Sims Diary

Photograph courtesy of Devon Brody.

Friday, May 2, 4 P.M.

It’s been a while since I visited the household that my Sim shares with Rian, the Sim I made for my partner, Ryan. In the game we live with our two youngest kids, two dogs, a cat, a cow, and a number of chickens. I’ve been nervous: even though she’s on the Long setting for lifespan, it seems like she’s heading toward death. To keep her alive, I’ve been playing with our older kids and grandkids. They moved out as Young Adults to live on separate lots nearby. Sometimes I get them to invite me over for dinner.

But everything at our house seems to be as I left it. I’m holding Fiona, the cat, and our son Fielding is holding Rye, the puppy. There’s a purple onion on the grass. Rian’s Chatting on the computer in our bedroom. I direct him to work on the garden, where some of the plants need to be Watered and Sprayed for Bugs. In this world he’s a stay-at-home dad. I work two days a week as a Creator of Worlds, the highest tier in the Author track of the Writer career. Would I have chosen a different career if my real job had been an option? Luckily it’s impossible to say. My Sim Goes to work two days a week and spends the rest of the time hanging out with her family and Writing on her computer. She’s very good at Writing—she’s already Published a Bestseller. I love whoever maintains the game’s patterns of capitalization; their work is imperfect and I imagine a series of interns, each of whom thought their summer job in tech would be something else. Maybe like the person assigned to fact-check my last piece about The Sims: “okay, i’m seeing this character referred to as the Grim Reaper more frequently than Death but both seem fine. also, i can’t confirm that in Sims 2 he can show up at Sims’ houses and eat a sandwich.”

Billie, the adult dog, is sick. I don’t have work for a few days, so I take her to the vet. I make enough money between my job and the royalties from all the books I’ve Published that I don’t think twice when I Spare No Expense at the clinic. Billie is instantly better and we Go home.

I notice that I’m walking with an elderly hunch. I’m a whole life stage ahead of Rian because I made myself first. Rian came into being one night while Ryan and I were on the phone, dating long distance; he hadn’t yet moved back to Nashville. At the time I didn’t have the Cats & Dogs or Cottage Living expansion packs, each $39.99 at full price, so Ryan didn’t have the option to make Rian good with animals. Instead we made him an Angling Ace, Family-Oriented, and Romantic. I moved him into the house next to mine. Soon he was sleeping over. I Read books after we WooHooed, and he did woodworking projects in his underwear. Often he woke up Flirty. It didn’t take us long to Get Married.

Rian still hasn’t Tended the garden by the time Billie and I get home. He’s Playing Chess against himself. None of the kids have done their homework. I tell them to Breeze Through it and start cooking Pasta Primavera until I see that the Grim Reaper is in my chicken coop. He’s a young adult and has a tablet, like a cloaked and dusty consultant. He’s looking between his tablet and a chick named Goats that I don’t remember and didn’t name. Maybe he hatched while I was playing with other households. The game will suggest names for them if you don’t bother, which is why the other chick is named Condor.

It’s disconcerting to see the Reaper with Goats. I didn’t know chicks could die for reasons other than neglect, and Goats seems to have all his needs met, even to be quite happy. Still, it’s too late for me to Plead. Goats disappears without an animation; I learn of his death through a blue notification in the corner of my screen. And then the Reaper turns toward Dolly, a chicken, who is in fact old: I imagine she’s the one he came for, and maybe Goats got in the way.

Ryan opens the front door, home from work, in a suit like a real-life businessman. Daisy, our real dog, gets off the bed to go see him. I close my computer.

 

Friday, May 2, 5 P.M.

Ryan wants to lie down for a minute before we leave the house. I open The Sims again with him beside me. I notice as Rian watches me Cook that he’s wearing a blue hearing aid I didn’t give him. I enter the Create a Sim interface to change it. While I’m there I ask Ryan if he wants me to give Rian Top Surgery Scars, which I only recently realized were an option. Ryan says yes. Arm hair? Yes. Chest hair? Yes. Leg hair? Yes. Back hair? No. I look at tattoos and try an outline of a heart on his left bicep. I don’t like it, but Ryan thinks it’s hot.

Gigi, our last chicken, is dying. I go to the computer in Rian’s and my bedroom and resume writing Poems Lovelier Than Trees. The game will auto-name your books, like your chickens, if you don’t bother. I’ve only once named a Sims book after something I was actually writing. In the game it turned out to be a Bestseller.

