An unordered list of movies worth seeing.
Just logging for science
I am a Java developer and I know how to use git. I have a good command of English, I know how to install Ubuntu, and I am privileged enough to be able to afford a computer to experiment on. That’s pretty much it.
I am not a computer nerd in the sense that I really could not care less about the limitations of Java, Spring, Windows, or “using the mouse”. I can’t be bothered to use command line interfaces and will always prefer clicking on things. I can type without looking at the keyboard with all my ten fingers; however I usually use but one finger, and it is just fine. I. Don’t. Care.
I have little to no experience with functional programming: I hardly learned anything useful on this topic at uni, just did the bare minimum and then forgot everything. What I know about compilers is “oh they parse things”. I am also a total web and front-end noob: I can’t write css to save my life and I try my best to avoid using Postman in my day-to-day life.
What I do have is some programming experience in a few tech companies. I like asking questions, spending time “modeling” a problem, and then writing code that is easy to read, to test and to maintain. Cherry on top is when it actually makes the problem manageable! I find that people in the same line of work usually wonder about simplicity, efficiency, elegance, and value tools that make problems look easy to solve. They talk about about finding good ways to model problems by making up words and implementing new procedures to deal with the code. People read about design patterns and object-oriented programming, but struggle to use them in codebases that are really patchworks of frameworks. Bugs are expected. Retro-engineering is mandatory. Nobody knows what they are doing.
What is bugging me is that functional programmers do not seem to have the same conversation topics. They talk about math and sound really satisfied with themselves. How?! How come? I’m curious, hence this experiment.
Note: I will complain every step of the way.
Here’s the goal (the original instructions are actually written on a piece of paper):
OS Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS IDE Visual Studio Code 1.104.0 (god I hate this)
First I did this and all I got was an ugly camel in the apps menu. Not sure what I’m doing.
sudo apt install opam
Then I went here: https://ocaml.org/docs/set-up-editor
What an error! “While the toplevel is great for interactively trying out the language” -what on earth is the “toplevel”? Okay, let’s rewind and instead, I’ll read this page: https://ocaml.org/docs/installing-ocaml
opam init -y
A bunch of stuff gets written to the shell.
It says to run
eval $(opam env --switch=default)
Okay. Computer didn’t catch fire. Let’s continue.
How are there 5 tools to install all at once? I would expect something bundled I guess? Anyway:
opam install ocaml-lsp-server odoc ocamlformat utop
It took two minutes and now it says that I need additional configuration for my editor. Oh honey, I am not using Emacs or Vim. The package is called “user-setup”. I’ll ignore ignore this for now and continue.
Let’s check the installation and type utop.
LOL everything looks vintage. 90’s kids unite behind Ocaml utop! It works;;
Why the double semicolon though? I was not prepared for this. Nobody warned me.
Next section is the “Tour of OCaml”. Here comes the Universal Toplevel. Oh yes, I am definitely going to read the introduction to the OCaml Toplevel. What is this? I’m guessing this has to do with “top-level expressions” but coming from Java, I’m puzzled. I’m not sure why and when I would need to evaluate small instructions? For learning? Wow I really don’t know anything about the OCaml coding workflow.
Interestingly, the tutorial says “In OCaml, if … then … else … is not a statement; it is an expression.” without ever introducing what a statement is. Is this the same as a definition? Since everything has a value, what’s the difference? Unclear.
The part about “Unit” is especially surprising. Why is it called that? A unit of what? I’m testing things in Utop while reading. There are lots of very short keywords. I think the OCaml syntax would make more sense to me in context, in a script. I’m faced with examples where I can type anything and it still works, which is not very helpful. Let’s stop reading the manual and go back to configuration!
Ugh, I finally passed the first sentence of the editor set-up guide and now I’m stuck on the second sentence, can you believe this?
“We already installed the tools required to enhance Merlin, our editor of choice with OCaml support.” Who is this Merlin? What is happening?
I will prevail. This won’t stop me. As instructed, for VSCode, I typed:
opam install ocaml-lsp-server ocamlformat
and everything is obviously already installed, because I installed it an hour ago.
I also installed the OCaml Platform extension in VSCode. It comes with a guide. I’m still not sure what to do and I’m tired of reading.
THANK GOD The next page is a tutorial.
I want to write code!! https://ocaml.org/docs/your-first-program It says it does “breadth-first learning”, I’m on board! Let me just clone the repo. Goddammit WHAT IS AN OPAM SWITCH?! Yet another introduction page. “These switches often cause confusion amongst OCaml newcomers”, YOU DON’T SAY.
opam switch list warned me that my environment was not “in sync” with the current switch.
eval $(opam env) seemed to do the trick. No idea what I’m doing.
