I played The Sims a lot as a preteen. It was the only computer game I ever liked that didn’t involve horses, and it lived at my dad’s house, where screen time was not limited. My friend Diana had it, too, and she and I played together sometimes, in the small office connected to her parents’ bedroom. Diana liked the design element of the game, and would use cheat codes to make her Sims very rich, then build them big houses. She chose balconies with glass railings, and reupholstered her Sims’ furniture.
That part was not interesting to me. My Sims were not allowed to use cheat codes. Instead, they had to succeed within the terms of my own life, or what I imagined it would be as an adult: they had to get jobs, learn skills, and build relationships. They spent time learning to cook, mostly by reading the cookbooks on their bookshelves. They paid bills that arrived in the mailbox, and redid their kitchen floors only if they made the money on their own. Everyone got a smoke detector, and I worked hard to help them keep their Need meters—Hunger, Bladder, Social, Fun, Energy, Hygiene, Comfort, Environment—in the green. If not given instructions, Sims will do their best to handle these needs themselves, electing to use the bathroom or play on the computer. But I liked to do it for them, sending them to the fridge if they were hungry, to bed if they were tired, and to another Sim if they were lonely.
At my dad’s, I started with the first edition, The Sims, which came out in 2000. That one had only four angles available, each ninety degrees apart, in which I could look down and out (and through the walls) of my Sims’ square houses, at three possible levels of zoom. The game was very gridded: furniture could only sit within blueprinted squares, never diagonally. Cockroaches, when they came, crawled in circles within one square only. The cheapest flooring option was black-and-white linoleum tile, which I sometimes used for my entire house, and on which the cockroaches would spread, in a grid, if I didn’t kill them.
The Sims 2 came out in September 2004, when I had just started fifth grade. I think I got it right away—I remember I was excited—though I’m surprised, now, that I had access so early to a game that I mostly remember in terms of where I could make my Sims WooHoo, their term for sex: bed, hot tub, shower. They were very demure, and would go under the sheets, or underwater, or behind the door, and then become pixelated. Still, though: there was a lot of WooHoo, and eventually a lot of Try for Baby, which would, in The Sims 2, sometimes lead to infants, then toddlers. The toddlers grew into children, whom my adult Sims could Help with Homework. Eventually these children became teenagers, and got boyfriends, girlfriends, pimples, and the desire to run away.
