Myshuno

Hello, my name is Wouter and I cheat.

This is what I would say if I’d ever join a CA club (Cheaters Anonymous). Thankfully they don’t exist, and if they did then I wouldn’t go there. It would be just a waste of money…

It’s not that I cheat with everything. Only with one single game: The Sims. Because I have a confession to make: I never seriously played with a sims family in the game without cheating. I tried doing it while I still used to be playing with The Sims 1, but that didn’t really work well, and with Sims 2 I never had the time and patience to play. In my games, adults never grow old, students never graduate, and children may become teens, but never adults.

Now I’m fairly sure that just about a 100% of my loyal readers plays the sims, so hearing this news might be a bit of a shock for you. Me, being the founder of one the most popular Dutch fansites about the sims, doesn’t play the game in the ‘honest’ way. I should be ashamed of myself. But mind you, maintaining a website about the sims isn’t a walk in the park either. It takes loads of time to keep the site frequently updated with the latest news and doing updates and maintenance to the technical part of the site to keep it from falling apart. So I just don’t have the time to play the game till I’ve completely seen it from inside out. I think it’s more fun to entertain you as fans on a site about the sims, then actually play the game myself. But in the end it’s a win-win situation: you guys get fun stuff about your favorite game, and I can manage a website about a game that I also happen to like.

But I digress. So I barely played the game without cheats. This is mostly because of my lack of patience and drive. Plus I just can’t stand the loading screens, and I don’t own a computer that runs the game properly. So maybe you’re thinking right now: Wouter, why don’t you just buy a new computer and do a nice legacy challenge? Then I’ll say: Sure, would you like to pay? iMac please! And put a nice red ribbon around it while you’re at it anyway.

But seriously: I am saving some money for a new computer, but I don’t think it’ll be on my desk before the release of the Sims 4. And legacies? God no. Yeah for some people a legacy challenge could be the trick to motivate them to play the game for a longer time. But I’m not really that kind of person who likes to play my game around 78 imaginary rules which you’re absolutely not allowed to break.

Anyway, under the motto of seeking challenges, expanding your borders, self actualization and all that other positivistic blah, I’ve actually started playing with my first ‘honest’ sim. Meet Carlo:

Carlo started life as a student, and for the First time ever I’ve played trough the entire student part of the game! While he was studying he found a girlfriend, and now that they’ve graduated they live happily married in Fairview with their two children. And I only cheated once this time! It was a maxmotive because Carlo was almost dying while he was dating an ignorant self-centred girl in a restaurant, so I thought it was okay to do this. But I did learn some stuff out of this ‘experience’: if you’ll find a balance between keeping your sim’s motives high, fulfilling wants and make sure that his career goes well, then the game basically plays itself. I for one especially make sure that my sims use most of their time to keep up with their wants, career and their relations, and only when they’re really in need, do something about their motives. Oh and something else that’s really important: The maximum speed button is your friend! I don’t know how many moments there are in this game which just aren’t worth to wait for your sim to finally do something. Especially when your sims walk as slowly as Carlo does in my game…

On the other hand, I think this is one of the weaker sides of the Sims 2: I’ll only play the game seriously when I really, really, really want to. Fortunately you don’t have to play the game just for the gameplay, it’s got so many features that (nearly) everybody likes. There are people who just play the game to build or decorate houses with the newest downloads. There’s also people who rebuild their game as a film studio for machinima movies. And to do this you have to completely disregard the original gameplay inside the game. And I think I belong with those two groups of people, instead of the ‘normal’ Sims 2 players.

Because let’s face it, it’s still a game where you have to send a person to the toilet all the time. You have to invest much more time into fulfilling your sims motives instead of doing the fun stuff the game has. This is probably because the days are too short, and because motives go down way too fast. Also, motives aren’t bound to some sort of internal biological clock, which we do have in normal life. Your sim doesn’t get hungry when it’s lunchtime, or doesn’t necessarily need to go to bed when it’s in the middle of the night, just because their motive meters aren’t low enough.

Especially when you’re visiting community lots, some kind of four-dimensional hole in time and space is created which causes time to make a standstill at your sims home until you get back. Which basically means that your sim‘ll get jetlags just from going to the restaurant at the other side of the street. This specific problem actually exists because Will Wright, the guy responsible for this entire… thing, never really had the intention to let your sims visit other lots. This feature was added when Sims: Hot Date was released. But because of the way the game was put together, time just had to stop at home when your sim went to another lot. And apparently this also couldn’t be solved in the Sims 2. But there are more things that Will Wright really hadn’t planned for this game, but happened anyway…

I think mister Wright never really thought that this game would be such an enormous success. He expected it to be more like an addition to his previous ‘sim’ games like SimAnt and (of course) SimCity. The entire idea of the mechanics in the game that Will Wright thought of are clearly visible: simulate life with basic needs, and if you fulfil those needs you can work on less important needs like social contacts and learning new things. An idea that looks a lot like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
If your sim needs to do something, then all his actions are stored in some kind of temporary queue, which includes the possibility to cancel actions while you’re waiting for the game to execute them.

This idea looks great on paper, but when put into practice it’s just too rough to be called a life simulator. Normal people do much more than just fulfil basic needs and do actions one at a time. We’ve got much more nuance in life than that. For example, Sims still can’t talk and cook at the same time, while at my home it happens all the time.
But whenever someone compares real life with the sims, people often give you the excuse that sims aren’t real people. But then you shouldn’t call it a ‘people simulator’ a term that was printed prominently on the front of the box of the Sims 1.

Anywho, the sims mainly got popular because of things that didn’t really had any significance, or weren’t planned in the original game. For example, sims 1 was never really built to support custom content. Several fans had to hack the game to import new clothes and furniture. And in sims 2, downloaded furniture is still being treated as dangerous hacks that could kill your game and your cute bunny. Another unexpected popular feature of the game was people making stories about their sims.
So these are the two main things what made the Sims franchise so popular till this very day. And it’s creators are still not giving proper support to make these features work in the way they should be. Which proves that this game is actually made by the fans, who apparently can take a whole lot of shit from EA and still not get angry about it. (Even if their computer tries to eat them because of the SecuRom security system included in the latest sims games…)

But there is hope on the horizon. Sims 3 is coming and it’s going to solve all our problems!
Support for all downloads, no more needs, and one single loading screen-free neighbourhood as a solution for four-dimensional time fractures. At least, that’s what they’re telling us. We still don’t know very much about this game. The only moving images released so far are a few frames on a computer in sims 2: free time, compressed in an abysmal quality.

But if this were to be true, then the entire idea that Will Wright had about this game would be thrown into the garbage. And maybe that’s a good thing, because now we’ve got much more advanced systems and technology to simulate life. And by the way, I don’t think he’d really care if it did happen. He’s far too busy working on Spore. A game which’s based on a way more genius idea than the sims ever had: Evolution combined with online interaction…