 

Photograph courtesy of Devon Brody.

 

Saturday, May 3, 1 P.M.

It’s raining again. I’ve been working on a writing project I put aside for a month or two. Ryan is watching softball and waiting for the stabilizers to dry on the table that he and my landlord are building in the garage. I sit between him and Daisy and open The Sims.

It’s the middle of the night. Our kids are Afraid of the Dark and convinced there’s a monster under Fielding’s bed. It’s true that tentacles are reaching out from beneath the mattress. After a few hours I get up and Spray it like they want me to. I should have Sprayed it earlier. Now they’re going back to sleep, but it’s already six in the morning. They’re going to be tired at school. I sit down to Write.

I finish my book. It’s Excellent, so I Sell to Publisher at the mailbox and walk out to the chicken coop to Kiss Rian. He’s eating some leftovers and talking to the new chickens I Bought. We end up Flirting on the bench.

Our house is built in the traditional style of Henford-on-Bagley, with stone walls and a thatched roof. We bought it premade and I’ve been remodeling it in bits and pieces. I want to give myself a writing area in the attic, but I can’t add windows and the ladder’s not working. I end up adding a new window beside my desk in the bedroom instead. It looks out at the waterfall.

Gus and Fielding come home from school. They’re both straight-A students. I thought that Rian and I would be less hardcore about academic achievement with this second round of kids, but it still feels important that they do their homework. Unlike with Sue, Eva, and Amie, our first three, we don’t make Gus and Fielding do anything else for enrichment. No mandated instruments, science experiments, or art. Gus likes to Go Fishing.

I finish another Excellent poetry book. This time I go to the mailbox and Submit to Literary Digest. You can only do that once a week; if accepted, publication in the Digest makes you more money than your Publisher alone. I haven’t written a Bestseller in a while and I’m not sure why.

I Write another book in the morning.

Rian and I try to WooHoo in our bed. Rian seems ready to go, but I don’t like that our pets keep coming into the room. Instead we WooHoo in the cowshed out back. It’s not good; in my old age, this kind of thing is uncomfortable. I’m instructed to avoid strenuous activity for the next several hours, or else I might die.

Rian wants to Have a Baby again. This makes sense with his Family-Oriented Trait as well as his Big Happy Family Aspiration. After I completed the Painter Extraordinaire Aspiration, I briefly decided I also wanted a big family, but after a few days I switched to Bestselling Author.

I don’t think Sims have genitalia, or their genitalia have never been revealed to me. You can choose whether they pee standing up. When we made Rian, we decided to lean toward veracity and check the box indicating he couldn’t impregnate other Sims. We can still use the computer to Have Science Baby for a thousand Simoleons. We’ve done it three times. Twice we had twins, Amie and Eva and now Gus and Fielding. Each time I’ve named them while Ryan’s been asleep. Recently Ryan rolled over and suggested we have another kid, but I said no. There’s already enough toggling involved in gameplay. I do regret that I didn’t make my Sim look more like me. We made Rian look like himself, and it would have been fun to see our children.

When I close the game, it’s been three hours for me, two nights for my Sim. It’s rare that I play for so long and I almost never open it during the day. The rain is slowing down. Ryan and I go for a walk in the park by my house. The light is jarring, even when mitigated by the trees. It takes me a while to regain my depth perception and for the world not to feel too bright.

 

Tuesday, May 6, 7 P.M.

Our friend Shoshana and I make a Sim in Shoshana’s image. Shoshana names her Ershna. Ershna doesn’t quite look like Shoshana, but she does look like a person we might know. The question, I tell Shoshana, is whether you make your Sim as you are or as you’d like to be. My Sims are always Geniuses. My Sim is also a Bookworm, which is a boring Trait—she wants to Read and Analyze, which is not so fun to watch. Shoshana takes this into consideration and eschews Genius in favor of Self-Assured and Snob. She makes Ershna very muscular. Ershna Likes Fitness, Cooking, and Carnival Beats.

Ryan comes over from his apartment with Daisy. He says, “Why play The Sims when you could go for a walk?” We go for a walk. Daisy tries to kill a possum.

Photograph courtesy of Devon Brody.

 

Wednesday, May 7, 10 A.M.

