Ara Ara’s Mind

{AN: Please be easy on me with this one. I have been playing the sims since I was 13 and it has remained a huge outlet for my creativity and my need to control everything around me. Due to this, I have so many opinions about The Sims as a franchise and the things EA decides to do with it. This was originally an idea I had for a video essay I wanted to do. Inspired by the video “The Anatomy of a Rom-Com”. This was written before EA announced that there would be no Sims 5 and only continuous updates for the Sims 4. Keep that in mind. Enjoy.}

The Sims. A game we know and love produced by a company we hate. In the beginning, The Sims had humble roots, goals, and game play, but as our world has grown and changed so has The Sims. Partly for the better but mainly for the worse.

Many of the simmers we see today have been along this long Maxis-EA ride for a while. Most starting to play the sims since they were preteens, making the best out of what they had. Even as the changed and morphed into a different beast, these simmers have stuck beside the sims as more and more content has been put out.

Originally I planned to look at the sims community rather than the changes in it’s demographic. But since I started this script the things we have known about the Sims 4, specifically, has changed. I still think the community is a large part in the shifts in demographics and gameplay, but I will bee less focused on it than I had originally planned to be.

There are definitely major problems with The Sims as a franchise, with EA as a company, and with some players who are just weird. I probably am not going to be able to get to all of it, but I will try to get to most of it if only to see how the community rises in the face of EA’s stupidity.

Cozy Gaming

As many simmers know, the way The Sims is viewed today is different than how it has been viewed in the past.

Many simmers have adapted the term “cozy gaming” or “cozy game play” to describe the type of players they are and what they try to achieve in their sims save. While the sims community predates the term “cozy gaming/gamer”, many simmers have adapted their channels to include more than just sims game play. Maybe because the sims has become a lot to handle with all the crashing and glitching and kits. Or maybe simmers are just starting to describe themselves as they are, gamers who like low stakes.

The term “Cozy Gaming” has been thrown around for up wards of four years now, but what does it really mean. Does it just mean casual gameplay? Does it mean games that have low stakes? Does it just mean games where you don’t have to use your brain? Was this term just used used so that women and queers could enjoy slower paced games without being judged or ridiculed? I am unsure of where the term came from or who coined it first on the internet, but it has had a large affect on the gaming community as whole.

Even though the Sims has cozy aspects, I would not consider the sims a cozy game. Maybe that has to do with my game style or maybe it has to do with how the sims works in general. The main difference being, these “cozy games”, animal crossing, stardew valley, spiritfaire, usually have an ending. Yes, these games are about going at your own speed, taking the time you have to accomplish what you can, but they still end. They have over arching stories and goals. There is a specific purpose the games gives you to complete it. That is not present in the sims, never has been. Since the beginning the Sims has been about many different stories, and what you the player decides to do with them. Everyone’s play through of any game is different. Especially in cozy games, which are mainly farming sims, where you get a random island, or a random flower, or you decide who you want to romance or be friends with. In the Sims, everything is dependent on you. What houses you have, what people you have, what job people have, who lives, who dies. You have full control over every aspect of the game. There is no end their can’t be unless you yourself decide that there is an end to your game play, your save.

There is nothing wrong with cozy games or labeling the sims as a cozy game but it can’t be denied that there is more to it than that. There is more to the sims than low stakes and slow game play.

The View of the Sims

The Sims started out as, and still is depending on who’s playing, a very chaotic game. A wild game filled with wild choices, each one of them coming with their own consequence. Everyone could play it and never know what was going to happen.

I don’t know why or when, but somewhere down the line of this franchise The Sims turned into a girls game. I speculate this happened around mid to end of the Sims 2 to the Sims 3. This might have to do with Will Wright, the original creator of the Sims leaving EA around 2009, which is when the sims 3 came out. Whatever the reason may be, from looking at old ads for the sims original and the sims 2 there is a clear shift between who they are marketing to.

The ads for the sims 2 are drastically different from these. You can tell that they have kinda let the chaotic-ness from the original game falter a bit as the sims 2 came to rise. Focusing mainly on women who crave to control their life and situations. Who want to have more than one option. The game still has chaotic choices and moments. But it cannot be denied that what is chaotic to a man is different than what is chaotic to a women. 

People started to draw a heavy line between gamers and people who played the sims. Because of it’s attachment to women it became illegitimate.

Now, I could talk about how a lot of the things women are interested in are immediately discredited and shrugged off all day. And I just might.

In the Sims 2, the game became less about how quickly your character can die and more on how much your sim can experience in its lifetime. Focusing more on the family aspect of the game. Like experiencing the seasons, or going to university, or getting your first job.

(With the way these things were released they might have been trying to find their demographic, Mysims came out in 2007 right before sims 3, sims free play came out right before sims 4 in 2015, they might have been trying to find a demographic or trying to make the game accessible to everyone that plays it and becomes obssesed with it so they want to play the new game. IDK how business works)

And as the Sims leaned into these aspects, queer people started to see the Sims as a place where they could take up all the space they could want. Thus making the sims a place where people could feel safe and welcome and in control for a change. A place where weirdos could do what weirdos wanted to do and not get any backlash for it.

