Viking-ninja romance and exploding barbecues: Readers share their Sims misadventures

I Always Wanted To Pretend That I Was An Architect
Our Special Topics In Gameology series on Neighborhoods continued this week as Samantha Nelson broke down what makes The Sims the perfect sitcom-generation machine. As with any mention of The Sims, this led the commentariat to recall some amazing stories about their own Sim misadventures. Armando Forero talked about creating many different sitcom-ready families, and DTH followed up with some weirder examples from their games:
I did a similar thing with The Sims 2, and it just got more bizarre as the expansions came out. I created a family of Vikings, a family of ninja, a family of superheroes, and a large group of roommates all dressed in medieval garb with the names of Arthurian knights. I suppose, in keeping with the thesis of this article, this is the equivalent to a sitcom getting more and more cartoonish in its plotting and characterization as the seasons go on.
The neighborhood kept growing, and as it did, my families had offspring—all of whom were horribly deformed, because I gave their parents cartoonish features—and then the offspring all started interacting, so that a Viking boy starting dating the ninja girl, and Sir Lancelot was carrying on an affair with the superhero mom. It was basically the same thing that happened whenever I took out all my Lego sets at the same time, only it was on a computer and I deliberately avoided taking control of most of it. That’s another thing that makes The Sims the ultimate anti-game: It gets more interesting the less you try to “play” it.
CedricTheOwl recalled the tale of a Sim family that made one simple mistake:
I recall making a model nuclear family in The Sims: father was a businessman, the mother was a cop, the two kids were perfect straight-A students. Then one fateful day, I made a decision that changed their lives forever: I bought them a grill. After approvingly gibbering at the new purchase for a while, the father decided to grill up some dinner. He might as well have been cooking steaks on a landmine. Within seconds of lighting up the grill, it exploded and surrounded him with an inescapable ring of fire. He was dead before the mother could even make it to the phone. The family took the loss hard. The mother lost her job at the police force and turned to a life of crime. The children were too depressed to maintain their grades and the son was eventually shipped off to military school. The moral of this story: Never trust a grill.
YOLO Swaggins’ story included a little more premeditated sewing of discord:
Back in my freshman year of college, there was one computer that was used almost solely for The Sims, and it was used by a bunch of people on the floor. We all used the same neighborhood and had our own characters. Mine was a fat man who lived alone in a tiny house and really did nothing but paint portraits of himself painting himself in his underwear.
I also decided to have him destroy the family of the owner of the computer. He slept with my friend’s character’s wife, painted them standing around together in my character’s disaster of a home, and I would routinely take screen shots of them in the process of Sims-love and make them the desktop image (after taking a screenshot of the desktop, making THAT the desktop image, then deleting all of the shortcuts, of course). The wife got pregnant, the resulting kid was one of the ugliest things I’ve seen The Sims produce, and she was ultimately shipped off to military school.
Our Sims hated one another (and my friend wasn’t too happy with me for a while), but all the differences were set aside because my Sim was really good at playing the bass in his underwear, while my friend’s Sim was very good at playing the drums.