In the office kitchen, I tell two coworkers my favorite Sims story:

My friend Rene Duplantier once googled himself to see if his music came up. He found that anything about him was obscured by Sims 4 wikis devoted to a ghost townie, Claude René Duplantier Guidry, who comes premade with the expansion pack The Sims 4: Paranormal Stuff. Claude René bears a striking resemblance to my friend Rene, and the pack was inspired by New Orleans, the city where Rene grew up and was living at the time. Rene was freaked out. He posted in the r/Sims4 subreddit, “Why is Guidry’s middle name also my name?” Someone claiming to have worked on The Sims 4: Paranormal Stuff said it was a coincidence. My friend Rene commented back about the distinction between Creole and Cajun names, but no one from Electronic Arts, the company that distributes The Sims, responded.

A few months later, a friend of Rene’s found himself at a dinner where a woman mentioned she was descended from someone named Claude René Duplantier Guidry. Her family was aware that a Sims NPC had his name. I don’t know if they ever communicated with Electronic Arts; my friend Rene has no further information. But if you google him, his and Claude Rene’s pictures appear beside each other.

My coworkers say, “Whoa.”

Some Sims players claim the first version of the game was much harder. Sims lost points on their Needs meters (Hunger, Bladder, Social, Fun) faster and needed more supervision to take care of themselves, stomp their cockroaches, and go to work. They didn’t get weekends. The game was meant to critique nineties-era American capitalism: needing to consume to live, needing to work to consume, and struggling to live while working so much. Some fault Electronic Arts for the game’s gradual loss of acidity and eeriness—what some would call reality. Gone are the piercing cries when a Sim catches on fire. Gone are the creepy prank calls, the frequent burglaries, the sense of isolation, and the random demotions after professional games of roulette. The Sims 4 is much easier and much more of a fantasy, unless you intentionally make it harder through mods like Health Redux, in which you can send your Sim through rounds of chemo.

 

Wednesday, May 7, 7 P.M.

Ryan and I go out to dinner with our friend Sara. She’s never played The Sims. We talk about how sad she will be when her dog Gigi dies: “It will be like someone cut off my leg and threw it in the ocean.” Gigi was found abandoned in a house without food or water. Her first two adoptive families returned her to the shelter. Gigi has been known to scale fences and walls that separate her from Sara. I imagine Sara would scale walls too.

We decide I will make a Gigi. At home I do it: Sarah and Squeegee. Squeegee is Loyal, Smart, and Playful. Sarah is a Self-Assured Dog Lover who Hates Children. She wears athleisure and has a big TV.

 

Thursday, May 8, 10 P.M.

Ryan has to stay up late doing work. I text Shoshana and decorate Ershna’s house. I paint her study dark green and give her a nice desk, a huge bookcase, a big kitchen, and a game table where we can play cards. She doesn’t have the option to be an academic, as she is in real life, so I get her a job as an Assistant Dishwasher. I make her a garden, but she doesn’t Like gardening. Her Fun meter goes down every time I ask her to Plant something. Shoshana texts, “good for me.”

I Hire a gardener, but Ershna still needs to do the Planting. The gardener comes by and throws his hands in the air. “Guess there’s nothing for me to do,” he says. The issue is that Ershna is supposed to be doing the Simple Living challenge, which requires her to go to the grocery stand or live off the land. The land so far only has basil, lilies, and pomegranates.

 

Friday, May 9, 9 P.M.

When we get home from dinner with our friends, I open my computer and watch Lisa from Blackpink on YouTube. Ryan says, “I think you’re spending too much time on your computer at night, when we could be spending time together.” I close my computer.

 

Saturday, May 10, 8 P.M.

Shoshana comes over. Ryan and Daisy fall asleep on the couch while Shoshana and I play with Ershna. Shoshana re-wallpapers her living room. We enter Create a Sim because we forgot to configure her romantic and WooHoo preferences and to give her outfits other than Everyday, in which she wears a crop top and cargo pants. Without direction, Ershna has been putting on a full face of makeup to go to sleep. Shoshana gives Ershna a Cold Weather outfit: a red shirt, a brown sweater, a big green coat, and a beanie.

Rian calls and asks to come over. Ershna agrees. They play cards and make dinner. Ershna goes to sleep. The next morning we find Rian staring at the unlit firepit in her yard. Shoshana clicks on the mailbox. “There are taxes in this game?”

