The SimsWindoWatch Magazine Volume 7 No. 7 July 2001 |
Copyright 2001 by Margaret Werdermann
…and now, fearless reader, we rejoin our heroine as she clings by her fingertips to the edge of the abyss
in immanent peril of being sucked down forever into the
It began innocently enough. It was a sunny, spring day when her son was given the computer game "The Sims" for his birthday. He was excited - it was the game ALL the kids were playing - and the grandparents who gave it to him basked in a warm feeling of pride in their birthday-buying accomplishment. Little did they know that the "Sim Vortex" was lurking inside that brightly coloured package.
His anxious parents began to suspect something was awry when the boy began to disappear for hours on end into the dark confines of his room. Hours stretched to days, days stretched to weeks with no sign of him. He didn't eat…he didn't sleep…
Fearing the worst, our heroine decided to investigate. The door creaked open on hinges rusty with disuse. "Hey mom! You have GOT to try this," he croaked through dry, cracked lips. Sensing that her child had been possessed by a being from the evil Sim world; she decided that, to master her enemy, she must learn about it.
Gingerly, she sidled onto the seat beside the boy. "OK, but just half an hour," she said, and those were the last words the outside world heard her speak... for at least four or five hours anyway. This game is SO addictive, it's amazing! Hours just FLY by to the point that my son and I coined the phrase "the Sim Vortex" to explain to his poor dad how time seemed to be sucked away from us while we played.
When asked to describe The Sims (and I've been asked more times than you'd think), I tell people that playing The Sims is like playing with a doll house - except the dolls have minds of their own! It's a "people simulator" created by Will Wright, the same guy who came up with Sim City - another favorite at our house.
We'll talk more, later, about the game itself. First, though, we should look at the system requirements. There's no point getting all excited about the game if your system won't handle it, right?
The system requirements for The Sims are not at all unreasonable. You'll need:
The good news here is that you don't need a pricey 3-D graphics card to run this game.
The installation is a breeze. Drop the CD in, and follow the directions. That's it! No nasty surprises here. Within just a few minutes, you're ready to play the top-selling PC game of 2000 AND 2001.
If you're a fan of Sim City, you'll remember seeing all the little Sims walking about the streets, driving their cars, and playing in the parks. You knew the general mood of the populace because you'd read it in the newspapers, but weren't you just a little curious sometimes to see what exactly they were doing in those little Sim houses? Oh, come on, you can admit it! I can't have been the only one, or they wouldn't have made The Sims.
In The Sims, you are given a neighborhood to do with as you wish. You can build as many houses as there are lots and fill them with Sims. The only caveat is that your "family" has to be able to afford the house you want to give them - reality bites!
So, first, we make our "family." Want the perfect "Leave it to Beaver" family? Go ahead - create them. Want a single guy whose house will become Party Central? No problem. Roommates…newlyweds? You got it! You can make any combination of adult(s) with, or without, kid(s). You can mix and match heads and bodies to create unique Sims whom you'll be able to recognize; and, best of all, you get to decide on their personalities, too.
Sounds great? Be careful, Grasshopper, because deciding on a personality can be a tricky business. You have 25 of what we'll call "personality points" that have to be shared out among traits such as neat, nice, outgoing, etc. Concentrate too hard on being the life of the party, and you might create a slob. Try to clone June Cleaver, and she may find she has no friends.
Yet, you don't want to find a "perfect" combination and make a whole neighborhood of Stepford Wives either. That would be just plain boring! Mix it up a little, and you'll have much more fun. You might even want to do a few unethical human-subject science experiments, like: What happens if a Sim has only one personality trait to the exclusion of all others? Try it. The results will be entertaining, believe me.
There's a catch, though. Just as in real life, there's no "undo" when it comes to people's personalities. Choose wisely, my friend, because once your Sims are "born" they're stuck with that personality for life!
Once you've created your family, they start off with 20,000 Simoleans (Sim money) with which to purchase a lot, build a house, and furnish it. Again, just like in real life, you'll probably have to start off with a modestly priced lot and build a starter home on it if you want to have a bed to sleep in the first night.
