Before we get into this article, I need to take a moment to break some news to you. Now brace yourself, because this news might be difficult to hear. The first Sims was initially released nearly 18 years ago. If The Sims were a person, it would be legally allowed to vote, fight for its country, and buy fireworks. When the game was released in February of the year 2000, no one knew that this life simulator was going to turn into one of the most popular simulation games of all time.
Multiple versions, expansion packs, Great Gatsby style pool accidents, accidental fires, and destroyed families later, and The Sims is still going strong. Though the fourth edition of the franchise was met with a large backlash from fans and critics alike, many people eventually warmed up to it and the base game ended up selling over 5 million copies (including both physical and digital sales) proving that it is still one of the biggest gaming franchises out there.
But with great sales comes great misconceptions. From people arguing over the proper way to play the game to people denying whether or not The Sims should even be considered a “real video game” at all, the internet is filled with people who have already made up their minds about a game they’ve never even played.
Well, have no fear, because I am here to right some wrongs, correct some misconceptions, and reveal what truly makes The Sims so great.
25 Live Out Your Dreams
The greatest thing about the franchise is that there are several ways to play The Sims. Though the internet may have you believe that all players create an incredibly attractive and wealthy version of themselves which they have marry a digital clone of their favourite rock star, there are thousands of other ways to enjoy the game. Make the wife a CEO of a fortune 500 company and have her husband a hopeful presidential candidate. Ruin their reputation by having one child become a criminal mastermind, have the other destroy hundreds of marriages across the town, and have his wife divorce him and marry his political opponent. What? EA told me to live out my dreams.
24 Good, Honest, Wholesome Fun
Sure, the games are buckets of fun on their own. But the fun does not stop within the confines created by the content that the developers have provided us. The true delight comes from scouring the web for the greatest and most bizarre mods you can find. The range of mods that exist truly shows how many different ways the games can be played. Some mods just enhance typical game play by fixing bugs are adding in small yet cool features (like changing descriptions for emotions, adding more trait slots, or letting kids drink tea and soda) where other mods completely change the game. These more bizarre mods include teen pregnancy, the ability to turn your pets into characters from My Little Pony, and the ability to impregnate yourself (because who needs a man!?).
23 Out Of Ideas
I love The Sims as much as the next person; however, sometimes you can find yourself in a rut. Sometimes you can find yourself making the exact same family structure with different names over and over again until you want to end yourself. But that doesn’t mean that we are done with the game itself. No, that just means that it is time to switch over to The Sims Medieval. Instead of functioning as an open world game, this version exists as a series of structured quests that give you the direction needed to pull you out of your rut. Be a knight! Or a doctor! Or a Pirate King who will later betray the Pirates and feed them to the Pit Beast. And once you feel like choosing your own Sim’s destiny yet again, switch back to the Sims game of your choice.
22 Skewed Morality
A game in which someone can end anyone without a second thought does not seem like the sort of game that would enforce a strict and almost puritanical moral code. But if you thought that you could stray outside of the moral code in The Sims 3 without suffering the social consequences, then you would be wrong. If you are part of the celebrity system (which was added to the game with the Late Night expansion pack), then be prepared to have your every act scrutinized and weaponized against you. Getting intimate with a fairy, vampire, or werewolf could lead to certain scandal. As could having a child out of wedlock, an affair, getting intoxicated in public, and anything that you wouldn’t want your grandmother to know about. But the average citizen is not safe either. If you cheat on your partner in public, you’ll get a bad reputation and those rumours could find their way back to your spouse and end your relationship. Tread lightly.
21 The Origin Of Sin
When I was a teenager, I lived on my family farm and was lucky to have no internet access. Though this may sound like absolute misery to some, it actually saved me from having to install Origin on my computer until I finally moved out. When EA decided to sell their games through the Origin platform, people were enraged. Now people were no longer able to share game codes in order to avoid buying Stuff packs themselves and had to install this buggy and irritating platform to their PCs. One of the most irritating things about this switch is the fact that Origin is an unreliable platform that often crashes and breaks. And if your Origin isn’t working, then you can’t play your Games. But in the world of evils committed by game developers, a buggy platform is the lesser of a sea of evils.
20 It’s A Charmed Life
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s incredibly fun to create a family with the sole intention of ruining every single one of each member’s lives in creative and well-thought out ways. But sometimes it can be actually fun to create a family with the intention of watching each member grow and experience life. It can be oddly beautiful to create a young adult and watch them excel in their career, find love, and then start a family. And then it’s so cool to watch their children grow into themselves, find hobbies, fall in love, move out, start their own careers and families… all while your original Sim grows old with their partner. Sometimes it’s fun to destroy lives, but sometimes it’s just amazing to watch life happen.