Shoshana is surprised Ershna has a Culinary career but decides it’s better than Freelancing. I encourage her to send Ershna to the Fair to meet some people, but Ershna Goes to work before Shoshana can get her to Take a vacation day. I show Shoshana how we can tell Ershna to Leave Early, but Shoshana’s cursor hovers closer to Work Hard. Shoshana clicks it. She looks sheepish. Later she does tell Ershna to Leave Early, but by then the Fair is almost over.

Photograph courtesy of Devon Brody.

 

Thursday, May 15, 8 P.M.

As I load the game, I have the sensation that my Sim will soon die. I Write poetry and name the book after a writing project I have on Google Docs. It’s a Bestseller.

I’m bored of hanging around the house. While the kids are at school, Rian and I Travel to Amie and Sue’s lot. There are two buildings, one for each of them. Amie and her husband Gus live in the bigger one, which has a room for their two infants, Karla and Courtney. The game named them. Karla cries in my arms and I don’t enjoy it. Rian and I Travel to town. I hope Ershna and Trout will be there, but the square is empty and I’m in a bad Mood.

I Exit my game and switch to Eva and Rosa’s house in Brindleton Bay. They live with their two dogs in a beautiful house by the shore. It’s full of fossils and crystals they dug up in the sand. Eva and Rosa walk through their rooms and feel Focused and Inspired. They have the perfect life. I’m bored and tired.

I switch control to Amie and Sue. Sue Proposes to his new girlfriend, who left her job as a Creature Keeper to Move In with him. I buy them a llama. Karla and Courtney Fuss and Cry and Sue can’t seem to leave them in their cribs, but Picks them Up and Puts them Down on the floor where Sprig, the dog, naps with them. It’s cute but I wish they would grow into Toddlers, when they can start acquiring Skills.

Back at my house the toilet breaks. Rian Repairs it. New weeds grow every night.

I close my computer and fall asleep. I dream of a house with an interior grid. I am trying to place a sofa on the floor, but it can only fit in one square or another, and neither is quite right.

 

Friday, May 16, 12 P.M.

I google “sims mod spirituality.” I google “sims mod political reality.” Neither quite gives me what I’m looking for. I want my Sims to Meditate, Understand, and Glow with Enlightenment, but these options do not exist.

I’m wrong! The Sims 4: Spa Day comes with a Wellness Skill. Sims can become Zen Gurus. I can buy the pack for $19.99.

I tell Ryan I think I need to step back from The Sims for a few days. Ryan says, “I didn’t say it.”

I leave my computer closed and read on the couch while Ryan watches softball and swipes on his phone. He says his TikTok has been showing him stuff about new parenthood and babies ever since we’ve been going to appointments at the fertility clinic, wanting to learn about our respective capacities before Ryan pursues a hysterectomy. A few months ago we visited his friends and their baby in San Francisco. When they talked about baby care, which they made look so fun and intuitive, I thought of how hard it is to care for babies on The Sims. I thought of The Sims, too, as I looked at the city’s strange foliage and blossoms, closer to graphics in the game than anything I knew in real life.

 

Saturday, May 17, 10 P.M.

Recently I received an email in a newsletter from John Paul Brammer about a reality show, Marriage or Mortgage, which aired in 2021. In the show, which I haven’t seen, a realtor and a wedding planner vie for the attention of each episode’s featured couple, trying to convince them to spend their savings on either a wedding or a down payment. The show did not give the couples any extra money to spend.

I asked Ryan if he knew about the show. He said yes and that it had been filmed in Nashville. I felt a pang for the featured couples who ended up opting for weddings; housing has gotten even more expensive over the past few years.

In the evening we go to a pre-wedding party for one of Ryan’s high school friends. The party mostly seems like an event for the bride’s parents and parents’ friends, maybe to accommodate those who can’t make it to the wedding later this summer, a plane ride away. We eat and listen to five short toasts, two involving poetry. At home Ryan shows me a TikTok of a microwedding in Italy. I say, “You want to get married in Italy?” He says no, not the part about Italy; the part about “microwedding,” which means twenty-seven people. I shake my head. “That would just be my family.”

I tell Ryan I think we could do something like the party tonight. We could have a space, even a yard, and invite people we know to come say things they might want to say. I think we’ll be all right as long as we feed them and give them somewhere to sit. Ryan nods.

My Sims’ weddings have never been very important to me, but I have a sudden urge to give Sue and his fiancée a beautiful simple wedding at our house. I want there to be toasts, and I want to buy decorative objects—more than just the wedding arch: white pillars, shrubs, candles, curtains of flowers I can hang from the walls.

