Learning From A Digital Dollhouse
How The Sims Inspired Me To Be More Creative and More Tech Savvy From A Young Age
When I was a toddler, I put a penny in the disk drive. Daddy puts other round things in here, my young, curious mind thought, so surely this round thing will do something. My enterprising broke the tower of the new computer real quick. After this incident my father, a blue collar Southerner who dabbled with Commodore 64s and other tech geekery, decided that it was time to not only to replace the defunct desktop, but it was also time to teach me how to actually use it.
I remember what the new clunky Dell PC looked like. A fat monitor that grew toward the back of a cheap wooden desk. Raised keys on a keyboard that clicked under my chubby fingers. And the perhaps the earliest fanciest tech gadget we had, a rechargeable wireless mouse! I don’t remember if it was a laser mouse or one with a removable ball, but I do remember the charging station hidden in the corner by the monitor. On this computer I played all kinds of games: Blue’s Clues, Oregon Trail, Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego. But the games I remember most fondly are the ones with digital dolls.
I loved playing with dolls before and after my discovery of the digital alternative. I played with dolls by myself far into my tweens. I always pitched playing with my neighbors’ Barbies and would spin tales of body swapping and survival. The only Polly Pocket set I had, a gimmicky mall model that snapped magnetic clothes onto a tiny blonde doll in a mechanical dressing room, was the setting a transformation chamber and a base of secret operations. I loved playing with dolls, so it wasn’t surprising when I fell in love with them online.
The list of digital dolls I played with is lengthy: makeover games, pixel dollmakers, and a variety of games scattered across the websites for the very dolls I played with in real life. I shoehorned dollhouse mechanics into games that allowed for even an inch of sandbox customization so I could play out the stories I wanted. The digital dolls that resonated the most to me were the ones made specifically for that purpose, Maxis’s The Sims.
Like the penny incident, I don’t remember when I started playing The Sims. My dad liked playing games and then handing them off to me once he made them unloseable. With a game like The Sims you can’t lose, so I don’t remember if he handed it over to me. My dad liked building houses but didn’t care for taking care of the extremely needy families and wasn’t the sadist many other players were. Maybe I just popped it into the disk drive now that I understood how it worked. Maybe I was inspired after playing with a teenage family friend.
Regardless, it changed my life.
I was terrible at managing my Sims’ life and my perfectionist self felt even more terrible about it. I distinctly remember playing the Goth household. A fire started on the lot, and Bella Goth and maybe her daughter Cassandra perished in the fire. I was so terrified when I saw the Grim Reaper in the corner that I held down the power button until the computer shut down. I still tried to manage families after that trauma. My history of no-loss games and straight-A school performance unfortunately made me irritatingly sensitive to failure, so I ended up playing the Sims without the Sims themselves.
In the Vacation expansion pack, I found out you could do construction on lots with unlimited money on vacation lots. So I would tell my stories by building on the lots and imagining that the people were there. The storyline I remember most involved a sick young girl who had to always stay inside, so I built glass hallways throughout the vacation lot. I imagined this young girl using these hallways and built rooms she would want so she could feel normal and happy: classrooms, theaters, and rooms that imitated the outside. I built my dollhouse and imagined the dolls.
My obsession ramped up when I got my hands on The Sims 2. Unlike The Sims, this was a game that I got for myself and eagerly installed all four disks myself. (Remember when games had to be installed on four disks because they were on CDs and not DVDs?) I fell in love all over again. While at first I was still pretty bad at managing families — my traumatic experience with stove fires in The Sims made me use buffet tables liberally — I was extremely excited about the customization options. This topped all the dollmakers I had used online: finally I had an offline way to create all the characters in my head.
