i'm not a sim-girl, not yet a sim-woman
when soothing video games make me feel guilty
As our dear and nearly free Saint Britney would say, “oops, I did it again.” And this time, it’s the Sims.
No, I’m not super proud of it. Yes, I’ve written about video games before. Will I be able to come up with something new and profound? Maybe. Hear me out.
I picked up Sims 4 recently (haven’t delved into expansion packs…yet). This was in part due to stress from teaching, part serious summer heat, and part nervous response as fall approaches. The more I hear about the Delta variant and what might happen again come fall (my work plans aren’t even fully confirmed just yet), the more I escape into the virtual families whose lives I have created in great detail.
I’ll spare you the obvious here: the Sims gives me a confinement I can control, as opposed to the one I can’t control. That’s the thing about anxiety: we feel as though control is out of our grasp, even when it’s not. I control their every outfit choice, the layout of their house, their career track, whether or not they enjoy fitness or gardening or playing violin or watching rom-coms.
The bigger question I want to ask is why I am surprised at myself anymore. I have a habit of diving into narrative-driven simulation games when the going gets tough. I am still obsessed with Stardew Valley and I have become deeply invested in the expanded universe featuring Ginger Island. Hell, Animal Crossing is one of the few things that kept me sane in the first few months of the pandemic. And I’ll never fully let go of my childhood nostalgia for late ‘90s Nintendo’s Harvest Moon, my strange but satisfying first farming game.
But every time I decide to dive into yet another one of these games I beat myself up for it. This is not productivity in a capitalistic sense. It’s not actively “bettering” anything but my mood. I’m an adult and I can choose to spend my time how I want to and still, I feel guilty.
Other folks play video games for stress relief all the time, guilt free, and many for far more time than I do. My boyfriend loves Super Smash Brothers and Slay the Spire. I and many friends fell in love with Fall Guys. Everyone has their game that hits a certain spot within them, releases some specific knot of tension that can be hard to pinpoint otherwise.
But somehow playing the Sims right after I turned 31 hit a little harder. Nothing important has been neglected: I do my work, I pay my bills, I write, I walk my dog several times a day, I call my parents. It isn’t impeding my life: arguably, it is improving it. So why can’t I embrace it with full arms, just like the way my Sims do when they make a new friend?
Part of this is the sticky nature of post-grad school life. There’s less structure to tether me, which I historically am not always great at managing. Part of this is also emerging from many, many years now of aiming for a career change goal and now finally getting to the other side, only to realize just how strict I had to be with myself to get here.
And yet another part is the realization of just how on hold certain parts of my life have become. The economy is shakier than my Sim Ellen was after putting out a cyber-fire on her cyber-stove. Given the housing market, I can’t imagine home ownership is in the cards anytime soon (not so with the Sims, where you are given a generous amount of money from some unknown entity to build a house from scratch).
Everything in my life has slowed to some degree, for better or worse, but in the Sims, life is speedy. You’re a child for a blink, a teen for a moment, a young adult for a heartbeat. There’s no pandemic pumping the brakes. Life moves on fluidly, happily, gracefully. Meanwhile, I’m just out here trying to stick this job market landing, and its much harder to execute than it may appear from the outside.
But that’s the thing. It has taken so much of my energy just to navigate the basics over the past year. I’m so very tired. So is everyone else I know. We’re all doing our best to stick the landing (a la our silver-winning US gymnastics team), and we always appear far more graceful from afar.
My Sims also look better from afar. Please don’t look too close at Rosie’s dirty kitchen sink or Tom’s inability to wake up on time for work, or the living room I made for Lena that she hated and I had to remake from scratch. We’re all feeling a little guilty and a little on edge. Let’s not look too closely, ok?