It is important, too, to have a bed (as well as a few other necessities) in the house as soon as possible. If your Sims don't have a bed, they'll eventually fall asleep on the floor and wake up grumpy (going to work grumpy too often can get your Sim fired); if they don't have a fridge, they'll eventually starve to death and you'll be left with a tombstone on your lawn instead of a Sim; and let's not even get into what happens when you don't provide them with a toilet!
Don't worry, though, you're not stuck with the first house you create - you can upgrade. Once you've found your Sims suitable employment, you can save their hard-earned Simoleans and expand their house and/or decorate it to the max. If you build up enough equity, you can even move them out of their original home and into another, more upscale, abode. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination and patience as well as the Sims' sometimes-unpredictable behavior.
Playing dollies in their pretty houses is fine for a while; but, if that's all there was to The Sims, I doubt it would have won the 2000 Interactive Achievement Game of the Year award. So what makes The Sims so addictive?
Remember those personalities we were talking about? Well, at some point while you think you're playing God orchestrating the lives of these puny Sims, you realize that, in fact, you're more like a parent. You might be able to control the purse strings, and you can suggest to your Sims what you think they should do, but they are ultimately in control of their own destinies.
You want to upgrade the house because the cramped surroundings are depressing your Sim? That means your Sim has to get a job to earn the Simoleans to upgrade; but, if she's too depressed, she may refuse to look for a job. Now what?!
Perhaps you've found your Sim a neat little sideline carving garden gnomes in his spare time. 
He stacks them up in his little Sim workshop waiting to sell them when his wife appears, obviously irate that he's spent the last several days in this stupid workshop instead of taking her out dancing (which he never does anymore anyway!), and proceeds to kick the stuffing out of the poor little gnomes, rendering them unsuitable for sale to say the least.
Maybe you think you're the perfect Sim parent, buying your Sim children all the latest and greatest toys. Don't let them get too spoiled. If they don't study and their grades fall, it could be "off to military school" for the poor little slackers - FOREVER!
Trying to balance your Sims' physical, emotional, and relationship needs while taking into account their individual personalities and dealing with surprises both good and bad is what makes The Sims so much fun. This isn't one game, it's many games. Because you have created the players and guided their actions yourself, your game will not be the same as your friend's game or anyone else's (and there are a whole lot of other people playing - more than 3,400,000 copies have been sold in 14 different languages worldwide).
I guess it soon became apparent that one neighborhood, one building contractor, and the contents of the first department store were simply not enough to satisfy the hoards of Sim devoted. What good parent doesn't want the best for his/her children? We wanted MORE, and the Sim gods delivered in the form of two expansion packs and the Sims on the web.
The Sims Livin' Large and The Sims House Party expansion packs can be added to The Sims individually or together. They both add more neighborhoods to the game (with the original game and the two expansion packs installed, you end up with a total of nine neighborhoods), some fun new architectural styles, and loads more merchandise to buy. They differ in their themes, though.
Livin' Large concentrates on the Sims' daily lives. It adds five new career tracks to the original set, some intriguing new architectural and décor styles from "Home of the Future" to "Castle," and some really interesting new situations from roach infestations to alien abductions (my son LOVES the genie in the lantern).
You must have a full, original version of The Sims installed on your PC and 175 MB free disk space, as well as additional space for saved games, to add the Livin' Large expansion pack.
House Party is the newest expansion pack. This one is intended to deal solely with your Sims' social lives and particularly large group situations. This is a great idea because your Sims need friends in order to advance in their careers. What better way to work on loads of friendships at once than to throw a party?
The architectural styles, décor, and props reflect party types such as Cowboy, Luau, and Rave - but there's nothing stopping you from permanently decorating your Sims' home in, say, ranch style if you wish. The costume trunk that comes with House Party allows all your Sims to change into party-themed outfits from disco duds to togas at once - that's a time saver!
Naturally, it wouldn't be The Sims without a chaos generator. House Party adds even more new and unexpected situations. If your party is too boring, the Mime may crash it; if it's really rockin', Drew Carey might appear in his limo (I'm not kidding, this is really his voice - apparently he's one of the "Sim devoted," too); and don't you want to find out what happens if one of your Sims hits the punch bowl once too often?
