The alien family lives in a yellow house, center stage, picket-fenced. Down the road, a war general raises his three sons in a domestic bootcamp. The middle son is in love with Ophelia, who lives with her thrice-widowed aunt next to a mysterious graveyard, but Ophelia is dating Johnny, the green-skinned teenage alien in the yellow house. Unbeknownst to Ophelia, she has an illegitimate cousin kidnapped across town in the basement of a mad scientist’s castle. The pale, mohawked prisoner has only one friend, and that’s Pascal, who lives in a spindly observatory with his two brothers and is currently pregnant with an alien child.
What happens next will depend on who’s playing.
This is the starting point of the world’s best video game: 2004 PC classic The Sims 2. Like its franchise predecessors, The Sims 2 is an open-ended life simulator, a virtual dollhouse with infinitely customizable dolls and houses. It offers three premade neighborhoods, Strangetown being the one described above, plus infinite custom neighborhoods with their rolling fields and meandering roads. But if you opt for one of the premade neighborhoods, you can skip past all the hairstyle selecting and coffee table rearranging and just dive right in.
Out of this ready-to-play ethos arise Strangetown’s central plot points. It’s Johnny’s birthday to teach you about birthdays. The spindly widow’s graveyard is haunted to teach you about ghosts. Pascal’s brother wants to go stargazing with his shiny new telescope to teach you how to get abducted by aliens.
Once most players—and I say “most players” without any statistical backing—exhaust the tutorial functions of the three premade neighborhoods, they move on to designing their own settings, populated by their own creations. That was my approach. It wasn’t until my imagination had run its course and my many iterations of similar-looking families had proliferated beyond amusement (always extramarital trysts, always twins) that I finally wandered back to the better-crafted, well-worn sands of Strangetown.
I wasn’t alone. Click around long enough on Sims 2 tumblr (affectionately called simblr) and you’ll start to notice the familiar faces of the “premades” studding the sea of pictures and posts. The premades are a sort of a common ground. It doesn’t matter how often you play or how seriously—if you’ve ever opened up Strangetown, you have an opinion on whether or not Ophelia’s white-haired graveyard-tending aunt is a serial killer. And if you have a particularly strong opinion, e.g. on why the graveyard ghosts are color-coded for everything from drowning to house fires to electrocution, maybe then you write a story about it. And then you’re in deep.
In general, Sims stories follow certain conventions. They are a scrollable blend of pictures and text, the text following the pictures in the form of paragraph-long captions. You can photograph your sims with an in-game camera as they go about their daily or melodramatic business; you can also, as do the savvy writers of the new decade, employ third-party screencap apps and spruce up the results in Photoshop. High-quality photos go a long way. So does high-quality writing or a solid plot, but it’s rare to find all those features combined in one story, and most readers are happy to settle for less. The community is small, and it’s gotten even smaller in the ten years since the official website shut down, and the nineteen years since the game was first released.
At this point, it’s fair to wonder at the fact that the community still exists at all.
It exists but meekly. The legendary storytellers have passed on into adult life, their posts preserved in various archives, their accounts defunct. Succeeding generations have their own bards, but their stories hang suspended in time, midway to completion, new chapters coming every few months, then once or twice a year, then one sporadic update five years later, a death rattle that can sound almost like resuscitation. Sometimes the writers check in with excuses: final exams, new job, raising kids. Sometimes they go silent for good. But through it all, there remains a trickle of content. The Sims 2 has proven surprisingly resilient to the new features and better graphics of change, progress, time’s forward march. Here on simblr, it will always be 2004.
Naturally, there is a Sims 3 now, and a Sims 4, and lately in the works a Sims 5. Whether the game has improved in some objective, linear sense with each sequel remains contentious, and is not the subject of this essay. But if we assume The Sims 2 is the superior installment of the franchise (it is), we still must contend with the obvious drawbacks of a game built to run on thirty-pound PC desktop computers of the early 2000s. The Sims 2 graphics are cartoonish, the loading screens rampant, the tools unintuitive, the outfits dated. Bugs and crashes are not just frequent but guaranteed, and a sector of the community has dedicated themselves to rewriting the game’s intricate code so that various features actually work as intended.
This is, as such players will readily point out, an insane amount of effort to expend on a game whose developers jumped ship a decade ago. Why are we all still here?
What The Sims 2 has, which other Sims variants have tried and failed to replicate, is lore. We’re all hooked on those premades. For some reason, the canon that’s built up around these characters is more imaginatively generative than the clean slate of a new game. Take the graveyard widow, for example. If you, on your simblr blog with your picture-and-caption simblr story, decide to make the widow a sympathetic character, you’ve already done something interesting, since everyone else has made her a serial killer. If you create your own graveyard and your own mysterious widow in The Sims 4, you’ve got to set the groundwork yourself in order to surprise anyone.
The seminal story of Strangetown was written by an author who has since disappeared from simblr, except for the occasional real-life check-in. The first chapter was posted in 2007; its final (latest?) update, Chapter Forty Part One, posted in 2017. The story will never end, but it begins where Strangetown always begins. Ophelia’s house is haunted. Johnny’s birthday is coming up.
The author’s approach was simply to play the game and take pictures of whatever occurred, whether planned or unexpected. When Ophelia and Johnny autonomously hook up in the background of an important scene, it’s swept into the narrative. When one of the bootcamp general’s sons smashes up his brother’s dollhouse, it’s spun as character development. To play the Sims is to watch your novel-size plot write itself, though you can always intervene and redirect your characters if things get out of hand.
