Eat. Work. Sleep. Repeat. When framed like this, life seems monotonous at best and dreadful at worst. But in reality, life is far, far more complicated, chaotic, and busy than that distillation.
It’s the things in between—impromptu hangouts chance encounters, deep conversations, and leisurely activities—that give life its flavor, although sometimes it can taste more like a mystery meat stew rather than a culinary masterpiece.
With the time between all of these basic needs and actions lies a great deal of freedom inherent to our human will. But what if we were given more freedom that what we have in actuality, bordering on the fantastical but nonetheless allowing us to “game” life more than a child’s dollhouse ever could?
Far from just a digital dollhouse, The Sims has pioneered the genre of life simulation games in a way that is as masterful as it is chaotic.
Over the course of its four primary iterations, its numerous derivatives, and separate titles inspired by its approach, The Sims has taken our understanding of life and the human person by the shoulders, shaken it, given it a wedgie, and sent it off running with a takeout container of microwaved carbonara.
That is, this game series has not taken life too seriously, as one should. Indeed, life possesses the utmost gravity, with each individual person harboring their own gifts, crafting their own experiences, sharing their stories, and possessing inherent dignity. But if we treated life with an overly cautious rigidity and an absence of levity, then are we even really living?
For instance, a player can have their sim attempt to marry a random stranger within their first day of meeting (and possibly succeed), switch jobs every other day until their options are exhausted, get housemates only to later trap them in a room and force them to create paintings only to then sell them for your own financial gain, and accidentally set the stove on fire while making pancakes because your cooking skill is practically nonexistent.
These are the random, chaotic, unexpected, hilarious, and odd things that make up not only the experience of playing The Sims, but also the human experience.
Now there are some things in the game that one can do without legal repercussions (namely, the painting captive example, but also something like trapping a crowd of swimmers in a pool by removing the ladder) that should not be replicated in real life. But these situations in themselves and within the context of a god-complex life simulation lend themselves to hilarity and absurdity.
Things which we would find atrocious or weird in reality are intriguing and funny in-game, not because it has transformed us into maniacal sociopaths but rather conscious people who recognize the comedy of human life. In this sense, the comedy is not in the pain or discomfort but the in unreality and boundary-pushing.
Between waking up in time to get ready for work, upgrading your living room furniture to allow more space for guests, visiting the local grocery store to stock up on ingredients to experiment with new recipes, and calling your friends to catch up, The Sims makes sure to include all those other parts of life that make us laugh, scream, and cringe.
It reminds us that there is more to life than these bare necessities and allows us to take ourselves les seriously.
By treating life with a hefty dose of levity and a healthy dash of self-deprecation, life itself becomes something we play with rather than something that plays us.
Among the Oxford Reference’s definitions for play is as follows:
Any spontaneous or organized activity that provides enjoyment, entertainment, amusement, or diversion.1
Enjoyment. Amusement. Who are we to say that we have never done something out of the blue, engaged in an activity that we thoroughly enjoyed, or planned out a leisurely outing?
Whether it is structured or impromptu, play engages all the senses, drawing us in to an experience of our humanity and the world that in turn reveals to us the vivacity of life. This is why we say we play video games, for they take us out of the confines of the real world as much as they ground us precisely within it, allowing us this opportunity to explore and enjoy.
The Sims blurs the line between fiction and reality eversomuch to the point where the god-complex it bestows on us as part of its specialization as a life simulation becomes more of a comedic device rather than a corruptive agent. This is how it plays with life—by freeing us from all the strings our lives are attatched to in reality so that we can be curiously chaotic.
I’d been playing The Sims since elementary school, beginning with The Sims 3 on the family laptop alongside the MySims titles on the Nintendo DSi, then The Sims 2 on my first personal desktop, and now The Sims 4 on both my desktop and Xbox.
Nothing sufficiently described the experience of playing these games until I came across old television ads for the franchise that closed with this slogan:
Play With Sims. Play With Life.2
This is precisely the ethos of this game franchise, the crux of its design philosophy, the cornerstone of every mechanic. This is what The Sims is about.
Life shouldn’t be seen as a a game centered around the binary between wins and losses. There’s not a way to truly “win” or “lose” in The Sims, nor is there on in life per se. Nor should we view life as the punctuated by pleasantries and one-off occurances.
We are what we make it; our experiences, goals, ideas, and questions make the game more than the mechanics make it. Does this not also apply to life itself? We bring to the table all that we are and all that we have. But if we take ourselves too seriously and forget to play with life, then are we even living?
A balance must be struck between work and play—for our own sake. In a world that seems to increasingly pull us in different directions, play is evermore needed. It’s about time we take life a little less seriously.
Go play with Sims. Go play with Life.
- “play.” Oxford Reference.; Accessed 2 Jun. 2024. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100331212. ↩︎
- Numerous commercials for The Sims throughout its various iterations utilize this slogan. Examples can be found in this commercial for The Sims 3 and this one for The Sims 4. ↩︎
John Lee Wagas 
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