The Sims 4 Sarahs Shady Sims Swim Again

I always know that my seasonal depression has begun when I spend more time playing The Sims than I practice living my flesh and blood life.

My parents bought me the very first version when I was a child. They were blissfully unaware that at that place would be dozens of expansion packs to purchase in the years to come. In those pre-Amazon days, my mom patiently drove me to Norwalk to see if the calculator store had the newest CD for The Sims: Makin' Magic or The Sims: Hot Date.

These games weren't inexpensive, but it wasn't like I played sports. My parents decided to foster my love of computers, and on my birthday I received 1 of those large circular iMacs with a colorful floral shell.

Baby Ella plays The Sims (ane) in 2002.

I spent hours hunched over that figurer playing God. During center school, I coped with bullying by creating Sim versions of girls who tormented me and drowning them in a swimming pool.

Merely I didn't merely verbal vengeance on my pre-teen foes. I built intricate, if hideous, houses and circuitous families with dozens of kittens. I ran snowy resorts, attended spooky carnivals and even had a robot butler.

The Sims allowed me to imagine the elaborate lives of fictional characters, years before I began writing short stories of my own.

I might accept grown out of The Sims as a teenager, but then The Sims two launched. The new game had depth. Information technology offered generations and customizable traits and amend camera angles.

My ascendant memory of high school summer breaks is listening to pop music on Z100 as I reimagined my family equally Sims. I gave myself the siblings I didn't have, fraternal twins who shared a bedroom with me on the second floor of our gimmicky beach firm. I wasn't lonely as a teenager, despite spending most of my time alone. I had all of these Sims for company.

The Sims 3 arrived on the scene just before I went to college, which might be why I never got into it. I didn't love the animation fashion or the open up-earth gameplay, and for the get-go time my real-life life was more exciting than whatever I could make my Sims do. I went to class and slept around and barbarous in beloved and made bodily friends.

As a college student, you are constantly surrounded past people to argue with and learn from and crush on. I didn't demand to escape into a simulation to feel like I was making something of myself.

The months later I graduated from higher, nonetheless, were some of the loneliest I'd ever experienced. I had an internship that I liked, simply I was commuting three hours a day from my mom'southward business firm into New York City and back. My parents had separated, and I was privately struggling with my bisexuality. My friends, who once lived but outside my dorm room door, were now scattered across the globe.

That autumn brought The Sims 4, a godsend for an isolated 22-year-old coping with post-grad depression. When I wasn't dozing off on MetroNorth, I created my higher friends (and more than one ex-fellow) and moved them into modest cottages in Oasis Springs and Willow Creek.

Sim Ella works on a new novel in her home function.

A friend created a Sims version of me, capturing my tiny eyes and my circular face, and I built Sim Ella a hideous Mission-manner firm from scratch. The physical appearance of Sim Ella'south husband was heavily edited with every new relationship I found myself in.

As my blog picked up in popularity and I fabricated new friends in Brooklyn, I gamed in moderation. Similar many casual Sims players, I would lose interest for months at a fourth dimension so rampage gameplay for weeks, usually when the weather got cold.

But The Sims 4 became a daily affair again in 2016 when my depression and anxiety worsened. I retreated into my tiny sleeping room, with its puny radiator and cockroach infestation, and played out entire lives on my laptop. There was the reclusive female person scientist and her approachable clone. There was the lesbian fine art critic who married ane of Sim Ella's daughters. At one betoken I downloaded the entire cast of Harry Potter from the Sims Gallery, each detail of their faces painstakingly recreated by a talented stranger.

The Sims 4 wasn't a course of self-care, exactly, only it gave me an outlet to decompress from work, time to mind to podcasts virtually the 2016 Presidential election. It was my soothing comedown after a hard day. And so, when Trump won and leeched abroad the world's remaining color, The Sims let me create another world to live in.


When current events are ugly and outside of your command, The Sims' quirky simply logical progression of growing up brings some semblance of relief. For your animated avatars, career advancement is simple and within reach. If your Sim practices chess for six hours, they will proceeds the logic skill required to be promoted to astronaut. The completion of a daily task—say, doing your homework—helps your performance amend, and plenty improvement will get you a college class.

Relationships share the same clear, achievable steps. If your Sim flirts plenty with their crush, they volition develop romantic feelings for each other. When their connection is strong enough, they can move in, or get engaged, or "WooHoo," the child-friendly term for doing the nasty. Individual personality traits might add a wrinkle to relationships—a noncommittal Sim will experience tense if they settle downwardly with one Sim lover—but information technology'due south not difficult for you to force a Sim to do your bidding.

I first started playing Sim Ella'south life in the fall of 2014. At present in 2020, Sim Ella's granddaughter Eloise has only moved in with her girlfriend, an creative person named Payton. They live in a embankment shack on the shore of Sulani, with rainbow pride flags on the front porch and a big fine art wall where Payton can sell her paintings. Eloise is a lifeguard, which gives her enough of time off to work on her tan and fish in a nearby cove. They're enjoying young adulthood free from responsibility, beyond paying their electric beak.

Payton Rodgers (50) and Eloise Dawson (R).

Eloise and Payton are talented and beautiful. They have doting families and perfect conditions (I turned off thunderstorms in the game settings). While they take hold of the occasional case of Llama Flu, they don't have to worry about fatal diseases or medical debt.

