger, when we knew so little about the world and needed so desperately to have a life we could contain and manage. I still boot up The Sims from time to time, but never find it nearly as engaging as I did back then, when I had never done the things that I directed my Sims to do, never gone to a club or worked a career, had a pet cat.
A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon playing bastardized ping pong in the park with my boyfriend’s friends. I’d been nervous to meet them; they were the kind of old friends that are like family, that were in all his stories, and who appeared by all accounts to be way too cool to hang out with me. But when we arrived, my anxiety was quickly relieved by their immediate warmth and goofiness. We opened some wine, broke out the paddles, and we played ping pong. None of us, of course, knew how to play. So we made up the rules—two points for hitting your boyfriend with the ball, three points if you get the tree behind you. It’s still in play if it bounces on the ground only once. At some point, someone threw in an extra ball. I’d been so afraid to meet them, preparing my cool anecdotes and building my defenses so that I’d make a good impression, and instead was confronted with a truly strange, unruly game of ping pong. It didn't work at all. At the end of the day, as we were leaving, one of them mentioned that she loved The Sims. We decided we would play together next time.