I really don’t care about all this for now, all I want is to create one (1) project.
Omg this tutorial is not very clear. “We start by setting up a traditional “Hello, World!” project using Dune. Make sure to have installed version 3.12 or later.” 3.12 of what? Dune? I guess so. Never used it before, remember!
dune --version is reassuring: it says 3.20.2. There’s hope.
dune init proj hello is supposed to have created a project?
What if, before continuing, I updated opam, since the tutorial adds a bunch of info about versions and stuff?
I just ran opam update and got the weirdest warning: “opam is out-of-date. Please consider updating it (https://opam.ocaml.org/doc/Install.html)”. Okay. Yeah that’s what I was trying to do? This is not working well o.o Let’s visit this other website.
opam upgrade says that “everything as up-to-date as possible”.
Well my OS is Ubuntu and the best I can get is opam 2.1.5 whereas the latest version is 2.4.1; nevermind, I’ll stay out-of-date for now.
I didn’t think to choose my OS based on this. The more you know.
Back to the hello project. Okay, let’s build! Apparently, you have to be in the project to run dune build.
Indeed, dune exec hello prints “Hello, World!” to the console. YAY!
Well this took me HOURS. Enough for today. Cheers!
]]>This is small test!
]]>This not an article about Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology (SIMS), although now I kind of wish it were.
I don’t remember the exact first time I played The Sims. It must have been somewhere in the year 2000, on my mother’s computer. I was a seven year old blonde girl who liked Playmobils and dolls and drawing stuff all the time. My earliest memories of the game are of my parents playing together and laughing because the original game mechanics were hardcore: their first sims had a baby, and died of exhaustion. They tried again and the baby was taken by social services. Eventually they managed to survive the terrifying newborn stage, and got a little blonde girl who liked to paint all the time. Figures.
I’ve been playing ever since; it’s been 84 ye- 25 years. Why? Why do I keep playing? I have no idea. It was great at the time and it still fills me with joy -sometimes frustration- for days on end. The game is supposed to be a life simulation, a glorified Tamagotchi of sorts, but it is much, much more: in this essay I will… try to explore and make sense of the numerous opinions I have about The Sims, hopefully without boring you to death.
The Sims used to be described as a management simulation or a strategy game rather than a life sim. As such, it aims to replicate our boring day-to-day life and enhance it with weird odds of things happening. It’s up to the player to deal with the drama and the absurd. The game provides tools to mimic western society “givens”, with questionable accuracy and detail throughout the series, and allows us to observe and manage little imaginary humans, with no goal. How can it feel so satisfying?
No goal, or “no winning” is a harsh way to put it. No explicit goal means freedom to do anything, forever, and that is what the first game was: 1st gen sims were immortal beings forced in a loop of Mondays, as an eternal pile of dishes clogged the sink and every surface of the house. It does sound terrible: where is the fun in watching a fish tank of little office workers struggling to pay the bills?
Well, some might find this quite fun (and going back to the first Sims game 24 years later is really funny, in a time-traveling kind of way: how quaint, sims back then did not have cellphones!), but it is not usually what people do when they play the game - and this is what fascinates me: playing the game is not about “watching sims”, it is about watching over sims. It is a game about control and catharsis. It is soothing. Building their home and environment is rewarding in itself, and actually playing allows us to see our personal take on our life. Playing imaginary scenarios is the goal the players choose for themselves, and it feels good.
We play with ourselves. Yes, it is a terrible pun, but it is also true.
The player can insert him/herself into the game, identify with the character, what O’Riordan (2001) refers to as ‘the incorporation of self into avatar’ and proceed to direct the action in a way that is unimaginable in other contexts. [Nutt & Railton 2003]
The Sims games all start with the creation of a Household, which will later be tragically stranded on a residential lot, where the player can then try to turn a 3D digital dollhouse into a home. Building and decorating is an altogether different experience, which I hope to describe in a following article. For the time being, let’s focus on the creation of sims and the playing that ensues. I’d like to argue that there are only two main “Create A Sim” (CAS) tendencies: recreating yourself, and creating other people.
