My obsession

When I was a little girl, I was taken to see a miniature (model) city, Minimundus at Klagenfurt. We visited several other tiny towns, in Austria I think, and in England, and in one of them, I'm not sure which one, some of the tiny models of people actually moved around the city on tracks, going to their workplaces or in and out of shops. Every so often the church would hold a service, with an organ and the sound of hymn singing, and then the little people coming out on their tracks and dispersing to their homes.
This idea of the people on tracks fascinated me, and of course translated to "real life" - the predictablity of people's lives, the patterns we draw in time, the paths we wear by walking them over and again.

Being a sickly, solitary, bookish sort of child, I made endless paper and cardboard houses and towns. The physical difficulties of modelling with the rather limited resources available to me meant these were rather unsatisfactory. A building set called "Betta Bilda" was one of my favourite toys, before I discovered Lego, which was far too expensive for me to have much. (A pocket-sized pack of bricks and windows of real Lego cost about three weeks' of my pocket money at the time). But Lego and Betta Bilda (IMHO far better for house building than Lego) were still very limiting. You could only build houses of a certain shape. Roofs were limited by the tiles available, and of course you could only build houses you had ENOUGH, and the right shape of, bricks for, so the large or complex buildings were out of reach.

Paper was cheap and plentiful. I decided I would DRAW my houses; my father helped by pointing me at books of architects' houseplans. In those days there was no hope of a child from a working-class family becoming an architect, let alone a female. So it became a game; I made books full of house designs and of course, planned out the families that would inhabit them. One favourite game was to develop a family over many generations, following rules I had set up for myself, and to see how the house was added on to, to provide extra living space, and as the family became wealthier.

Does this sound at all familiar? If you are a Simmer, it will.
Much time passed.

In about 2001, I was once again off work sick, and my son-in-law lent me, along with a pile of other games, a copy of The Sims 1.0, Will Wright's masterpiece game which has since developed to Sims 3 and still selling millions of copies. That was the start of my obsession. Sims 3 allows the modelling of the Sims' characters much more fully than the very first pixel people, who stood 128 pixels tall and suffered many an iniquity at the hands of Simmers. Sims 1 was a spoof of the consumer society and IMHO particularly modelled US suburban consumer society of the 60s and 70s: Sims got happier as you bought them better "stuff" and the game was all about making them richer, etc. (One nice touch was that while Sims 1 Sims could actually "play in bed" - an odd activity which involved barking and much giggling and which sometimes resulted in pregnancy) - they got more Fun points from playing a computer game!)

The reproductive cycle of Sims 1 Sims had to be seen to be believed. A pregnant Sim immediately upon discovering her "pregnancy" produced what I always thought of as an egg - a baby bassinet or cradle containing a "baby" which periodically required feeding, changing and singing to. If the parents nurtured this baby successfully, it hatched amid brighly coloured stars into a Sim-child after three days. If not, it was taken away. (They used a very similar sequence for dragon eggs in a later expansion pack of Sims 1 called Makin' Magic, though those actually LOOKED like eggs.)

The beauty of Sims and its sequels for me is that the whole town can be modelled. And that unlike Sim City and other city modelling games, you can actually PLAY the Sims and see how they live, get inside their lives, see and control the tracks they run on. Sims 3 does this exceptionally well, with the "seamless view" of the town. While far from perfect, it's the best yet.