Culture Feature

I Gave Myself the Life I Deserve in "The Sims 4" Because Real Life Is Terrible

Constructing my pixelated alter-ego is the most productive thing I've done in months.

Photo by Carl Raw on Unsplash

Today, I'm introducing the world to my Sim alter-ego. She's really going places, unlike my actual self, who's hardly moved in months.

Although I've never identified with the title of "gamer," simulation video games have held a special place in my heart for almost as long as I can remember. Back when I was way too young to know what the word "WooHoo" euphemized, my older cousin showed me The Sims on his computer — the original, horrifically low-res version that came out in 2000 — and very patiently taught me the basics of building a house in the world's most famous simulation game to date. Little did anyone know that I'd be hooked for life.

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Marvel/ Square Enix/ Verizon

There's such a thing as good video game downloadable content (DLC).

Sure, it's exceedingly rare, but The Witcher 3 and Ghost of Tsushima prove that DLC can actually be used to vastly expand upon a game instead of just milking players for cash. But those are the exception. From essential story content to entire characters locked behind paywalls at launch, bad DLC is the rule, and unfortunately, it's a race to the bottom. Here are the worst of the worst:

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Konami

Aside from evil, irredeemable monsters, and perhaps also people with very bad allergies, everyone loves to pet animals.

Video games provide a space of limitless possibilities, where we can just as easily step into the greaves of a 13th century samurai as we can ride a motorcycle across a futuristic cyberpunk cityscape. Sometimes video games also have animals in them, and in a world where so much is possible, we must be allowed to pet them.

Sadly, far too many games fail this most basic of tests. Imagine going to all the trouble of intricately rendering a virtual animal and then deciding that you're not going to give players the ability to scratch its fuzzy widdle head. Absolutely ludicrous. Thankfully, some games—the best games—do deliver. These are some of those games:

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Gaming

VIDEO GAY-MER | Creating An Experience All Your Own

In a world where queer people don't have experiences of our own, we have to create new ones.

Games are an escape.

Games are an escape from your struggles, whether they be personal struggles or the terrors of the world, they allow us to take a step away and focus on a reality that isn't our own. And as a queer kid growing up in the Southern United States, I retreated to video games for most of my young life. And I've spoken in length in many other articles about how, despite my love for video games, the lack queerness has soured me to them a lot of the time.

Instead of giving you yet another example of the lack of representation present in games, I'm going to talk about a very specific aspect of queer gaming culture. It revolves around a very specific part to a lot of games across many genres: Character creation. We've all done it - whether you've created a Mii or played through Dark Souls III, you've most likely created a character of your very own. Often times, these characters have little to no real back story and are largely designed to be a catalyst for the player.

So, why is this important to queer gamers?

Because these characters can be whatever we queer gamers want them to be. A major, more recent example is that of the Sole Survivor of Fallout 4. After the game came out, I saw a large amount of different players across the internet posting their OCs. They gave them very specific storylines, and a lot of them were queer. They had entire lives not spoken about in the base game. Some of them three the base game out entirely.

The same thing happens across many different games from Dragon Age: Inquisition to Terraria to Sims (on a grander scale). We have to work harder to build a world in which we can escape to - so we project ourselves onto characters that we are allowed to create. For instance, my characters are always good natured gay men, who become heroes in a world that previously didn't accept them.

In Fallout 4, this was the reason I was drawn to the Minutemen and the Railroad. Unlike the Institute and the Brotherhood, the other factions were underdogs. The Minutemen, a militia of the Commonwealth dedicated to the people, starts out the game barely existing and disgraced after what happened in a town called Quincy. The Railroad, a band of ragtag fighters seeking to free the much feared Synths (synthetic humans) from their tyrannical creators.

My character fit so well into these groups, because I wanted to create a queer character that fought for people who got shat on all the time. It wasn't what the game intended, obviously, but one of the very few good things about Fallout 4 was that it didn't matter. You could make your character do ALMOST whatever you wanted (so long as it stayed in their very specific factions, but that's neither here nor there).

Not only could I, a queer person, be a hero to an entire group - but to an entire society. In this game, my character makes history and changes the world for the better. This cathartic experience is one of the reasons I still play Fallout 4 to this day. I do the same thing with Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect, etc. There's something so powerful about being able to look at this queer character that you, a queer person, created and saying, "You're a hero to all the people in this world."

That level of freedom is so important to a queer audience, because we're so used to hearing straight people tell us that things have to be a certain way. That's why more linear games can often leave a queer gamer bored or annoyed, because we're forced to sit through this character living out another straight fantasy that we always see. Does this mean we hate these games? No, of course not. I love Final Fantasy X as much as the next guy, but it's romance bores me to tears.

When I escape, I don't want to escape into a straight person's fantasy romance or a straight man's power fantasy. If game developers won't give me my own characters, then let me play the games where I can create my own fantasy. Let me make the Inquisitor a gay Elf; Let the Sole Survivor be a queer secret-Synth who has a harem with literally every romanceable companion because they all fell in love along the way; Let ALL OF MY SIMS GET GAY MARRIED!

Sure, it's not the same as giving me real characters, but it's something to keep me going until I get to play next great queer game. So, I guess I'll take it.

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