Let’s hear it for meticulously crafted, efficient lots built with love and perfectly designed and decorated for the family that lives there.
Let’s hear it for huge barns with with three pinball machines, two arcade games, a billiard table, and four bowling alleys, but no stove.
Let’s hear it for gorgeous, gigantic, replicas of real palaces that crash 90% of games when loaded.
Let’s hear it for neighborhoods played in strict rotation; for neighborhoods where one family is played for three generations before another household is ever loaded; for neighborhoods still being used after 15 years of doing every Very Bad Thing under the sun; for neighborhoods that vanish inexplicably after being played once.
Let’s hear it for Maxis Match, for vanilla only, for palettes that are used exclusively for six months and then scrubbed in favor of a new one, for players who don’t know what any Maxis items, hairs, or clothing actually look like anymore.
Let’s hear it for unmodded games and for games modded into unrecognizability.
Let’s hear it for games in which each neighborhood has its own separate folder so it can have its own specific set of downloads and the player has to sit down and think about whether they want to play medieval, regency, fantasy, the 70s game, the BACC, the Test of Time,or the zombie apocalypse; and games in which the technology and fashion of all eras cohabit unselfconsiously in the same household.
Let’s hear it for non-supernatural heteronormative nuclear sim families; for werewolf/vampire/plantsim polycules; for queer utopias; for dictatorships that Big Brother would think too restrictive; for rigidly “realistic” games; for unabashed nonsense.
Let’s hear it for perfect worlds with no injury or sickness or fire or death and for hellholes of unending drama and danger.
Let’s hear it for defaults that make even aliens, plantsims, and robots conform to the range of current real-world skintones; and for those in which all colors of the rainbow are available except for those seen in the real world.
Let’s hear it for players who create neighborhood after neighborhood, setting them up perfectly, and never ever have a household open and unpaused long enough to see a welcome wagon.
Let’s hear it for players who build and build and build and never take the game out of build/buy except to playtest their build.
Let’s hear it for players who create CC for games they never play anymore.
Let’s hear it for players who have never made a thing, but toss in families, houses, clothes, objects, and businesses made by Maxis or other players, and play the stuffing out of them.
Let’s hear it for storytellers who never turn on free will and set everything up with poseboxes.
Let’s hear it for storytellers who never turn free will off and are continually surprised.
Let’s hear it for those who document their games and share them, and those who keep their games to themselves.
Let’s hear it for players who rush on to the next new thing.
Let’s hear it for players who doggedly maintain the tech to play their favorite iteration in the face of all difficulties.
Let’s hear it for no-cheat games, and all-cheat games, and every game in between.
Let’s hear it for the sandbox, and all the players therein, playing exactly the way they like to play.
