“Lifetime Happiness Points” – The Sims 3

[For my latest guest most, I turn with thanks once again to my brother Martin, who most recently wrote about Alpha Centauri and Blue Sphere]

The improvements that took place between The Sims and The Sims 2 were vast and incredible; the original was an amusing enough diversion for a week or so, but ultimately did a little bit too good of a job at reflecting the mundane drudgery of everyday life that it sought to satirise, while the sequel was, for a time, rather an all-consuming obsession of mine. And the primary reason for this wasn’t actually anything inherent in the game itself, but the community around it.

Specifically, it was down to something called the ‘Legacy Challenge’, the full rules of which, as originally posted to the official Sims 2 message board in 2004, have been preserved on the Sims Legacy Challenge website, where you can also find a sweet little story about how they were directly responsible for their creator meeting his wife. In brief, the challenge was to play a single sim family through ten generations, with points scored along the way for completing various tasks like reaching the top level of a career, or maxing out every skill.

In truth, though, while this point-scoring may have been the nominal point of the exercise, I don’t think most of the people playing the challenge actually cared much about their score. The really important thing the challenge did was to give a structure to your game, to help get a handle on the rather overwhelming array of possibilities The Sims 2 presented you with, and to give a direction to the stories that you told, and, most crucially, that you shared with others.

Something else it served to do, which took a while to become clear, was to expose some of the limitations of the game; one couldn’t help but notice, after just a couple of generations, that while your legacy family aged and ultimately died, the same wasn’t true of the rest of the town’s inhabitants. Your first kid would bring home their friend Chandler Platz from school, then as a teen, share a first kiss with Meadow Thayer, then as an adult, make friends with their co-worker Goopy GilsCarbo. And then their kid might bring home their friend Chandler Platz from school, and so on, and so forth. And, even more critically, as Legacy Challenges around the world reached their later stages, players reported more and more bugs; as it turned out, the real challenge was to make it through ten generations without the game completely collapsing under its own weight.

Enter The Sims 3. Where the second iteration had introduced the concept of mortality to breathe life into your sims and your sims alone, the third sought to breathe life into their whole world; now every NPC sim in a neighbourhood will live out their lives at the same pace yours do, and more impressively, you can see them doing so. Gone are the tedious loading screens any time you want your sim to leave their house, now you can visit the local parks and libraries by just scrolling over to them and clicking. Having spent so much time in my life playing the second game, this freedom of movement still feels astonishing to me a decade and a half later. And while that is the biggest and most striking new feature, it’s far from the only improvement to simulated life that this game presents.

Firstly, in a move that I genuinely believe to be at least somewhat inspired by the popularity of the Legacy Challenge, sims now have a ‘Lifetime Wish’, a singular goal to strive for that you could, if you so wished, use as a way to structure your gameplay. A lot of these were variations on a theme; some for reaching the top of each of the available career paths, others for maxing out certain skills (sound familiar?), along with a smattering of more unique options like ‘Become a Chess Grandmaster’, ‘Presenting the Perfect Private Aquarium’, or ‘Gold Digger’, which is rather brilliantly explained as a desire to “see the ghost of a rich spouse”.

Secondly, in the first two games, you could assign personalities to sims through defining where they fell on spectrums such as neat/sloppy, or shy/outgoing, this generally had little noticeable effect on the way they would behave. The Sims 3 does away with this, and instead has you choose 5 personality traits from a list of around 60 to define your sim, and while not every one of these is hugely distinct from every other, there’s certainly enough variation to make sims feel more like individuals, as well as adding some delightfully silly flourishes like the way sims with the ‘Evil’ trait have the option ‘Evil Slumber’ instead of ‘Sleep’ when clicking on a bed.

That ‘Evil’ trait is an interesting one, because evil in the Sims universe is a rather nebulous concept. The evil that sims do is generally of the cartoonish supervillainy variety rather than the more mundane and systemic evil that permeates the real world. Evil sims will cackle with glee as they steal candy from a baby, but they’ll never pass over an employee for a promotion because of their skin colour. From the very first game in the series, The Sims has always treated homosexual relationships as fundamentally equal to hetero ones, and the fact that this makes it stand out as much as it does in the world of mainstream games is a huge indictment of the rest of that world. I do not believe that there is another series of video games as big as this one that comes even close to doing as much to provide young LGBTQ+ people a safe space to explore themselves, and to find a supportive community to do so.

And yet, for all that The Sims 3 is a vast and incredible improvement on its predecessor in many ways, I didn’t put even a fraction as much time into it. Nothing to do with the game itself, it just didn’t come at the right time in my life for me to do so. And equally, I found it somewhat difficult to come back to it now, having played its own sequel. The Sims 3 may have eradicated the neat/sloppy and shy/outgoing dichotomies as simplistic and limiting in favour of a much more nuanced approach to defining its people, but there’s one binary that remains very solidly intact here.

When you open up the character creator, you can choose your sim’s gender, and you have two options, male or female, each of which comes with their own catalogue of clothing and hairstyle choices, exclusive to that gender. Certainly, in 2009, this wouldn’t have stood out to many as anything but the obvious way to arrange things, and if you played a new game with a character creator in 2023 that did the same thing you would hardly be surprised. But The Sims 4 has shown that it doesn’t actually have to be that way, that this is no more of a necessary default than romantic interactions being strictly heterosexual. And now that genie has been let out of the bottle, I can’t put it back in.

The Sims 3 existed, and it did good things, and while it did, the world continued to live on around it. That is its legacy, and that’s just fine.