How I'd Play The Sims Is Probably How I Want to Live

As my pop never used to say, you can learn a lot about a man from how he plays The Sims.

Maybe our favorite things to do in The Sims franchise might say something about how we like to run our own lives. If you think about it, the world is a sandbox that's not too different from The Sims and we're dropped into it without much direction on what we're supposed to aspire for, so we invent "challenges" for ourselves to keep ourselves playing.

What is The Sims? And Sims Challenges?

The Sims is a life simulation game where you create little digital people called Sims, build them a house, and then manage their lives and direct their moods and satisfy their desires, from big-picture stuff like career and relationships to super primal needs like hunger, hygiene, fun, energy, bladder, and social.

If you mismanage any of it, the game is happy to punish you in bizarre ways.

The Sims originally started as an architecture game after the creator, Will Wright, lost his home in the Oakland firestorm of 1991, which might be why the house-building mechanic is so intricate and well-designed, and why it was terribly easy to set your kitchen on fire in early iterations of the game.

Then, realizing that this game didn't feel like much of a game, Wright introduced the simulated people themselves (the "Sims"), who were originally meant to judge how livable each house was to reward the player for their house-building abilities. These Sims turned out to be far more interesting than the house-building aspect, and the game really took off from there.

Tell Me What To Do! Introducing Sims Challenges

The Sims, as a game, is inherently aimless. Pretty commonly, after you pour your heart and soul into creating your Sims and building your dream house, having finished the Create-a-Sim page's endless questionnaire (yessir I've picked an outfit for every occasion, yessir I've given every Sim a lifetime wish and a favorite color and a favorite food and blah blah), the actual game begins at last, and your brainpower has been so thoroughly spent that you have nary a clue how or why to play it.

And, well, you can play by ear and just follow your Sims' whims. Your Sim suddenly wants to eat a grilled cheese sandwich, or become good acquaintances with the mail carrier, or splash in a puddle, so you let them, and they're happy for about ten seconds before they want something else.

But a life spent chasing tiny wants gets old fast, and eventually you start wishing, deep in your soul, for Something Bigger. Something with Purpose, a reason to get out of bed that will outlast your Sim's desire for a grilled cheese sandwich.

To make gameplay more interesting and give it some story and stakes, players began writing their own rules for "challenges" and posting them on the Sims forums.

A challenge is basically a self-imposed set of rules. Commonly, a challenge tells you how to create your starting household, like the age/gender composition of the household and what traits each Sim starts with. The challenge might also dictate how your house should be furnished, down to how many beds or which appliances are permitted. Finally, the challenge lays out rules on things your Sims can and can't do, and some kind of scoring system that decides whether you've won or lost.

Some of the most common challenges I remember are variations on the "Legacy" challenge, where you start with a single "founder" Sim, have them raise children, and then pass the game down to an heir to begin a new generation.

When you look hard enough, legacy-style challenges are variations of the same handful of goals:

• amass a certain fortune
  • see Rags to Riches Challenge
• breed a trait into or out of the family line
  • see the Breed Out the Ugly challenge, which can be physically ugly or figuratively ugly,
  • or the propagate-your-very-unconventional-hair-color-or-eye-color challenge
• have X number of babies
  • see 100 Baby Challenge, which is, ah, exactly what it sounds like
• collect all possible deaths
  • see Black Widow challenge, where you, ah, marry a string of Sims and kill them off, under the rule that each death has to happen in a unique way
    • The Sims Franchise provides you with a truly bizarre repertoire of ways to die... not that I would spoil any of those here

The other kind of challenge I remember are the story-based ones. Instead of a family tree, you get a cast of characters, often lifted from a fairytale, a movie, or a TV show. Some are "good," some are "evil," and the rules make them act out a plot, or at least a Sims-flavored version of it:

• An elimination gameshow, where you lock a group of contestants in a house together and subject them to challenges to evict them one by one until there's one last winner
  • This goes by many names, each with their own unique rules: Hunger Games, Big Brother, Survivor, Bachelor / Bachelorette
• The Orphanage challenge, where one or two caretaker Sims take in a house full of orphaned children and try to raise them all to adulthood, a wholesome-ish counterweight to all the murder described above
• etc etc.

Now I Do Psychoanalysis On Myself

If our favorite challenges in The Sims really do say something about how we run our own lives, then it's worth looking at mine.

I say this as somebody who never actually owned the PC games for The Sims, but I did spend some amount of my childhood watching other people's "Let's Plays" of Sims challenges and fantasizing about which challenges I'd want to play if I did get a copy of The Sims.

For what it's worth, I think the fact that I liked watching people play in spite of never have played is high praise in and of itself. There exist games that are fun to play yet boring to watch, so surely a game that's fun to play and fun to watch is doing something right.

The two challenges that stuck with me most, from when I was watching "Let's Play" videos, were the Cinderella Challenge and the Four Immortal Sisters Challenge.

1. Cinderella Challenge

In the Cinderella Challenge, your Cinderella lives with her stepmother and two stepsisters, who have been cursed with some combination of the Slob, Snob, Evil, and Mean-Spirited traits, which means they'll be trashing the house and throwing snobbish parties while poor little Cinderella does every chore in it.

She isn't allowed to leave the lot except to go to school, and she can't start on her own homework until she's finished every chore in the house, and it's often a huge challenge for players to get her through every chore while keeping her from passing out.

Her way out is to progressively age up through the life stages without failing a single life stage, which means keeping her grades at a respectable level and without being taken away by the social worker for child neglect, at which point she can finally move out and live happily ever after.

Time for Psychoanalysis

I feel like this one is pretty straightforward to explain; it satisfies my masochistic fantasy of a Sim with a passion and not much time for this passion.

