Sims Serendipity

Monty and his beloved daughter Mimsy

When the first version of The Sims came out, I didn't pay that much attention to it.  I had other games to play and other things to do with my computer. I didn't see the point in involving myself in it. After all, the game play was limited. There wasn't a lot that could be accomplished. It didn't really inspire me that much.

However, when The Sims 2 was released, Something Awful did a review of it that completely changed my mind about the game, and, in a lot of ways, ended up changing how I structure my playtime. In typical Something Awful fashion, they made the character as ugly as possible and gave him a life of debauchery and neglect.  The article was funny as hell, but more importantly, it displayed several things that had such unlimited potential for me.

1. You could build houses. Had I been less fearful of math, I would have gone into architecture. I love house structure and keep tons of house plan books around so I can look at them and fantasize about having said house. It's kind of like porn for me. Anyway, with TS2, I could build any kind of house I wanted. I wasn't very good at this, not at first, but after a while, I could build my Victorian dream houses with the best of them. I could also build really junky trailers.
   
2. It is a great storytelling tool. As I have said before, I should get paid to play with dolls. That would be the best job in the world. The next best thing to that is being able to let my creativity flow with Sims. I have put my sims through every level of strangeness you can imagine. Murder, revenge, jealousy, crazy mad scientist ambitions, and complete tragedy. Or, you know, sometimes I just let them garden.
    
3. Even despite my best efforts to play god, the game can always throw random crap at me. You'd think I would hate this, but I don't. I love that no matter how hard I try to control things and give him a good life, my sim might get struck by lightening or fall in love with the wrong person. I love that I might answer a chance card wrong and they get fired from the job they always wanted. It means I constantly have to work around things and handle challenges I didn't consider.
   
4. Sims can have children with their genetic traits. This means, assuming the game isn't glitching and my computer isn't screwing up, that I can watch many, many generations of the same family. I can see how the family grows and changes through the years. I can watch as traits from Generation 4 show up in Generation 9.  It's neat to see a nose show up again or a unique eye color stay generation after generation. In fact, creating families is probably my favorite thing about Sims.

I've been playing Sims for years now. During my darkest days of depression, it kept my mind occupied. During deaths of people in real life, it gave me a place to escape and feel like I had some marginal level of control. It gives me something to ask for during the holidays and it gives me something to look forward to. In short, it makes me happy and keeps my brain stimulated. And all of this is due to reading one very funny, very sarcastic article years and years ago.