Creating “other people” is somewhat similar with building houses: players create celebrities or original characters, ugly or beautiful sims… It’s all about the beauty, the style, the resemblance, the fantasy, it’s creative, it’s fun? I almost never do it. I have come to terms with the fact that I am the sims that I create. I remember telling a high-school friend about “my sim”: she was horrified. I don’t know if her reaction was either very French or deeply rooted in self-deprecation, but she explained that she could never do that, as it would feel both self-absorbed and disgusting. She could not fathom being able to manipulate a “realistic” puppet of herself; it was obviously voyeurism! I was shamed. I kept playing with “my sim” nevertheless. I just stopped telling people.
Why this reaction? Players make avatars of themselves in RPG games all the time! “When playing Tomb Raider, players often refer to Lara as ‘I’.” [O’Riordan 2001] Why would it suddenly be so serious? I suppose the answer lies in the fact that The Sims model Real Life™ and it makes people uncomfortable when the lines are so blatantly blurred. Grand Theft Auto is realistic to a point, but you don’t get to role play YOUR life in it (unless you are a cool drug lord or a really bad driver). You and your family do not go on hikes in the mountains of Skyrim; your friends never slept in a nuclear era bunker and they do not own huge machine-guns (again, maybe you’re cooler than me); your grandfather did not mysteriously disappear and left you with instructions to build a fancy chicken coop (good luck with that!); the spiders in your house do not make awful noises at night and there are no zombies outside (yet). The Sims are something else: it’s the closest we get to experience Jumanji - without the perilous jungle fauna.
Squire and Jenkins (n.d.: 10) suggest that The Sims encourages us, the players, to: ‘use the simulator for social experimentation, modelling our own interpersonal relationships with friends, lovers or family members, and testing alternative social strategies for coping with everyday conflicts and tensions’. [Nutt & Railton 2003]
Today, social media, reddit and forums contain dozens of posts of people talking about “their sim”. Hell, there’s even a word for that: your “simself”. Here’s what I know now: it is very, VERY common to recreate yourself as a sim. And now, for something philosophical: what is creating yourself? Just kidding, I am not qualified at all to write such an essay; instead let’s just try to find meaning in the possibilities that The Sims games offer.
What’s impressive about the sims character customization interface, is that it started at rock bottom. You could only pick one of two between adult and child, male and female, and then a head (face and hairstyle not editable) and a body (clothes and body type). The concept of race was three nuances of skin color, and that was all. Today, the UI is a masterpiece of design, with sliders allowing to change almost every inch of the sim’s appearance, and of representation, with concepts of pronouns, life stages, disabilities, weather-appropriate clothing, fertility, and so on. It is so innovative that other games just copy it when they run out of ideas.
Needless to say, it is still not enough to recreate an accurate depiction of what I look like. My sims are what I think I look like, or what I hope to look like, and that is exactly the point: I am not my sim at all. Simselves are not ourselves; they are an enhanced version of ourselves. They are the clean-slate clueless version of who we think we should be, and by playing, we will force them into a life that resemble our own, only to watch them suffer - I mean, learn - for days, and become The Best, or die trying. Because that is what we players do, that’s how we play with ourselves: we start with the sim(pleton)self and then we carefully climb the ladders, all the ladders we can find.
Players control the narratives of their Sims in ways that they may not be able to control in their own life narratives. [Nutt & Railton 2003]
I wish I had statistics to back my claim, but the latest game design decisions in The Sims 4 are making me pretty confident. Here’s what I do, and what I have done countless times: I create my simself (to the best of my abilities with the available tools), sometimes along with family members or real-life love interests - but not always, and then I place this tinkered household on a lot, and I care for them with all my heartless guile and parental projections. My simself will be the employee of the month in every area of their life, promotion after promotion. They are happily married with their soulmate. They read and write books, they paint, they are the best cooks. Their children get straight A’s. The dishes never clog the sink. They are always happy, clean, and nice to the neighbors. Sure, it’s a hassle for them, but it’s perfect - for me.
And then comes the wish to try something else. What if I had pursued another career path? What if I never married? What if I had four kids? What if I was famous? Would I sleep in a coffin, as a vampire, or as Sarah Bernhardt? After all, I am still waiting for the Hogwarts acceptance letter. What If? It soon turns into the wish to try everything. Well, not everything: only the things that look fun and interesting, and I have to admit that while there are dozens of different things to do in The Sims, only a small subset arouses my curiosity. I could not care less about my sim’s popularity. My sims are lousy musicians, they do not dance and they almost never go fishing. You may wonder, how is it not boring to always make the same limited choices, over and over?
