When The Sims first appeared for sale in February 2000, it did more than just introduce a game to the public; it unveiled a cultural sensation. The brainchild of Will Wright, who developed it with a team at Maxis, The Sims was a type of life-sim and social-sim game in which players took on the roles of virtual dolls. During the five years after The Sims hit store shelves, the life-sim/social-sim genre became the kind of powerful public and private obsession that, in earlier times, had attached itself to crosswords, Rubik’s Cubes, and on-screen solitaire. The virtual lives led by The Sims players became a new form of folk magic, an enthralling blend of make-believe and ritual that encompasses storytelling, relationship drama, interior decoration, and dress-up.
Fundamentally, The Sims provided an unparalleled sandbox experience. No other game on the market can touch it for the sheer amount of “just messing around” a player can do. That’s not to discount the many goals and challenges a player can undertake for fun—achievements and rewards are very much a part of the Sims experience now. But I value it for the ability to bring out the sort of mildly deviant side we all have. Sometimes my Sims life can be downright ordinary and perfectly wholesome. Sometimes, though, I run a family by stuffing the mom, dad, and kid into a single room so they can get to the next payday without having to buy two separate bedrooms.
For me, playing the first Sims game was unforgettable. I designed every tiny detail of my house and chose the appearance of my characters (Sims) from the bottom up. And this was before the era of expansion packs, when the game itself and all of its decisions stood on their own. After that, I played SimCity and the original Sim Tower, which later became Yoot Tower, topping many of my designs with helipads for tiny pixel helicopters. But those were games of resource allocation. They didn’t play with your emotions. You didn’t have any tiny human dramas unfolding before you. You didn’t have any little love stories happening. You didn’t have any little villains you could sympathize with unfolding in front of you. There were no surprises.
The charm of the game was that it offered the chance to play at real life. You could construct an ideal world and live in it, or you could take life as we know it and pull it apart piece by piece, event by event, for no reason except to watch the forwarding of the plot. Even the act of making a family was fraught with tension: Whom would Sims settle down with? Would their mates cheat? Would they die? “Everyone has fantasies at one level or another,” argues one commentator, “and in The Sims, Maxis gave a pretty wide gamut of fantasy possibilities to its players.”
The game’s innovation lay in large part in its user-friendly interface and its accessibility to a wide variety of players. The Sims was, quite simply, easy to pick up and pay. That was Eben, not Eir, and I think that is a key factor in why that was Eir’s game (1). The use of intuition is another key factor. Visual feedback is quick and unambiguous. If he becomes a computer, that’s what he’s running inside his head, because that’s what players understand, and the other way around is a part of Intuition, too. When a player has to do a few reversals of expectation to do a task, that’s less good means of allowing intuition to function.
The Sims turned into a massive part of our culture for one really big reason: it handed the reins over to the players and, essentially, told them to do whatever they wanted. (Well, up to a point. More on that later.) It was almost like handing over a set of paints and saying, “Okay, don’t just look at the paints. Make a painting. Do something worthwhile with them.” It was a blank canvas, with way too many tools for doing the kind of work that kept it from ever being a blank canvas.
Constructing and personalizing homes was one of the most beloved parts of the game. In terms of the home-building aspect alone, The Sims offered a sheer variety of structures and design styles. Players could “build” many things; the building experience was certainly not secondary in any way. The “Erector Set” possibilities of what you could construct pushed each player’s game experience into unique territory. Very few player houses were the same, and you could argue there were no two styles that were identical among the houses of any player.
The creation of Sims allowed me another opportunity to express myself. The character creation tools that The Sims provided let me, and many other people who played the game customize endlessly. We could and can create all kinds of characters. There’s no game that holds a proverbial candle to the kind of customization possible in The Sims. And when I play it, I can’t help but feel that the vision of even the most varied custom appearances and stories that’s possible in the game barely covers a fraction of the apparent self-expression possible with these tools.
Further possibilities for creativity emerged through the game’s expansion packs and downloadable content. Added variety came from new items, clothing, and building materials that served to keep the game fresh. Expansions like The Sims: Hot Date and The Sims: Vacation went beyond the game’s scope to introduce new mechanics and types of experiences. With these packs installed, players could take their characters on dates, vacations, and more. It was one thing for Maxis to open up players’ toolsets; quite another for the company to open up whole new scenes of private life.
What I found most delightful about The Sims was that it was a storytelling game. It offered a virtual dollhouse in which I was free to create whole narratives of my own. While the last game I had played with something close to that amount of “tell your own story” freedom had been my childhood Barbie’s Dream World, what I found equally enjoyable was the clear, straightforward (yet oddly riveting) gameplay of The Sims.
