When Love Was Found…

and despite everyone’s distrust of them to keep their apartment in order, everything’s pretty nice. misa has a joint calendar hung on the fridge, and they have multiple forks now, so they’re killing the whole living together thing. honey has slipped into sam’s vernacular more than he would like to admit, he’s got other stuff he worries about so he can’t quite keep every bit and joke neatly into their own boxes. sometimes misa is mike, or mikey, dude and bro, and sometimes he’s honey or babe. it’s a non issue, misa responds to anything anyways. sam once threw out puppy just to be annoying and misa tilted his head up all the same.

they’re both sort of messy but not in any drastic way, hotel rooms versus spaces they actually live in are different. hoodies over the back of the couch, some plates left on the table, shoes that live more in the middle of walkways than anywhere else. their laundry is all mixed up at this point too. misa’s more of a shirt on but boxers only sleeper and sam’s more of a no shirt, basketball shorts sleeper. all it means is that sam sometimes turns around from making coffee to find misa stumbling into the kitchen with undeniably his shirt on, london knights three which really doesn’t give any wiggle room for misa to have thought it might have been his at all. it doesn’t matter though because misa will just lay his head on the counter and complain that the coffee smells bad. and that night he’ll pop up for an episode of bad sitcoms in sam’s sharks hoodie, number six over the heart, and sam will just have to be okay with it.

misa’s a pretty good roommate anyways, he sticks to three things he can actually cook so he doesn’t accidentally burn down the kitchen. sam likes having someone around anyways, it was half the reason he was always over at the toffolis last season. misa’s always in the apartment now too, leaves with sam and comes back with sam, and only has an outing or two a month without him. sam sort of figured something like that would be annoying but he really, really likes it, likes having someone to come back home to who’s in always in one of his reliable three spots: corner of the couch, at his desk, curled up on sam’s bed. sam’s not really sure when it became his bed misa was more commonly found in but it is. sam will come back from lunch with musty and walk into his own room to find misa in sam’s hoodie, playing clash in sam’s bed.

trevor zegras at shoulder check

“During The Sims’s protracted development, the team had debated whether to permit same-sex relationships in the game. If this digital petri dish was to accurately model all aspects of human life, from work to play and love, it was natural that it would facilitate gay relationships. But there was also fear about how such a feature might adversely affect the game. “No other game had facilitated same-sex relationships before—at least, to this extent—and some people figured that maybe we weren’t the ideal ones to be first, as this was a game that E.A. really didn’t want to begin with,” Barret told me. “It felt to me like a fear thing.” After going back and forth for several months, the team finally decided to leave same-sex relationships out of the game code.

When Barrett joined the company, in October, 1998, he was unaware of the decision. A fortnight into his new job, he found himself with nothing to do when his supervisor, the game’s lead programmer, Jamie Doornbos, took a short vacation. Jim Mackraz, Barrett’s boss, needed a task to occupy his new employee, and he handed Barrett a document that outlined how social interactions in the game would work; the underlying rules for the game’s A.I. that would dictate how the characters would dynamically interact with one another. “He didn’t think I could handle it with Jamie off on vacation, but he figured that at least I’d be out of his hair,” Barrett told me. “Neither he nor I realized that he’d given me an old design document to work from.”

That design document predated the decision to exclude gay relationships in the game. Its pages described a web of social interactions, in which every kind of romantic relationship was permitted. That week, Barrett confounded the expectations of his disbelieving boss. He successfully wrote the basic code for social interactions, including same-sex relationships. “In hindsight, I probably should have questioned the design,” Barrett, who is gay, said. “But the design felt right, so I just implemented it. Later, Will Wright stopped by my desk,” Barrett said. “He told me that liked the social interactions, and that he was glad to see that same-sex support was back in the game.” Nobody on the team questioned Barrett’s work. “They just pretty much ignored it,” he said. “After a while, everyone was just used to the design being there. It was widely expected that E.A. would just kill it, anyway.”

In early 1999, before E.A. had a chance to kill the design, Barrett was asked to create a demo of the game to be shown at E3. The demo would consist of three scenes from the game. These were to be so-called on-rails scenes—not a true, live simulation but one that was preplanned, and which would shake out the same way each time it was played, in order to show the game in its best light. One of the scenes was a wedding between two Sims characters. “I had run out of time before E3, and there were so many Sims attending the wedding that I didn’t have time to put them all on rails,” Barrett said.

On the first day of the show, the game’s producers, Kana Ryan and Chris Trottier, watched in disbelief as two of the female Sims attending the virtual wedding leaned in and began to passionately kiss. They had, during the live simulation, fallen in love. Moreover, they had chosen this moment to express their affection, in front of a live audience of assorted press.”