As McKenzie Wark describes, “This violence wasn’t real.

This sounds rather awful, yet there was always an element of delight when removing the door from a room to watch the Sims slowly perish.

The player could also turn on their Sim and end their life for them: e.g., you could build a room that had no doors in order that the Sim would starve or you could direct the Sim to get into the swimming pool, then remove the ladder so they would drown. In the PC version, after living many Sim-years, the grim reaper would eventually appear on the scene and take your little Sim to the Beyond (A nasty accident could also cut short the Sim’s life). 2 Looking back now, I see that not much was happening in my social life it’s little wonder that the prospect of designing a house, deciding what my Sim was having for dinner, and even flirting and potentially having sex with other Sims (described by the ‘Woohoo’ action) all seemed more exciting then the possibilities of a nerdy and relatively shy fourteen-year old’s measly social life – despite it all being virtualised and confined to the logic of the game. Its appeal was that it enabled me to enact my rather childish desire for omnipotence: I could customise my Sim’s appearance, sex, age and background, any which way I wanted.

Many of my evenings were spent feverishly developing every aspect of my Sims’ personal and professional lives. When I was fourteen years old, I was addicted to the PC game. It is also one of the only computer games that is predominantly played by women, especially those aged between 12–35 years old. 1 The first version of The Sims series was launched in 2000, and it has become the highest selling PC game of all time. It’s a game about life administration: your challenge is to navigate your Sim through the minor quandaries of daily life. Your Sim will make friends, go for dates, get married, while working their way up the corporate ladder of their chosen career in order to fill their house with furniture, appliances, and even a swimming pool. The Sims is described as a ‘casual life simulation video game series’, in which you create a virtual person-a Sim-and then live out that Sim’s life.

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