What Goes into Playing the Sims?

From sisters, to mothers, to cousins, to friends, almost every women has had the experience of playing the sims if only for a time. There is something nice about being able to control a world. About having pseudo people listen to you, sometimes. About taking life into your own hands and bending it to your will.

But that only last for a bit. At some point you will have killed your sims neighbors every possible way you’re interested in and then what is left of the game? What comes after that? Boring gameplay? Legacy challenges?

Creation comes after. You start to pick up what you like the most about the game. Just playing to build a house or create a sim. Maybe that’s what you always do. Maybe you start missing the game play. Maybe you want to create a save that is just your personal sims you have played with over the years. Maybe you want to play with a certain career or in a certain world.

The Sims is a deeply personal game

I am starting to believe the longer you play the more things you will find to do.

There is always new mods. Always new custom content. Always new kits and expansion packs.

From EA official, to Tumblr, to Pinterest, to Youtube. There is so much content out there for and on the Sims it’s hard to really ever stop playing.

The Sims seems to be an endless well of creativity.

And Simmers follow suit. Simmers like OshinSims, xUrbansimsx, lilsimsie, and Neecxle (just to name a few) all have been playing the sims forever. Their connection to the sims seeps into every thing they create and every story they long to tell. You can see it in the way the reminisce about the Sim 3, in the way their style has evolved since the beginning of the Sims 4, in the sims they make and the houses they build. When you watch one video you automatically know you are watching experienced players. You know, or have even seen, that they have already been through their alpha CC phase. Through giving freckles to every sim they made. Through trapping their sims in a room and waiting till they die, or deleting the ladder in the pool so they drown, or forcing their sims to have a million babies. They have experienced these things before they were challenges, before there were rules and guidelines for how they should be done. These simmers we see today know how they want to play, they know what cc they like, they know what stories they haven’t told. They are simply working off their desire to create.

To them, that is what has become fun. And there’s still room for the original gameplay. There is still room for trapping your elder sim in a room and waiting for them to die. For deleting sims that pissed you off. For immediately divorcing your sim’s wealthy husband. These actions just mean more. They do these wild things because they care about the game. They care about their sims.

That’s the only way to enjoy it. To pour an obscene amount of care, love, and time into your sims, their homes, and their surrounding world.

The Comfort of the Community

I believe this is what makes the Simming community so comfortable. So warm.

Its player’s overwhelming care, nostalgia, and love. And I think this happens because of the overwhelming amount of women and queer people who play the game.

The immense separation that has been put between the gaming community and the sims has shaped its community into one of the best sections of the internet. The lore is deep and the content is bountiful. It is a chaotic, wild game with emotional, hard working players.

I think the sims has become the epitome of womanhood. By womanhood I mean anyone who has been told they’re too emotional, or too feminine, or too different, or too much.

The evidence is laid out in front of us. People who cannot get a break from the real world go to the sims to create a world they want to. A world they can control. Then they were told that they weren’t real gamers (like that’s a title you want) and that the game they were deeply passionate about, deeply invested in wasn’t a real game. Despite this, they still sought refuge in this game. In its characters. And as the game evolved and changed so did they. The game changed because of its players and the players changed because of the game.

The sims community is the actual representation of women and queers making the best out of what they have been given. Of the changes we have to go through and the people we become when we come out of it.

The Faults

Now, there are a lot of issues with the sims. From the production of the actual game to the greedy, greedy dumb people who play it.

The Sims 4 is not a great game. It needs a lot of mods (in my opinion) even if you have the base game and even without it the game will lag and crash unprompted. While the graphics are better and nicer than the previous games, The Sims 3 has the better game play. I feel as though the packs and mostly kits that are coming out are uninspired and rip offs of the mods people have taken so much time and energy to create. Again, that is just my opinion, I know a lot of people would like to have less mods in their and I completely respect that.

There’s a ton of other things wrong with the game. Let us not forget Journey to Batu or the new stupid shopping cart that shimmers and tells you what you should buy or how broken restaurants are or how they said they were going to do pack refreshes and then only did one or Project Rene.

The people who play the sims aren’t all great people either. This is to be expected, the world is wide and a lot of people are stupid. Some people decided to keep their things behind paywalls even though EA has stated that isn’t allowed. Some people make Tr*** flags in replace of the pride flags that have become base game or make Bob Pancakes, the only black NPC in the base game, white and call his large nose disgusting.

Not to mention the amount of viruses I’ve gotten on my computer from downloading from The Sims Resources or the amount of CC I haven’t gotten because I would’ve had to turn off my ad blocker. As well as, custom content being stolen and put on Curse Forge and the recent development that they support genocide.

There are a lot of things that are not great surrounding the sims. That does not take away from the amazing people who play the game and the creators that make the game function.