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Ooboo Vroose Baa Dooo! That’s “happy birthday” in Simlish, the delightfully nonsensical language of The Sims. The life simulation video game franchise turns 25 this year, making me feel officially old.

Like many others, I grew up playing The Sims, oscillating between designing dream homes and orchestrating ideal careers, and trapping my Sim characters in a tiny block room, removing all the doors and . For the more benevolent among us, The Sims was an endlessly rewarding digital dollhouse.

Game designer Sid Meier (creator of the Civilisation series) defines a video game as . In most games, interesting decisions are about which gun to use or which party member to heal. The Sims’ interesting decisions, however, were far more mundane. “What clothes should I make my simulated human (typically a digital avatar of myself or my friends) wear?”; “Who should they date?”; and, most importantly: “Should I use the ‘rosebud’ cheat to give myself infinite money?”

The Sims went on to become one of the , with myriad sequels, expansions and an obsessed player base. While similar titles at the time, such as , had you playing as an omnipotent god, they were primarily strategy games based around controlling territory. What made The Sims special was its focus on – player-driven experiences where players could create their own stories.

Much of this focus is also present in what is now called the “cosy game” genre. These are games that focus not on conflict or challenges, but rather on creativity, exploration and personal expression.

Before let us befriend a moody fisherman, allowed us to be financially terrorised by a raccoon, and made us cry over a box of kitchen utensils, The Sims showed us a new way to play. One where the biggest challenge was forgetting to pay your bills, and the most rewarding accomplishment was finally affording a pool (whose exit ladder may or may not just have ).

This normalised the idea that games didn’t need to be won to be fun. It was a shift in design philosophy that paved the way for later games that let players tend a farm, manage a café, or befriend ghosts without a game-defined goal.

The Sims was less about victory than it was about making your own fun – whether that meant imagining your future family life with your crush, or seeing how well you could build your Sim’s career from the ground up before succumbing to late-stage capitalism.

Copying The Sims’ homework

Many features that define the cosy game genre today trace directly back to The Sims. It popularised meticulous environment building and customisation tools, for example, from house layouts to outfit choices and suspiciously elaborate hedge mazes. This DNA is the bedrock of many modern cosy games, like or pandemic hit Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ island growing.

The Sims was free from combat or major stressors (unless you count fire hazards and ). No timers, no pressure – just vibes (unless you forgot to build a toilet, in which case the vibes would be bad). You could play at your own pace, which came to define other self-paced games like .

Much of The Sims was about the relationships between the Sims themselves. They could get married, have children, make friends and even enemies. Instead of fighting for survival, Sims were fighting for their relationships.

This was augmented by a growing “machinima” fan culture, where . These forms of emergent, social storytelling are a mainstay of modern gaming and meme culture, made even more prevalent by social media and now on many game controllers.

Over the years, The Sims franchise has become a bastion for diversity, equity and inclusion. Most recently, that’s meant .

This provides more representation to players, and showcases the importance of cosy games for exploring an . The move has even inspired copycats like the upcoming , which provides even more realistic graphics and complex life simulation, building on the formula introduced by Sims creator Will Wright all those years ago.

For 25 years, The Sims has proven that games can be different. They don’t need conflict, challenge or even victory to be engaging. Sometimes, the real joy comes from designing an entire town, crafting a chaotic soap opera – or simply watching a Sim pace around a door-less room, gradually descending into madness.

, Lecturer, Faculty of Creative & Cultural Industries,

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