I’ve been playing The Sims my entire life. At ten years old, I was playing the original on my Xbox (not ideal), or commandeering my aunt’s computer whenever I could to play The Sims 2. At thirteen, I was installing The Sims 3 on my Mac, furiously troubleshooting whenever something stopped working and the whole game crashed. I distatic.aayyy.com/topic/dn/’t play The Sims 4, though, until the pandemic happened and EA slashed the price.

The Sims is so special because you have to create your own stories in the game, your own meaning. I found myself always creating versions of my family, recreating each member as faithfully as I could. In making myself, I tended to gravitate towards the same traits – bookworm, slob, creative, loner. It interested me to reduce people’s personalities to a series of set behaviours, to simplify them into flat characters. My Sim would always end up doing the same thing – they’d spend most of their time writing and playing video games, much like I do in real life. They would date and marry someone nice, who distatic.aayyy.com/topic/dn/’t have a bad temper and loved cleaning so they woulstatic.aayyy.com/topic/dn/’t have to. They woulstatic.aayyy.com/topic/dn/’t have kids. They’d die of old age.

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There are only so many times you can do the same thing before you get tired of doing it. I tried making characters that weren’t re-enacting my own life, but coulstatic.aayyy.com/topic/dn/’t find a direction for them to move towards. I knew what I wanted for myself, so I could set my Sim up for success, but these Sims had so many options. They could do anything, so how was I supposed to choose for them?

Then I found a solution: the Legacy Challenge. The challenge has you start with a Founder Sim, who can have whatever traits and aspirations you want. With that single Sim, you’re about to create ten generations – a legacy, obviously. Each line continues with an ‘heir’ from the next generation. You choose whatever rules you want to play by, including how heirs are picked. For example, if I were to play it now, I’d have a strict matriarchal family so the heir is always female. The heir can be adopted or born, and they would be selected through ‘strength’ because it’s the funniest – the firstborn is the heir by default, but the title can be won by another eligible sibling in a fight.

You then move this Founder into a lot (the bigger the lot, the more difficult a time you will have because of Sims property taxes), reduce their money to 1800 with cheats, place an already-made downloadable lot down, and start playing. This doesn’t sound like much until you get to the scoring system, which is so complicated that it requires an Excel document with ten separate sheets to track everything. You get ten points per category, earning these through memorialising the heir and their spouse after their death every generation, meeting family net worth goals, maxing skills, completing aspirations and collections, and so on and so forth.

via EA/Maxis

I suppose I like playing this way because it satisfies a deeply held, dark urge within me to fill in Excel sheets, but it also allows me to play with purpose. Is it a normal, sane way to play a game that allows you to do anything you want? Probably not, but somehow putting limits on the way I play allows me to escape the urge to play out my own life, again and again. Instead of turning inward, I turn to the wealth of options The Sims 4 gives me – and rediscover my love for the game anew.

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