On The Nature Of The Sims

It's blog post time baybee

I posted this in the Paralives Discord. I was genuinely surprised by the intimately detailed responses that followed, and I thought it'd be nice to save it here, too.

It is thoughts on what makes The Sims a genre in its own right, and how/why it works, and what imitators seem to be lacking and need to focus more on, from what I imagine is a more philosophical perspective than most players ever get into when playing.

Enjoy! Or don't!

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The core gameplay of these kinds of games revolves around gradual development of the self, expressed as or utilized for a means of sustainability (i.e. hobby work that makes money, or skill effort that translates into a career, or hobby that builds a skill that translates into a career, or simply a career that suits a hobby/personality), which is used to bolster your space in a way that facilitates those things, and ultimately affords you the freedom to have spare time to do as you please or bolster future generations.

The process skill -> career -> money -> better life -> easier skilling -> easier career -> better life, into perpetuity, resetting when the player has a tragedy happen, or dies, or has a child (who essentially lives life on "new game plus" mode, benefiting from the generation before).

Paralives doesn't seem...like it really thought about that loop, which is unfortunate, as it is the core of what makes these games what they are IMO.

The Sims, from its start, is a game designed around building up a little guy so that the environment he uses to build up facilitates growth better, which facilitates improving the environment, and so on, and so on. From what I see they don't really have a lot of effort invested in that sort of loop. It feels a little vapid, much like Inzoi. The "snowballing" of starting out and "Making your way" towards an ideal feels lacking.

The buildup of a "life", with bumps along the road like a new romance, a growing family, a bigger house with more expenses, retirement, a better life for kids that gives them a leg up, etc. That's the core identity of these games (when done right). from what I've seen it seems to be lacking in Paralives (and in fact all games trying to compete with the sims, as if they don't understand the basic design philosophy the game is built around).

Admittedly, as a non-patron, I have not seen everything there is to see.

You've got fans like Plumbella who have an obsessive understanding of lore, who are probably in some ways "better fans" than me, but I think The Sims it he one thing I would truly earnestly say I am personally the "biggest fan of", so I like to think I have a pretty good insight on what makes the series/genre so appealing and have such longevity. The Sims is truly my favorite thing.

And there has to be more to it than dolls and houses!

There has to be an intrinsic element of growing through a sisyphean loop of constant improvement where things keep getting better and towards some sort of ideal but then the boulder rolls back down the mountain and you begin again because you got fired, or had a house fire, or had a new baby, or moved in with someone, or are moving out your newly adult child to start a life from their perspective, and you're boosted on your next trip up by the actions of those who came before and have already smoothed out the bumps along the way. Sims 1 obviously didn't have that exact format as it didn't have aging, but it's still the core concept of the whole thing, and the game was built with those sorts of things in mind- and in fact the game's existence owes itself to Will Wright picking up the pieces of a destroyed home, and building back with what he still had.

(And, in fact, in the Sims 1 instruction manual, explanations of game mechanics are written as if you're reading a field guide to another creature entirely, and how it lives and behaves and mates and plays. The Sims really looks at its characters from a perspective of how their lives work, and not simply how you mash them together to kiss or put them in a sportscar.)

I think I have a potentially more philosophical take on the game design than most people would, but I think so did Will Wright and the Sims 2 teams especially. As time goes on, even with The Sims, the actual breadth and depth of gameplay revolving around "purpose" and "growth" gets obfuscated and simplified, and the competitors are reading from a bible that has been translated a few times over, and is lacking original context, and so they, too, lack that context in their own writings.

In recent years Sims 4 has really started going back to those roots though I think. It's flourishing pretty hard lately with things like Grief, Discovery Moments, Compatibility Systems, Relationship Satisfaction, Formative Moments, etc.

For Paralives- I think the baseline design has sort of skipped over this foundational "loop" and it's building off an incomplete base. That's my take.

I imagine most players don't think it's "that deep" but these things are so intrinsic to The Sims that I think people "feel them" without knowing they're there or thinking too deeply about them, which is another appeal of the series. It just works whether you dissect it this way or not.

The way the game facilitates multiple types of gameplay loops depending on who is being played is also important. There has to be a variety and the variety has to all feel purposeful, or have meaning for other aspects of gameplay to make it purposeful, otherwise it falls flat and is vapid.

It becomes a lot more complex than "number go up" because it's a lot of "number go up", but the number going up also needs to be met with resistance- number doesn't go down, no, but you constantly need more reasons to make number go up.

In Sims 1, this was "You need more friends to get higher levels in your career. You need higher levels in your career to pay higher bills. You have higher bills because you bought better furniture. You needed better furniture to be happier for work. You needed to be happier for work to build more skills and friendships." It never ends! It never becomes vapid, not until you really truly have "made it".

ya boi has a deep lifelong love of these games and thinks competition gets a bit lost in the hustle culture cozy core sauce sometimes and the devs would accomplish a lot stepping back and maybe recondoodling the whole core gameplay loop from the bottom up for these reasons, and that applies to all of them- Paralives, Inzoi, Life By You, Vivaland, that other one, whatever that other other one was, and so on. They all kinda miss "the point", which is more than just dolls and houses, it's about developing a life, against the ails of life itself.

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