19 Benevolent God
One the other hand, sometimes you just have to be a vengeful God and ruin some lives. There are several ways to do this. You could do so in a realistic way and ruin your sims marriage, vanquish their parents, have their ex win the house, the kids, and the pets in the divorce, which forces them into a one room apartment and a life of day drinking. You could go the creative route and fill your sims home with ghosts and haunted gnomes which will rob them of sleep and cause them to eventually succumb to insanity. Or you could go the sadistic route and make strict unwritten rules that they have to follow or else they will be trapped in a small room in the backyard which will be filled with ovens and (eventually) tombstones.
18 I Reject Your Reality
Though it can seem like your only gameplay options are to either play a ridiculous, modded up, misery-filled game or to create a realistic, happy, sitcom-like family,; there are far more options than that. In The Sims, you can do and be literally whatever you want to. You can be a mermaid who is also a firefighter. You can be a vampire doctor or a detective who is also a ghost. A vet that hates animals or a kleptomaniac policeman. You can even be a slightly more attractive and wealthier version of your current self. You can live in a treehouse, in a penthouse, or in a shack by the beach. A Simmer can live a modest life, be a celebrity, or a Black Widow-type woman. The choice is up to you.
17 Not For Safe For Kids, Not Safe For Life
Though the games are rated T for Teen and do contain some adult content, that adult content is often cleverly (or sarcastically) disguised so that younger players won’t fully understand the games more adult content until they get older. I started playing the game myself when I was ten years old and didn’t even realize what “woohoo” meant or what the bubble blower which came with the University expansion pack was until I was nearly 15. Though the juice bar was quite obvious and the fact that six or seven juices gave my Sim a sugar buzz felt a little sarcastic, the disguised adult content was a cool way to include realistic themes without making it too explicit. It’s hard to achieve that perfect balance, but I think that The Sims nailed it.
16 Crime And Punishment
Just like there is a strict moral system, there is actually a strictly enforced legal system in place in all of The Sims games. In the third installment, if your Sim is in the Criminal career track, they will often be picked up from the police during their shift to spend a few hours in the local jail. Teens and children have a strict curfew that they must follow and the teens who break it can find themselves being escorted home by the police. And the paparazzi will be held accountable for their law breaking ways as well. If they create false and slanderous rumours about your famous Sim, your Sim can take them down to City Hall and sue them for slander. Even pranksters can risk punishment for their behaviour. The law of the Sims is not the be trifled with.
15 Play Until You Drop
Have you ever seen a commercial for any given Sims game? If you have, you’ll notice that they seem to emphasize the gameplay aspect of the game. It makes sense, considering that they are advertising a game in which you play… however, that is usually not how actual players enjoy their Simming time. If they wanted to make a realistic Sims commercial, than it would feature a young adult laying in bed with a laptop on their stomach, surrounded by bags of chips, and empty soda cans. Said person has been creating a sole Sim for the past two hours. They are no longer trying to make the Sim attractive as they are just playing with the controls and laughing at what happens. Eventually, they make a nice family and then build the most beautiful home ever seen by human eyes. They then close the game and do not reopen it for several weeks. And when they do, they delete that family and start all over again.
14 Not Everyone Can Be A Parent
In The Sims 3, it was insanely easy to raise a baby. You could essentially leave them in their crib until it was time for them to age up into a child and head to school. Just cheat code their moodlets until they are happy and cheat away the negative personality traits that they will get due to your terrible parenting skills. But you can no longer laze away your babies formative years in the latest installment of The Sims. Now you have to teach them basic life skills and they cannot be left in their cot until they age up. They have nightmares and needs that cannot be easily cheated away. If you wait too long to feed your toddler, they will become angry. And if they become angry, they will throw their food on the floor and then whine that they have no food. It honestly might be easier to raise a real baby at this point.
13 Glitches Make The Game
Glitches can be the enemy of a good time in the eyes of a gamer. Glitches can range from insanely irritating to rending the game completely unplayable. Big glitches can be frustrating, but minor glitches can actually improve the gameplay and provide some solid entertainment. Some hilarious glitches include heads of lettuce that ask you out on dates, horses that appear in front of your home and watch your family through your window, 8 foot tall babies, Sims whose arms shoot backwards through their bodies and out through their backs, and sentient countertops that want to come over to your house to play with your children. I’ll tell you, nothing makes me happier than seeing a zombie T clip through the trampoline in my backyard.