I get a thrill from seeing the Cinderella Sim scrub toilets and fighting to stay awake because I project myself into her if not cranked up to cartoonish levels. I've never scrubbed a toilet as putrid and gunky as her stepfamily has left it and I have no desire to live it myself, but goodness, is it satisfying to watch her claw her way to an A anyway.

2. Four Immortal Sisters Challenge

In the Four Immortal Sisters Challenge, you have four sims, each to represent the four elements:

• a Fire sister who is in charge of making lots of friends and making babies
• a Water sister who is in charge of keeping house and taking care of the kids when they're young, as well as cooking the Ambrosia that will keep the sisters immortal
• an Air sister who is in charge of being an Intellectual(tm) and mastering all the skills through book only, and tutoring the kids when they're older
• an Earth sister who is in charge of acquiring the ingredients that are necessary for producing the Ambrosia that will keep the sisters immortal (gardening and fishing), as well as keeping the children physically active

So there are two main pipelines keeping this household running:

1. The baby pipeline, in which the Fire sister is responsible for bringing in a steady stream of new babies, and the other three sisters are responsible for raising those babies into well-fed, well-educated, well-exercised young adults and sending them off into the world
2. The immortality pipeline, in which the Earth and Water sisters are responsible for keeping a steady supply of Ambrosia on hand.

Re: (2) the immortality pipeline, in order to have immortality in this game, you pretty much need to groom a household of Sims to keep each other alive. Ambrosia takes two ingredients, a Life Fruit and a Death Fish, which require a near-maxed-out gardening skill and fishing skill to get, and then a maxed-out 10/10 cooking skill to cook it into Ambrosia.

To master these three skills can take up a huge chunk of one Sim's lifetime, so players who optimize for immortality often divide the work across multiple Sims, with each one devoting himself/herself to mastering a single skill, until together they form a neat little pipeline of eternal youth.

Re: (1) the baby pipeline, the basic idea is that grooming a household of Sims solely to stay young forever is sort of bleak, like, what's the point of immortality if you exist solely to grind out the ingredients for more immortality? The reward for all this work is just more time to do more work?

So the Simmer who wrote this challenge adds this legacy aspect to offset the infinite grind of immortality. Instead of living forever for its own sake, the sisters raise generation after generation of little Sims and send them out into the world, so that immortality isn't the goal in and of itself.

Time for Psychoanalysis

I've come to realize that, left to my own devices, I'm the Air sister. Most of what I do for fun is reading, writing, and programming with maybe some drawing, which is a pretty Air-heavy lifestyle.

It's also somewhat humbling to see Air as a Sim in the game. When I describe what I do, I can dress it up all fancy, but in the game, Air's "just" a Sim who reads and then goes pute pute on the computer and sometimes opens a chat window. Which, uh, checks out.

This is also a little sobering for me, that when you delete each sister one by one, the world in which we're missing the Air sister is also the most painless. For starters, the immortality pipeline depends on Earth producing ingredients for Water to cook, so without Earth, the sisters grow old and die. The baby pipeline depends on Fire producing babies for Water to raise, so without Fire, there's no next generation. And of course, when you remove Water, both the sisters and the babies go kaput.

Without Air, the household would be a little less well-read, sure, but everyone would still be alive, well-fed, physically fit, with some horse-sense taught into them by the Fire and Earth sisters.

Aside 1: Some Analogy About Startups

There's probably some analogy I can twist in here about Fire being the sales team who keeps bringing in new clients, Water being customer success who fields the new clients, Earth being core infra who helps Water keep up with the onslaught of clients, and Air being the research division whose work will pay off when the company lives long enough.

When I'm feeling bleh, one thing that helps is realizing I've been playing as the Air sister for the last N hours, and it's time to switch characters.

• I can be the Water sister and cook an actual nice dish, or clean my apartment with my favorite scented wipes (Clorox Scentiva Disinfecting Wipes, man am I a fan of their citrus and coconut scents) - both of these let me turn my brain off for a while, and at the end I've got a clean apartment that smells good, or a good dinner, or both.
• Or, I can be the Earth sister and go running or climbing.
• Or, I can be the Fire sister and go to some social event.
  • I can happily exist as Air+Water+Earth in a nice, self-contained ecosystem, and I suspect that most yuppies live like this, where they have a job they are on top of and they stay in good physical shape and they keep their house running / cook / clean / chores and they can loop de loop forever.
  • But most interesting things in my life have been result of certain "characters" inciting some incident or me starting something myself, and Fire is how I get exposed to ideas/people/problems I wouldn't run into on my own.
    • (For the record, I'm only taking on Fire's friend-making duties, not her baby-making ones. My partner and I are very happy, thanks.)

Thinking of it as switching characters makes me want to do it well, and I like that my brain is easy to trick in this way. Cleaning my apartment is a chore, but, no, being the Water sister is a divine role from the Heavens, and if I'm going to be Water, I want the cleanest, best-smelling apartment in town. Same with staying in shape; if I'm the Earth sister, I'm not just getting my steps in and going through the motions, no, I must absolutely max out my skills to level 10/10 because the Heavens have mandated me to do so.

I guess I just really, really like maxing out skill bars.

Aside 2: Some Analogy About Relationships

I think this works for relationships too, not so much that you typecast each person into one role ("you're Fire, you're Water, okay, go"), more like each person picks up two or three roles and trades them off depending on who has the energy that week. If one of you is deep in an Air-heavy stretch, say, crunching on a deadline, the other one steps up as Water and handles the dishes.

Two introverts can be perfectly happy, too, but at least one of you has to be willing to step into Fire or Earth every so often to drag the two of you out to a birthday or even just a hike. Otherwise, to borrow from Kurt Vonnegut, you're asking one person to be your whole social life, and nobody is that many people. Everybody needs a village.