Just as with the Livin' Large pack, you must have a full, original version of The Sims installed on your PC and 255 MB free disk space, as well as additional space for saved games, to add House Party. If you want to add both of the expansion packs at once, be sure to install The Sims first, Livin' Large next, and House Party last. This can add up to some super fun when you mix and match among all three programs.
You'd think that all those different neighborhoods with all those different Sims in all those different houses facing all those different situations would be enough for most people, wouldn't you? Evidently not because The Sims has also spread to the web.
The official Sims web site can be found at www.TheSims.com. This is a phenomenal site! On it, you can learn tips and tricks for playing the game; share your best families and/or their houses with other fans; create or download new "skins" (Sim bodies), homes, and objects using the Sims Teleportation Device; chat with other fans; enter contests…the list goes on and on.
The official site also has a very helpful page consisting of a long list of links to some of the more notable of the more than 200 other fan sites on the Internet. The links are organized, on one side, by what they contain and, on the other, by 14 languages (15 if you count English-North America and English-UK as two different languages - and there are those who would say you probably should).
According to Electronic Arts, the most popular of the fan sites are The Sims Resource http://www.thesimsresource.com, Mall of the Sims http://www.mallofthesims.com, and Seven Deadly Sims http://www.7deadlysims.com.
The Sims Resource has a terrific collection of skins. I really like Wulfy's Sim Shop http://www.wulfysimshop.thesimsresource.com the best for their celebrity skins. My son is partial to their NSync skins, but my favorite is definitely Seven of Nine from Star Trek Voyager.
Mall of the Sims includes some good tutorials and MOTS TV - fan-produced slide shows organized into "channels" from drama to romance to sci-fi, etc.
The Seven Deadly Sims is also a terrific place for skins, etc. For a chuckle, navigate to Dr. FrankenSim's laboratory, find the GilliSim's Island skins, and read the warning about the Chimp. For any of you with a truly warped sense of humor, check out The Sims Death Match.
So, who are all these millions of people who forsake their humdrum lives of work, sleep, and bills to live vicariously through Sims and their work, sleep, and bills? The answer to that question is "everybody!" Although the game's ESRB rating is "T" for Teen, its fans are multigenerational and multicultural.
You could write a thesis on why this game is so popular with so wide an audience. Is it because it gives people a sense of control over something in their stressful lives? Perhaps it appeals to the soap-opera lover or the voyeur. One young man I know plays it purely for the pleasure of creating homes and decorating them, ignoring the Sims themselves (an interior designer in the making).
Of course, there's also the joy of doing something really bad and getting away with it. That always appeals. One afternoon my son and I experimented to see what would happen if two Sims voodoo'd each other at the same time (in the interests of science, naturally). The results were hilarious, no harm was done to any living thing, and we had a chance to be exceptionally evil with no consequences.
Seriously, though, one of the things parents like most about this game is that it's a "co-operative" game rather than being "competitive." They really enjoy seeing their kids playing together to build something up instead of trying to shoot each other down.
Best of all, in my opinion, it's also a great bonding experience to laugh and work together with your child (or any other loved one, for that matter) toward a common goal. Because the game is based on real-life situations, it can provoke some very educational conversations that benefit from the advantage of not sounding like lectures. Through The Sims, my son and I have discussed setting priorities, time management, money management, the virtues of patience, and the importance of relationships - all within the non-threatening context of a game. Who could put a price on that?
OK, before anyone calls Child and Family Services, the whole "… days stretched to weeks … He didn't eat…he didn't sleep…" thing was a bit of an exaggeration. OK…OK…it was a downright lie - but it wouldn't have sounded nearly so thrilling if I'd said, "he really played the game a lot," right?
The WindoWatch team is taking a break in August. (All this hard-core gaming can be exhausting, you know.) See you in September, and have a great summer!
| Product Contact: | Electronic Arts |
| 209 Redwood Shores Parkway | |
| Redwood City, CA 94065 | |
| web page: | www.TheSims.com |
| Direct Sales phone: | (800) 245-4525 |
| Prices: | The Sims - $39.95 USD |
| Livin' Large Expansion Pack - $29.95 USD | |
| House Party Expansion Pack - $29.95 USD |
When she’s not living vicariously through electronic dolls, Margaret Werdermann plays at being a technical writer in Canada.