🌻Essential Life Skills I Learned from Playing The Sims
O Vwa Vwaf Sna!
Hi, friends! I am thrilled to be back in your inboxes today. I think I’ve finally figured out my new schedule.
“New schedule, you say?” Yes! I have a bit of professional news… I have parted ways with my marketing agency, Lunaris Creative, and am setting out once again on my own as a true freelancer. This time, I’m doubling down on my specialty: writing, editing, and communications strategy for organizations in nature + the environment. Check it out, tell your friends: https://itsdrfunk.com/
It’s been an exciting few weeks!
So much has happened since our last post. We got to play dungeons & dragons in person and our rookie Kansas City friends took to it marvelously. I sang at both our Good Friday and Easter services at our church, Athens. Ate the required deviled eggs on Easter. Gideon (the dog) turned two. Quit my job. Drove to Illinois to watch the total solar eclipse with my family. Drove to Memphis to learn about record collections and Southern Soul. Played bunco for the first time. Got older and didn’t hate my birthday. Spent four days at New Orleans Jazz Fest with friends. Tried out a keto diet. Experienced the profound joy of a “silent retreat.” Relaunched my business. Hosted family on a road trip.
Despite there being a solid handful of heartfelt things I could write about in there, instead you get this post because it’s what’s stuck in my head this week…
Essential Life Skills I Learned from Playing The Sims
I was chatting with my husband, aunt, and uncle the other day about our observations related to differences in spending habits and money management mindsets we’ve seen among friends, family, and acquaintances and I had the thought: But it’s all just basic Sims strategy.
Wait… did I learn my approach to money from… The Sims?
For context, The Sims is a computer game, first released in 2000 (Anna’s age: 11). The series is still going strong: Wikipedia tells me The Sims 4: For Rent came out last December. But the very first game, plus the first few expansion packs, were the only ones for me (Livin’ Large and House Party — I had Vacation and Unleashed as well but even by then the core game was mucked up too much for me).
These were the days before Steam logged my gaming hours. I won’t say I ever reached World of Warcraft levels, but I might’ve reached World of Warcraft levels.
Anyway, in The Sims, you start with an empty neighborhood to build. You create a family, pick their appearances and outfits and names, move them into an empty lot, and start building their home and careers.
(Fun fact, I remember my bestie S.G. and I named one unfortunate character ISuck Bugalagoop. We thought it would be funny to make a real loser of a character, but the joke dried up fast and we didn’t actually play with him very long.)
Every family starts with the same amount of money. There’s no credit, only cash. With some trial and error, some common sense, and way too many hours invested, I learned a few things playing.
You can’t buy the biggest lot or you won’t have money left to build your house.
Start small. The first house you build should be as small and cheap as possible, so that you can afford all the necessities.
You pretty much can’t spend anything on toys at first, because you need to buy a bed so you can sleep. If your Sim isn’t eating and sleeping and showering, they’ll lose their job. Your first paycheck buys a microwave and a trash can.
The best first job for your Sim? Literally whatever is available. There is only one job ad in the newspaper each day, take it or leave it. But you always take it, because $90/day is better than $0/day. The job is entry level: “test subject” puts you on a science career track, “dishwasher” on a culinary track, and so on.
Once your Sim has earned some money from this job, you use your newfound funds to invest in a little professional development. You’ll never get promoted unless you have some skills! So you buy a bookshelf to read and improve your cooking and mechanical skills. Buy a weight machine to build some muscle for your career as an athlete. Working in a more brainy career? Get a chess board to work on your logic.
Don’t socialize too much yet, it’s time to grind. Unless you start to get depressed, that is, then take a break and spend some time with some friends until your “social” meter is filled once more.
As your skills improve, you get promoted, your daily wage increases, and your bank account grows. Now you can start updating your tiny, crummy house.
But even that has a strategy. What has the most immediate impact on a Sim’s daily mood and well-being? Upgrading the necessities first. A better kitchen makes food more filling. A better bed makes them wake up better rested. It’d be a major waste to drain the account to buy them the $2,550 Strings Theory Stereo when they don’t even have a decent oven and are living on salads.
By the way, if you want to change career paths at any time, you can. Just know you’ll be starting over at the bottom rung again. But don’t worry: You’ll climb that ladder much faster now, so long as you have transferable skills from your other job. It’s easier to go from one logic-based job to another than to decide to become a professional athlete when your “body” score is at zero.
Then as you start to really earn some money, you get to keep upgrading your stuff incrementally. It’s so much more satisfying to go from the crummy version to the mid-tier version of all the furniture, than to splurge on one thing and still have crummy everything else.
Or: You can just save and save and then knock the whole house down and rebuild. That’s fun too, but dangerous — it’s easy to run out of money mid-way through your remodel once you start splurging.
Level up, level up, level up.
Why is this game so fun and absolutely addictive???
I never thought about it until this last weekend: But this is, in fact, how I live my life.
I would have thought Sims strategy was just 1. common sense and/or 2. that the game is modeled after reality, but as I look around at other people’s life choices and spending habits, it seems like this is not how everyone is living. I try not to judge, but some of y’all didn’t play the greatest game ever made* — and it shows.**
So here’s to The Sims, for teaching me essential life skills.
And with that trip down memory lane, I will leave you.
Honestly, I will probably be re-downloading The Sims this weekend. Reliving this has me really hankerin’. It’s just so, so good.
Dag dag.**
✌️
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*tied with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, obviously.
**or you had the game but only ever Rosebud-ed your way into a million dollars so you could play around in build mode. Yeah, I see you, you cheaters. You missed out on a really great game! And education lol
**that’s Simlish for goodbye. The subtitle, O Vwa Vwaf Sna!, is also Simlish, my favorite phrase (effectively, nice to meet you), which I always heard (and mimicked) more like coma non shanna? but apparently the internet has agreed on other transcriptions. My second favorite Sim saying, which I could not find anywhere, goes more like dat gworrr is frendyshaped, and a wobadosna essuh je-huffagun ja-ho nonnie. I always took it as friendly gossip.
My next character's name is going to be ISuck Bugalagoop
Great read! I thought, write more!