I obviously love The Sims, although I never spent much time discussing it with other people before the year 2020. When I finally realized that the game was indeed one of my erm hobbies, I started reading stuff online and was amazed to discover that in this (very) single-player game, despite the absence of a definite goal, we all played the same. For twenty years, I had been doing exactly what players do when they are not given a quest. Based on what I stumbled upon on forums, there seems to be two preferred ways of creating the “perfect” sim-life I just described: the “supersim” and the “legacy”. I believe the other forms of play, aside from building, are only variants of these two paths.
The supersim is basically Voldemort or Darth Vader if they had loving parents and a keen interest in personal development. It combines the quest for eternal life with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and/or power. It’s the default in the original Sims game: sims are immortal lest they accidentally die, and free to master every career and learn all the things. The Sims 2 introduced “aging” and “dying” (isn’t it the plot of The Bible?) and, of course, the antidote: an elixir of life, and vampirism. The Sims 3 added a magical flower to cheat death, and multiple ways to rejuvenate your sim. (Resurrecting the dead is also a thing, but I’ll try to cover that topic another time.)
I usually avoid creating supersims because I don’t feel worthy of knowing and trying everything. I once tried it and watched all of my sim’s children and neighbors die. It’s lonely at the top, I’d definitely rather marry Aragorn and forsake immortality. My go-to style of pursuing ultimate knowledge is the legacy. Simply put, the goal is to try everything with a line of sims instead of just one. It’s Dallas, it’s eugenics, it’s traumatizing generations by choosing an heir based on looks, it’s inbreeding, it’s the drama: I love it. That’s where I find the control and the catharsis I crave: by planning their entire life even before they are born, I push my sims to become the best version of themselves while micro-managing their day in order to solve their problems in the least toxic possible way (which sometimes is murder; ends definitely justify the means when I’m fighting for my simself’s great-grandchild). It is life optimization.
My best attempt to date is a Sims 3 game where I successfully reached the fifth generation. In The Sims 2, I never went past the third. During the pandemic, I got to the fourth generation in the Sims 4 before I got bored: at some point, all of your sims are little supersims, and your family lot is packed with powerful objects and money trees that make the game really easy to play. I guess that this is why “legacy challenges” usually have dozens of other rules that players are encouraged to follow in order to keep the struggle alive. A vanilla challenge would be a goal of ten generations, no cheatcodes and no magical life-saving interventions. Some include restrictions on the objects that the sims are allowed to use, in order to mimic technological change, others have strict heir-designation policies. I am also quite proud to say that I managed to start a legacy in the original game by bending the rules a little: since there’s no aging, children never grow up… unless we use magic!
Of course there are many other ways of playing the game; throughout the years, players have developed numerous versions of non built-in challenges (the hundred baby challenge is a great example: it is a kind of chaotic legacy where a female sim must give birth to a hundred babies in as little generations as possible), and some only play by building lots or killing sims. Others create elaborate narratives around their legacies or supersims, and document them on blogs or in YouTube videos, just like a series. Apparently, people have been at it since the release of the first game!
The player becomes a player/author, constructing a phantasmagorical, on-screen story. [Nutt & Railton 2003]
I don’t do all that, but I guess that those challenges being oddly similar to what I had been doing on my own all these years explains why I feel like I am winning: I am playing just right.
After painfully grasping that I was a very basic player, I was left to wonder: where’s the creativity in my playstyle? What can I feed my ego to keep feeling special? Well sure, there’s the mastery of the games: it is a cozy game but it can be demanding if you want it to be.
Part of being an experienced player, then, is an intimate knowledge of the games’ intricacies. [Iversen 2011]
I do not use cheat codes anymore, my sims have to build their empire from scratch and rely only on the game mechanics… but it is also very common for experienced players. Maybe it’s the way I model myself, and the choices that I keep making? One can only hope. Maybe I should just accept that I am a normal part of the simmer community.
Rather than indicating that this is the only way to play the games, the relative similarities in playing styles and understandings of the games should be regarded as an expression of shared culture. [Iversen 2011]
One of my very best childhood friends is a shrink, and when she was studying psychology in college, she told me she had been to a class where they taught that The Sims could be used with children and teens, as a tool to understand how they interpreted social dynamics and family trauma. Patients would set up a game, and then be asked to explain what they had been up to. In a sense, this is similar to what I’m doing now. Brace yourselves.