It’s easy to think of the game thusly, as a storywriting shortcut, a world in which any problem of plot can be solved by letting the characters run amok on free will for a few hours. The sims are coded to act in certain ways, and sometimes they betray their coding and act otherwise, and sure, call it a glitch, but it reads as character. To take a series of random interactions and string them into narrative—isn’t that the great coping strategy of humankind?
Sometimes, though, the writerly appeal of the Sims format is less obvious. Take another classic of simblr canon, the Sims 2 prequel, which is exactly what you’d imagine: a backwards jump to before the start of the game, starring the same recognizable characters, just a life-stage or two younger (adults become teenagers, teenagers become children). Setting this up requires a lot more planning than taking the game off pause and letting the premades loose. You have to clone the sims, or use cheat codes to age them down, which screws up the rest of the game in predictable ways—marriages vanish or glitch, toddlers have memories of things they shouldn’t have experienced, and sometimes you have to resurrect dead sims to fill out the cast. If you’re writing a prequel, you’re not really playing the game anymore. It’s more like directing a movie, with a troop of scatterbrained actors that you have to keep fed and on-task.
Not to mention that, if you want to tell a complicated story, you’re going to have to depict a few scenes that aren’t technically possible in the game. Example: the serial-killer widow in Strangetown never killed anyone, as far as the game is concerned. There’s no murder interaction in the Sims. It’s family friendly. But to write a proper prequel, you’ll need to stage a couple homicides—the old woman shoving her sister into a ladderless pool, for example, which is the only drowning method the game offers. Maybe to stage this you have the old woman shove a random passerby, and then you freeze time, move her over near the pool, get her sister to do some kind of dance move that looks like falling, arrange her right at the pool’s edge, and then you shoot the picture from a convincing camera angle. Maybe over time you simplify this process by downloading hundreds of pose boxes from the vast online troves of player-created content. In the prequel I’m thinking of (a marvel of Sims storytelling), every single shot is immaculately posed, down to the direction of each sim’s glance.
After a certain amount of time reading such stories and scrolling through the accompanying photos, which must have taken ages to set up, you’ll start to question the utility of this format. One of the great things about writing, after all, is that anything you describe is instantly made real. Sims writing, on the other hand, is a particularly unforgiving breed of fanfiction. Sometimes when you’re shooting a complicated scene (e.g. one that involves a lot of sims—a wedding, a funeral) you forget to disable free will, and one of the principal actors wanders off to take a shower and reenters the shot in his bathrobe. Sometimes the sims refuse to cooperate for more intrinsic reasons. You want one sim to reject another’s advances, but it turns out their chemistry is too high and they keep hooking up anyway, no matter how many arguments you command them to start and how crucial their breakup is to the broader plot you’re orchestrating.
It is an absurd medium. Online communities are insular enough that diehard fans don’t have to confront their own absurdities too often. Such absurdities are so easily swept under the rug, or ironically lampooned, or waved as a calling card of authentic fandom. But the contrivances of simblr are harder to uncritically swallow, as every scroll reminds you how these writers, these genuinely talented writers, are spending hours setting up a single shot for a single chapter of a Sims story that two hundred people, max, will ever read.
We were teenagers when we started, but the game has been around for two decades and time is passing in real life even if it isn’t online. The writers I’ve alluded to are in their thirties and forties. They’re having children, and the children are growing up and playing newer and better video games, as their parents cook dinner and clock in on zoom and wait for the dryer to finish tumbling.
My love for the Sims 2 is the last frontier in my life that has resisted optimization. All other hobbies have gone the route of productivity culture: my writing, submitted to journals and sold; my reading, streamlined into a career; my music, earning cents per month on Spotify. Even when immersed in the world of simblr, I still feel the impulses of capitalism kick in. All these brilliant writers around me—they should be discovered, they should be published—these indelible characters, shouldn’t we do something with them?—isn’t there someplace concrete that all this love can go?
This thinking violates one of the core rules of fandom: that it should be silly and pointless; you love something because you love it. I know this, I believe it, and I will still spend my life seeking excuses for it. Trying to explain, in this essay, to you, why Sims storytelling offers something that you (I) can’t find anywhere else.
I have never been very successful with my own Sims writing. A few stories posted here and there, all of them short-lived. For years, I had a sweeping plan for an almost operatic tragedy set in Strangetown and the other premade neighborhoods. But the posing was too much of a hassle, and enacting the plot via gameplay was too time-consuming. In some notebook, I’ve kept thousands of words of the story that I never got around to filming. It’s one of the better stories I’ve ever written. I wish I knew why.
You could say I’ve moved on, grown up. I write real stories now, stories that require me to design my own settings, to invent my own characters and their backstories. But there is some aspect of the Sims story that I’ve never been able to replace. In my writing now there is no preexisting lore, no network of expectations to work within and around, no instant recognition on the part of the reader when she sees a white-haired woman in a graveyard or a teenage alien bent over his birthday candles. Rather than offering my interpretation of a collection of communal facts, I am the one creating the facts. Sometimes it ends up feeling weirdly easy, or lonely.
I have tried to salvage the story I set in Strangetown. I’ve tried to rewrite it into new settings, to condense and multiply the characters, to change the names, move the plot points around, preserve only as much as inspired me originally. It never works. The thing that made the story good is the thing that makes it unrecoverable—the way it played into the world in which it grew, where originality was a process of elimination and everyone knew everyone else’s name.
Devon Halliday is a Pushcart Prize–winning writer, with stories appearing in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, The Rupture, and The Normal School. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University, and is pursuing a Fiction MFA at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She lives in Athens, Ohio, where she and her husband co-own a local bakery.