The Sims didn’t only charm gamers; they also greatly affected pop culture and all forms of media. This happened not just because the game was a massive hit by broad appeal, but because just about every human with a computer could relate in some way to living, laughing, and dying in The Sims.
Folks, we’re talking about a paragon of Western art that touched the lives of gamers and families all over the world. How did The Sims achieve such omnipresence in popular culture? A key reason is that the game is based on a very simple, universal premise: “What if you could play at the game of life itself, in a kind of risk-free, no-consequences (or at least no serious, life-altering consequences) sandbox mode?” While fantasies and high drama can, of course, be intensely captivating, they can’t top the drama of watching what your sim does after you’ve flicked the walls of the house to invisible in order to observe what goes on when, for instance, four guys of varying temperamental dimensions live together in the same bachelor pad, all trying to romance the steak-pan-knife-wielding, good-girlfriend-material sim next door.
The game gained even more popularity once it hit mainstream media. The Sims constantly popped up in magazines, television shows, and news articles, where its cultural significance and mass appeal were emphasized. The game wasn’t just something people played—it was also something they talked about. It was often brought up in conversation as much as in the press. Stars of stage and screen well beyond the celebrity games circuit often professed their love for this virtual world of dollhouse drama.
The gaming industry was affected in a noteworthy way by The Sims. This game was successful and showed that there was a hidden, large potential for life simulation games. Games that give player avatars a more or less “normal” life to live. Games that are kind of like acting out a play where the player’s in the lead role. Games that are their art, in the unique way that all games are, because as much or more than any other medium, a game can be unfakeably what its creators intended, and The Sims is unfakeably a life simulator game, as are its successors.
Another way in which this game has had influence is in the realm of user-generated content and modding communities. The Sims was a pioneer in embracing the concept of user-generated content, and in the freedom it gave players to create and share. Following The Sims, subsequent games that rose in popularity came to understand the value of letting players create and add on to the game world. This not only served the purpose of extending the life of the game far beyond the initial release but also insured a continuous money stream for the developers.
What really stands out about The Sims is its incredible community. They are absolutely one hundred percent dedicated to their passion for The Sims. This has been the case since the game first came out, and the community has grown exponentially since, probably, its second or third iteration. Successive versions of the game didn’t just sell more; with each new version, the fan base expanded well beyond where it had been. More than that, though, the die-hard fans were always constantly playing it already; the game completely had them.
Players really made the fan sites and forums into vibrant communities. They shared what they were doing in their game and where it took place. The only reward for the player in this was to show off a bit of what they had created in the game. Countless players like me have put in hours and hours downloading and using custom content and mods furnished by The Sims Resource and Mod The Sims (among other sites). Spend a little time on the gallery pages of those site or in the forums, be they the official forums (where official forum rules hold sway) or the unofficial forums (where chaos usually reigns), and you’ll get an eyeful of what other players have done with the game.
The community expanded and had more influence. Social media—like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube allowed fans to connect to other fans, usually in real time, so that they could effectively collaborate on ideas and perhaps even feel like they were making a difference in the world. The transition to YouTube was so important when trying to understand the current state of The Sims because video content effectively replaced the older content. Before the first video appeared, fans shared picture stories on personal websites, where they’d post photo albums of their Sim doing some task or another.
The community’s development of modifications (mods) and other custom content has been one of its most substantial and important contributions. The modding community hasn’t just created new items, clothing, and hairstyles for the original game or the DLCs that followed. It has created new gameplay mechanics and vastly expanded the possibilities for The Sims in ways that the developers could never have imagined back when the game was first released.
Indeed, the modding community and the community of people who create custom content have become more important over the years as the developers have embraced them. Since the original game (actually, going back to the first Sims game back in 1998), there are few things that the development team hasn’t changed in one way or another.
The game The Sims has had a much deeper impact than just the fun of playing a computer character who lives in a unique, virtual world. By allowing players to not only control the actions of an avatar but to step into the role of “dollhouse god” and shape every facet of the world they inhabit, Will Wright and his team at Maxis created a game that has you doing something truly incredible: They have you (and millions of other people) creating. Creativity, as something that humans are innately drawn to, has allowed The Sims to become a hit game, but in a world that was filled with so many other “creativity”-type games that followed in its wake—after a mic drop.
In sum, The Sims turned into a cultural phenomenon due to its groundbreaking format, which offered completely new and innovative ways for players to interact within a game. It was the first game that allowed players to act as “gods,” controlling tiny people in a tiny world, and it appeared like an absolute hit from the moment it was released in 2000. The game did not simply repackage old ideas; it offered social commentary and forced players to think about the choices their Sim characters made. It was hailed by both old and new fans of the art form as an Evening Standard for games, and it had the impact of a nuke, not just on other PC games but also on games across different platforms and genres.