Photograph courtesy of Devon Brody.

 

Sunday, May 18, 8 P.M.

I open The Sims twice in fifteen minutes to organize this wedding I allegedly want, but each time I’m exhausted by the quantity of choices and clicks demanded by the experience and am subsequently distracted, first by Daisy, who wants to play, and then by Tavi Gevinson’s Fan Fiction, which I begin to read while the game loads a second time.

What is actually necessary for a wedding? Food. Tables, chairs. Alcohol? A stereo. A microphone? A yard. A tent?

 

Monday, May 19, 6 A.M.

I wake up to an email from the Nashville Banner telling me that members of the Tennessee Human Rights Commission have been laid off without the reassignment they were promised when the legislature dissolved their department. The office of the attorney general was supposed to absorb the board’s now-former thirty-two-person staff, along with their duties: investigating discrimination in housing and workplaces, which the THRC has done since 1963. Theoretically these duties will now be performed by the staff of Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, quiet collector of trans adults’ health records and defendant of Tennessee’s ban on hormone therapies for transgender minors, as named in Supreme Court case U.S. vs. Skrmetti. I say to Ryan again, “Should we think about moving?” It is not so much this event in particular as how little it surprises me; that I am so accustomed to our state government empowering itself to antagonize its constituents. We have said we will leave if Ryan can no longer access his care. Over the weekend we learned that his clinic’s website had been taken down. He still doesn’t want to move. He says, “I’ve figured it out so far.” But my imagination of our future here feels more and more like a fantasy, our financial plans operating in an alternate reality in which schools would be safer and better funded by the time we had a child, pregnancy less dangerous, the wetlands reprotected, Ryan’s rights more secure.

I go downstairs to use the spin bike in the gym at Ryan’s apartment complex. The instructor on the screen looks at me blankly and says, in a monotone, presumably intending to motivate me: “No one’s going to care about you as much as you do.” She seems taken aback by her own statement. She says, “Well, I care about you.”

 

Tuesday, March 20, 6 A.M.

I dream of an active shooter in my workplace. I hide in my office, and when I emerge the mother of a client tells me to read a book called Rise, or maybe Risen; it is orange and was written by a woman, maybe a nurse. We learn there have been no gunshots, that the shooter threw white ribbons through the halls. Later in the dream Ryan and I buy an ugly house and I use the Build dashboard in The Sims to fence our yard and choose a red brick for our external walls. I don’t want to play The Sims anymore.

At night I go to pottery class. I had stopped taking it because it was so expensive, but César, the teacher, still let me come by and do my own projects while my friends did their pottery. I wove, sometimes I wrote, sometimes I sewed. I bit the bullet on the last day of sign-ups for this term, and today, the first day, César seems happy when I tell him I’m enrolled in class for real. I throw eight bowls and a vase. This time around I only want to make practical things: things from which I can eat or drink, that can hold enough to be useful, and I want to get better about asking César for advice. I’m certain that one day he’ll be famous, internationally renowned, more than he already is. He makes giant pots and sculptural pieces, confident children and babies swaddled in blankets that make me think of Moses and migration. Most recently he put together a wall of two hundred and sixty vessels, differently glazed but identical in form. My friend Pete helped him get them all done. I met Pete in pottery class last spring and asked if I could set him up with my friend Katie. Now Katie takes our pottery class too. We say Ryan should join so we can rename it Love and Pots instead of Skill Building with César Pita, but Ryan gets bored with these kind of activities.

While I work I think of the new expansion pack, Businesses & Hobbies, which came out this spring and costs $39.99. I considered buying it. It’s cheaper than pottery class, and I bet my Sim would be better at ceramics than I am—that she could buy a wheel and a kiln for her house, and soon all her things would hold water. Sims can now make vases, attend or teach classes, and open their own small businesses. I’m confident that a pottery business in The Sims would be easier and more lucrative than a pottery business in real life, that progress would be more linear and more characters I don’t know would show up to buy my work.

But buying a game to do something so tactile feels almost sick, more disturbing than using it to have sex or exercise or adopt a pet. It feels on par with having my Sims play video games, which I will not let them do under any circumstance. They all Dislike playing video games. If they autonomously choose to Play Video Games, I send them to do something else.

 

Devon Brody is a writer living in Nashville.