I mentioned the Create A Sim interface before, only to talk about looks, but the game has far more to offer in terms of character creation. The first game was very limited though; the concept of “personality” was sketchily represented by twenty-five points to assign between five 0 to 10 scales:
“The game offers apposite examples of space/time compression, for, within game-time, promotions at work happen in a matter of days and babies become children after three days, but walking from one room to another can take half an hour”
Pretty much everything else was random: sims had favorite conversation topics, such as aliens or politics, which appeared in speech bubbles as they talked so you could follow their most unhinged dialogues and sigh in despair as they miserably failed to flirt. Relationships were represented as a single 0 to 100 scale, from total stranger (or enemy) to BFF or lover (getting married was impossibly hard), and the game only distinguished between household and neighbors (children you lived with were automatically yours, there was no difference between a sibling or a roommate). Family dynamics were absent, so I found solace in killing sims and building houses.
In 2000, I identified as a little girl sim. After playing for a while, I realized how little agency children had, and started playing with more adult sims, usually over-achieving parental figures. My children had tiny rooms and I made them study for school a lot, because that is what my daily life felt like. My adult sims struggled to make friends, because I had no interest in giving them outgoingness points: they were clean, shy, active, crazy, nice people, because this is how you get a fun and tidy house and well-behaved children. I remember being utterly worried about money, always keeping thousands of simoleons in the bank, “just in case”. Houses all had easels because painting was cool, chemistry sets because science was cool, and big tiered cakes with dancing strippers inside because why not? It was a Pippi Longstocking meets the Addams family level of absurd, as I decorated the garden with pink flamingos and tombstones, in hope to meet ghosts every night. The scariest part was dealing with bills and taxes. The bills literally turned red when we were late to pay. I was a bright child.
The Sims 2 were released in 2004 and it was a revolution: I was almost twelve when they added teenagers, right on time. I was particularly impressed and enthused about the genetics: Sims 2 children now inherited physical and character traits from their “biological” parents. The game featured family trees one could browse. I started to take notes in a real-life notebook, with said trees, and to plan for further family expansions. I made long lists of baby names and appropriate surnames for diverse families. I wanted to play with people of all ethnicities and nationalities, I designed layouts for their houses and listed the traits and life aspirations I wanted to give them. I killed the sims I didn’t like, Desperate Housewives style. I was obsessed.
I wanted to recreate my family, but I was faced with a problem: one lot could only hold eight sims, and we were nine. I had divorced parents, two step-parents and four half-siblings. In order to get an accurate family tree, I would have had to replay the divorce (savage! lol), and then the new marriages, and hope for the babies to be born in the correct order. I did not try it. I created two households. I never played with them and started investing in my ideal neighborhood. I created cool teens who shared traits with me, but I put them in imaginary families instead, much like my Sims 1 games.
Personality did not evolve much, but The Sims 2 introduced “life aspirations”, which translated into daily wants and fears, that the player had to take into account in addition to their basic needs, as well as lifelong goals: since they were not immortal anymore, sims had to have a purpose, and a kind of scale to measure their success in life, in order to reap rewards at some point. The aspirations were as follows :
I never played with Popularity; it was the most boring life goal I could imagine. I played with Pleasure and Romance a little, but none felt rewarding because those aspirations were about multiplying experiences, and it was a bit repetitive. Fortune was fun: it was easy to make up stories about Uncle Scrooge in the game. Ambitious Fortune sims were paving the way for legacies, but Family was of course the most legacy-fitting aspiration. Most of the sims I created were Family oriented, because I wanted parents to be happy to care for their children. I wanted the children to be their priority, Fortune and Family sims made great couples to raise my teenage simselves.
Last but not least, my favorite sims were obviously all Knowledge: I wanted them to study, and read books all the time, and that’s the only aspiration that matched my Ravenclaw playstyle. I spent hours watching over both teenagers falling in love and making out (hello hormones), and lonely little geeks looking through telescopes hoping to meet aliens (hello hormones?). It resulted in big happy families with green-skinned red-haired babies, because I also had a huge crush on Ron Weasley. I added sim-eating cow plants everywhere. It was great.
What changed with the third game, released in 2009, was the scale: the previous games were lot-centered, this one was neighborhood-centered. The experience started to feel like an ant farm: you could follow your sims on the streets between their house and the park, or see what the neighbors were up to. Nosiness was going strong. The strategy and planning became a lot easier, because time would flow for every household in the neighborhood at the same time, no need to switch between households anymore to synchronize aging. It was trading god-like control over all sims for “authenticity”. It definitely encouraged legacies, and I happily wallowed in it.