The Sims 2 is when the game series seeped into my life. For my parents’ anniversary I made them and myself in the game and took a screenshot of us in a recreation of our living room. My screenshotting abilities, helped by the new free range camera in the game, was incredibly useful in my academic pursuits. I needed to design and furnish a dream house for a math project so naturally I built it in the Sims and used the screenshots as the project graphics. All the stories I wrote for school came with cover pages with edited screenshots of my Sims. I tried to write a paper once about history of The Sims in middle school and I had to scrap it because it just became so overwhelmingly long.
But The Sims 2 did something very important for me: it expanded my creative and technical horizons. The Sims 2 came with a tool called The Body Shop where you could edit the models and textures of clothes and hair easily in a graphics editing program. I had been dabbling in graphics editing before this but now I could live out my fashion designer dreams. Most of them were graphic T-shirts with clipart I found online but I loved them. Perhaps more importantly, I learned how to use these tools through my own experience and tutorials on the official (and now defunct) Sims 2 website. Through that website I found The official Sims 2 Exchange where people shared their own creations and also shared their own stories composed of screenshots and captions. Within this Maxis ecosystem, I delved into The Sims fan community and all it had to teach me.
Then I found websites outside the clutches of Electronic Arts. I found myself down a rabbit hole of custom content: high polygon count hairstyles and gorgeous, off the runway clothing. Through this I learned how to install that custom content and how to unzip archive files. I downloaded WinRAR for the express purpose of getting custom content. The rabbit hole of ModTheSims led me to scripting mods where I could add magic when I couldn’t afford the official expansion pack and InSimenator gave me all kinds of menus in games to create the stories I wanted. I learned how to traverse forums, refine search queries, and also run many, many virus scans way before I needed to do research for school. I admired these mods, especially the game scripting mods, that changed the system and in turn allowed me to more easily bend The Sims 2 engine to my storytelling whims.
When The Sims 3 came out in my early teens, I wrote a persuasive essay to my parents explaining why they should buy me this game, outlining the many benefits of the game such as the outlet for creativity and how it could be used as a reward for doing chores. This essay was compelling enough to a family friend that she ended up buying the fifty dollar game for me. Naturally I went down the same rabbit hole of custom content, game mods, and finding Sim communities that told their own stories through machinima (movies made using game footage) and screenshots with captions. But sometime between The Sims 2 and The Sims 3, I started actually playing the game “as intended.” I played more families without cheats, started playing more strategically, got a lot more invested in Legacy Challenges and other fan-made challenges. It was less about my freestyle storytelling and more about learning and manipulating an existing system.
After taking a mandatory computer science course in high school and finally playing more action-based games, I switched over from my dreams of theoretical physics and decided I want to become an educational game developer and I pursued my love of educating, software, and games. I tutored computer science throughout high school and college and declared a computer science major and a game design minor. I took game design courses and finally had words to attach to the freestyle play (padia), the communities (affinity groups), and interesting playstyles (emergent behavior) that I found through The Sims. I had a professor that did all kinds of research on the custom content scene for the original game and I wrote papers for many classes about my favorite game series. Unsurprisingly, all throughout college I played The Sims, finally buying The Sims 4 my junior year of college when it went on sale.
I have since graduated and now work in software development. While I may not be coming up with fantastic stories as often and my skills in unzipping files aren’t special anymore, I feel the impact of my Sims-filled childhood and adolescence. It gave me yet another excuse to explore technology, this new thing called the internet, and how to use a variety of systems. It gave me another creative outlet, both in game and out of game. It was a resource for personal and academic projects. I want to say it was so much more than just a digital dollhouse and I wonder how many other kids, how many other girls learned as much as I did from it. How we can learn from communities and systems The Sims had. How much support and privilege I was blessed with that gave me the environment to love The Sims as much as I did and how to replicate that for kids today.
Last time I was visiting my parents for the holidays, I was playing The Sims in the living room while my dad watched TV. He asked me what I was doing and I told him that I was building a house with a specific budget. He looked at me incredulously. “You’re still playing The Sims?” he asked. I rolled my eyes and smiled at him.
“Yes, I am, Dad,” I said, “and aren’t you glad?”
