Names of the Sims involved have been withheld to protect the innocent.
EA Games released The Sims in early 2000. I was in the middle of writing my dissertation. I was trying to finish, sell our house, and get ready to relocate for my first academic job. I was stressed out and desperate. I’m not sure if I bought it or my partner did. She was always good at buying me games to help me relax. I played it once and I was hooked. I spent lots of time building houses, forging relationships, and killing people. I made Sim versions of folks who had pissed me off and drowned them, burned them, watched them foul themselves and starve to death in enclosed spaces…whatever felt right at the moment.
I quickly realized I had to get my little problem under control. I started rationing the game. I began to reward myself with gameplay time for finishing a chapter, packing a box, drafting a section, you name it. The Sims got me through the dissertation process and kept me sane. I bought tons of expansions and numbers 2 & 3, but after the dissertation was finished it just wasn’t the same. I haven’t really played in years, until last week. This week I started playing The Sims Social on Facebook and I am officially hooked! I have been trying to draw all of my other FB friends into the madness. I am building and leveling up on a regular basis. Today I learned something new. I leveled up from BFF to Inseperable with the Sim of the one of the graduate students in my program and it just got weird.
One of the most fun things about playing The Sims has always been the fact that I could be as inappropriate as I wanted to be and no one would ever know. No one knew when my Sim killed her current love interest or slept around. I could walk up to folks and smack them without giving it a second thought. I lost more babies to Child Welfare than even I care to admit. But now there is The Sims Social and things are definitely a bit more high stakes. My Sim can’t be friends with other Sims unless they agree and polyamory is non-existent. If you try to date more than one person you have to break up with the first one first! What fun is there in that? Where are the jealous rages and slap fights? Where is the fun? And if that wasn’t bad enough EA now wants you to kiss and tell. More specifically, you are supposed to WooHoo and tell.
Not only do they want you to notify your Sim boyfriend/girlfriend that you have stopped by and woohooed, but then they want you to post it to their FB page! Go ahead, share it with the world. Let all of FB know that you just “did it” with another Sim (without your explicit permission even if you did agree to be at least “Inseparable”). Now for me, all of this wouldn’t be so damned weird if it weren’t for the fact that a good number of the folks that I am Sims Social neighbors with are graduate students and family members. I know…it’s just a game, but there is something that is a little too much like crossing the line here. The strangest thing about it (and this just occured to me right now) is it is not so much the fact that our Sims our woohooing that bothers me, but the fact that graduate students/friend’s kids/nieces/etc. would know that we were woohooing in the first place. When I play the Sims offline nobody knows except me and Jesus what is going on and more and more I am thinking that this is just the way I like it. It just seems a bit too incestuous to be woohooing with my graduate students. A bit too much like the creepy professor pushing up on unsuspecting co-eds during office hours. A bit too child molester-ish. I won’t even get into the fact that I am a little creeped out by myself because I am more comfortable woohooing with the other Sims as long as they don’t know about it and don’t have to consent to it explicitly. Kinda weird date rape-ish that as long as they consent to some kind of “romantic” relationship (and I had no idea that “Inseparable” was romantic) that they heretofore consent to all of my amorous advances. Shit, maybe I just have too many issues to play The Sims!