The personality points were abandoned and replaced by “traits”, corresponding to complex behaviors and routines that the sims would exhibit in-game. I was sixteen and I no longer identified with teens; my simselves were young adults, who could be defined by a maximum of five traits. As usual, I always used the same ones, even though there are more than a hundred… Here are a few of the only 17 traits I liked the most (I spared you Artistic, Bookworm, Computer whiz, Neat, Ambitious and Cat person):
Ouch, it is starting to paint a more precise picture of my personality. I wish I had paused to think about it ten years ago, it would have saved me some good therapy money. Still don’t know what’s up with the green thumb. As I like to put it, I am an indoor human; I guess this is my way of enjoying nature? Who knows.
The last game was released ten years ago; when I first played, I was VERY disappointed to notice that the creators had backtracked with the neighborhood-centered concept of The Sims 3. It felt like a big setback: I had no intention of playing a modernized Sims 2 game, I wanted novelty! And this new game didn’t even have pools. What a joke. But the creators had added something new: “emotions”. Now, mourning sims were sad. Chess-playing sims were focused. Inspired sims would prepare better meals. The quest for a perfect morning routine just turned up a notch, it made playing the game a lot more difficult: sims had to be in the right mood in order to do things efficiently. Otherwise, they just wouldn’t listen!
The trait system was kept, but the number of traits was divided by two; adult sims could now get only three traits to sum up their entire personality. Again, I only used a handful of the available traits to create my new simselves: some were very similar to The Sims 3 (Ambitious, Genius, Creative, Bookworm, Neat, Vegetarian, Cat Lover, family-Oriented, Loner, Proper) so I won’t dwell on them, but others added new interesting gameplay:
Read on reddit: I have schizophrenia and use erratic + paranoid for my Simself.
My go-to traits today would definitely be High-maintenance, Art lover and Genius (what? it’s just broader than Geek - “genius” sims get tense when they don’t write 10-page articles about their special interest; I feel very attacked right now).
It is obvious that my many simselves evolved with me over time, as my understanding of myself sharpened and the game became more detailed. In retrospect, I am pretty sure that playing helped me a lot with human interaction; I was never shy and did not miss (that many) social cues, but real life is kind of absurd and hard to understand, especially for children and teenagers. The game translates this absurdity perfectly, and helps with learning to take a step back and relax: sometimes people are weird or mean, and it has more to do with them than you. Let’s just stop assuming things, and accept the things about us that we cannot control, or as Jessica Rabbit gracefully said: I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.
It took me two decades to be able to say it: I love this game. I used to feel the big social stigma associated with playing The Sims: it’s a game for girls, it’s not really gaming. I had no problem telling people about Skyrim or Minecraft, but I was ashamed to talk about the game I spent thousands of hours playing - it was madness. My family and close friends knew, of course, but I would avoid the subject with any other gamer I met -any human really. This too is apparently very common:
Brunner et al. (1999: 85) argue that the game appeals to girls’ and young women’s interest because it has ‘an electronic doll-house feel’ and it allows them to ‘make a difference in a social situation’, concerns that they see as feminine. This may help to explain the dislike for the game held by some young adult male players such as those featured in a recent review by Pratchett (2002). [Nutt & Railton 2003]
The game series The Sims (TS) (Maxis 2000), with its many expansions and sequels, is another popular media work consumed in particular by women which, similarly to the genres mentioned above, has often been regarded as dubious and somewhat ridiculous within gamer culture and amongst games scholars. [Wirman 2011]
The game is not perfect; hell, I’d change a lot of things. Very leftist of me, in the capitalist individualistic heaven that is The Sims. Anyway, even if it feels ridiculous, and even if the game is sometimes buggy as hell, you should try it. It’s harmless, the possibilities are almost endless, and you’ll get to think and learn about the model you have of the dynamics between you and your relatives. Plus you’ll get to watch absurd situations unfold before your very eyes… I promise you it’s fun. Try the “grilled cheese” aspiration! Next time, I’ll talk to you about building and architecture in The Sims. Or about death and llamas in The Sims. Or about the Sims games’ storyline and what I expect to see in the upcoming Sims movie. I don’t know, we’ll see.
Thank you for reading, Sul sul!
Lathanel
Lifelong simmer - Soup enthusiast
You can download The Sims for free here. You can download The Sims 2 for free here. (They are now available on Steam as well.) The Sims 3 costs 20€ on Steam. The Sims 4 base game is free.
I would also love to read this(hi Santa!): Gee, James Paul, and Elisabeth R. Hayes. 2010. Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning.
]]>