Eloise's female parent Camille, Sim Ella's eldest daughter, died of quondam historic period subsequently a long and successful career every bit a Secret Agent. Her tombstone is nestled in the sand beside their mailbox. Occasionally her ghost comes to family unit dinner and possesses the flat-screen television for a laugh.

While Camille Dawson and a few of her brothers have completed their mortal lives, Sim Ella Dawson is alive and well thank you to the Potion of Youth. She writes best-selling novels in a funky cottage in Brindleton Bay, where she lives with her husband, a blackness lab, and a very stinky cat. When information technology's not too common cold, she takes the dog jogging through the wood. Sim Ella is never short of breath.

In real life, I am a cocky-employed author. I rarely leave my boyfriend's studio apartment because taking the elevator puts me in close contact with the doctors who alive in his building. Most of my earthly possessions are stuffed into boxes in my dad's basement and my childhood bedroom at my mom's house.

I am frequently winded, and my heart races unpredictably due to feet. I aspire to be a successful novelist, just mostly I want a dog and a home where I can hang up my posters of smutty lurid novel book covers.

Meanwhile, my Sim cocky is at the top of her field. She has created several generations of Sim Dawsons to carry out her legacy. Her success is a bloodshot reminder of the dreams I struggle to achieve, probably because I spend so much time playing The Sims.


Playing The Sims was a solo activity for me until I discovered the marvelous world of Sims YouTube. Thousands of folks around the globe upload videos of their gameplay, from elaborate storytelling to jaw-dropping speed builds.

The Queen herself, Plumbella

At some point the YouTube algorithm introduced me to lilsimsie (Kayla) and Plumbella (Jesse), two women who make their livings from their dearest of, and talent in, playing The Sims. Kayla and Jesse are whip smart, skilled and incredibly fun to watch. During the COVID-19 pandemic I've seen their faces more than often than those of my actual friends.

In betwixt speed builds and game reviews, they share piffling snippets of their lives off-camera. While I am acutely aware that lilsimsie and Plumbella are strangers to me, it brings me comfort and joy to scout their videos and know that other people are feeling the same weirdness and grief that I am. When Plumbella took a few weeks off to protect her mental health, I felt a little less similar shit for needing space from my Twitter notifications. When lilsimsie shared her frustration that she hasn't been able to see her long-altitude boyfriend for months, I remembered how far autonomously we all are from each other, and how wonderful it is that the internet allows us to pretend otherwise.

Midway through the pandemic, I downloaded a salvage file that Plumbella created. To play in this brand new Sims globe designed by one of my favorite gamers, I created a new Sim Ella. The game had been updated so much since my initial Sim Ella was born in 2014 that I wanted to start over and make apply of the new features. Sim Ella 2.0 looked more like me, cheers to better curly hair options and cozy clothes.

To imitate my life as much as possible, I moved Sim Ella two.0 into a modest 1-bedroom apartment in San Myshuno. She landed an entry-level job in the social media career and struck upwards a flirtation with the manbun next door. With custom content I downloaded from independent Sims creators, I had fun filling her home with things like a row of multi-colored cowboy boots on her bookshelf.

Everything was going swimmingly until I received a pop-upward alert. Sim Ella had written a weblog post to gain the social media followers she needed for her side by side promotion, and the post was a smashing success. "You're being applauded for existence the first to broach such a complicated bailiwick," the notification said. "Ella has gained 150 followers. She now has 3,999 Followers in total."

Something about this bulletin bankrupt me. Information technology was too weird, too perfect an false of my bodily life. There I was, a social media manager with a weblog that focused on stigmatized topics similar mental health, blowing off steam by helping my Sim self go promoted to social media manager past writing a web log post about a "complicated field of study."

Every bit embarrassment pooled in my gut, it became clear that I had flown likewise close to the vicarious digital lord's day. In that surreal moment, I realized that I didn't even enjoy working in social media anymore. I didn't like the career I'd chosen in existent life, and I didn't similar it for Sim Ella ii.0. Why was I putting Sim Ella through the same bullshit that I was playing this game to escape?

Sim Ella quit her job in the social media career runway and dedicated her hyper-speed hours to writing novels. A few months later, I did the same.


Earlier this year, I considered starting a Sims YouTube channel of my own. Wouldn't it be squeamish to plow my hobby into a side hustle? Wouldn't it exist fun to develop a presence on a new platform and monetize my gameplay if I became popular enough? I would demand to buy a meliorate computer, and learn to edit video… and be interesting enough that people would cull to sentry me play. Simply I dearest The Sims, and I'm funny, and nosotros're all trapped at home anyhow. Why non?

The more I thought almost it, though, the more incorrect it felt to turn my hobby into just some other content stream. The Sims is something merely for myself. It is precious and relaxing and a little weird. Information technology'south the simply thing I practice with my time that I don't package for public consumption, the but activity I pursue simply for the sheer pleasure of information technology.

I'm not a peculiarly "good" Sims player. Just it doesn't matter, because who cares how ugly my houses are? No i needs to run across my tragic window placement or my basic kitchens. The time I spend playing The Sims isn't productive or perfect, and it shouldn't be. I don't need to go a professional Sims vlogger to justify the time I spend playing The Sims. The joy and customs information technology brings me is valuable on its own.

Eloise and Payton on a appointment at a bar. Rememeber bars?

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Source: https://elladawson.com/2020/12/03/were-all-depressed-lets-play-the-sims/

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