12 Death Becomes Us
Every installation of The Sims creates new and interesting ways of ending the lives of the Sims you create. By using a special (and lengthy) cheat code in the second Sims game, one could unlock every possible method of passing away with a simple click. These included meeting one’s demise via old age, flies, starvation, drowning, electrocution, and loneliness. The third installment allowed Sims to perish by the same classic and beloved ways but ended up replacing “death by flies” with an ending involving a mummy curse that one could acquire in the Egyptian tombs with the addition of the World Adventures expansion pack. The fourth Sims did not disappoint, as it added emotion-driven states your Sims could enter which lead to a possible demise via humiliation, laughter, and pure unadulterated rage.
11 More Eggs Than Easter
One of the greatest aspects of The Sims franchise is not finding unique and exciting ways to end the lives of your Sims, but rather the intense level of detail that the creators and developers put into the games themselves. There are crossover families (like the infamous Goth family) and legends that exist in the lore of the games, dating all the way back to the medieval era. There are inside jokes with gamers and creators (like the threat of chinchillas). The notorious tragic clown has become a creepy yet endearing staple throughout the entire series. Even the titles of the books on your Sims’ shelves are references to popular TV series and films (the books also reference books from previous Sims games as well).
10 It’s Better Down Where It’s Meta
As well as an abundance of Easter eggs, there are also a lot of exciting and meta details within the games and meta activities that your Sims can take part in. In The Sims 2, your Sims can attend university, join the tech/computer science major, and prove that they are all living in a giant simulation. Sims can sit down at their own computer and play The Sims themselves. You will not believe the amount of times that I have sat at my own computer, playing The Sims, and chastised my own Sim for doing the same thing. Many players joked that those playing the game act as a sort of God, so The Sims Medieval decided to make us an active member of the game by calling us “The Watcher.” Sims will often feel blessed when they feel like they are being watched and will feel comforted when they can feel The Watcher guiding them.
9 Impressionable Youth
Not only are the children in the fourth Sims game harder to actually raise, they also require a new level of attentiveness that didn’t exist in previous games. Not only do you have to keep these children alive, but you are now in charge of the people that they become. You have to teach your children morality, manners, empathy, responsibility, and compassion. And everything you do (be it groundings, answers to their questions, advice, or punishments) will affect the morals that they absorb. These morality levels cannot be cheat coded away. Whatever happens to your young Sim will shape the person that they become. I have never been more terrified to yell at a virtual child in my entire life. What if I scar them for life? Maybe I’ll just write of kids entirely, both real and digital.
8 It’s A Sims Thing
I will admit it: I was incredibly disappointed by the fourth installment (as were most players.) Don’t get me wrong, the graphics were beautiful, and they added a lot of incredibly cool features to the game. However, the game just doesn’t feel complete. There are a lot of features missing that were integral parts of previous games. They are literally selling an entire stuff pack in order to add laundry to the game and another for bowling when both of those were included in the university pack for Sims 3. The fourth game has been out since 2014 and we still don’t have nearly as much content as we did in previous installments. But that doesn’t keep any of us from buying new packs and playing the game because we are all hopelessly addicted.
7 Limitless Possibilities
The first Sims game was released nearly 18 years ago. I have clocked roughly 736 hours (roughly the equivalent of a solid month of gameplay) on The Sims 4 alone. Even though it was a disappointment, the graphics keep pulling me back for more. And yet, neither I nor the millions of players around the globe have gotten bored. The only thing that has lead to a decline in players has been poor decisions made by EA itself. With a game as limitless as The Sims there really is no way to “get bored” with it. Make a different family, live in a different city, shake things up with a technophobic journalist or a serial cheater romantic path. End every marriage in the town and then move to another town and try again. The possibilities truly are endless.
6 Impractical Waste
When I was a kid, I was only allowed one hour of gameplay a day. That was one rule I never did follow. The moment I got a PC that supported The Sims in my bedroom was the moment that my mother started worrying about me getting bedsores. I was often told to go outside and chastised for wasting my day away on a computer game. But I am here to disprove the idea that video games, especially The Sims, are a waste of time. Video game journalists pay their bills by writing articles about games like The Sims. Also, when I moved into my new apartment, I had no idea how to arrange my furniture. So I created a scale model of my home in The Sims and figured out how to optimally arrange my furniture in-game before actually doing so in real life.
