Doll’s houses are for girls and punk sissies, right? Maybe in a counselling session to come, my shrink to be will uncover some repressed urge to have played with my sister’s Barbie crap, but until then I’m sticking to my guns. I was so hardcore as a kid that I didn’t even have any truck with Star Wars Death Star style “scale models”. It was obvious some sideways attempt to go me on the boy flavoured doll house tip, and I was playing that. When my buddies would roll those things out when I visited I would look at them as if they had whipped out some leather chaps and told me they wanted to play Village People.

Plastic models of TV/movie characters? None, except my Fred Flintstone shaped bowling tenpins. You getting the picture? Nobody was going to catch me having imaginary tea with Polly Prissypants or Clyde Frog. Nobody.

So you can imagine my typical gamer reaction when The Sims came out. “Too girly” and “where’s the lightning gun?” were my responses. I steered clear. I scoffed at the idea of playing it. My thinking was the only interaction character models in a game should have should be passing a ball, tackling, kicking, punching, throwing, or shooting.

And then The Sims 2 dropped in on my desk. Grudging sense of duty – Kreese needs a new set of shoes - I fired it up. Sure enough, more virtual dolls house stuff. Oh look, a chick needs to pee. How exciting! Nice graphics. An interface so simple you could play it with a Macintosh mouse. But I wasn’t buying in now, no sir. After half an hour or so of tinkering and messing around I turned it off and cleansed myself with some ritualistic fragging. I felt like I’d emerged from my gym’s dressing room just before a pack of rugger buggers emerged starkers from the showers – thankful and relieved.



Then a funny thing happened. I felt these strange urges. Not the urge to rend flesh and drink blood, it wasn’t a full moon. I felt like firing up The Sims 2 again. Figuring it was me subconsciously trying to get in touch with my feminine side, I rolled with it. Then I found myself starting a new scenario from scratch. Before long, I was arranging furniture. I had become something I feared almost as much as becoming one of those guys you see in Games Workshop stores. I was one of “them”. I had become a Sims freak.

What I didn’t realise – or studiously avoided – is that The Sims more than any other game allows us to truly become gods. Not of the Peter Molyneux all powerful entity type, rather of the living room and front lawn type. Restricted in scope, in a good way. Tom Hulce said it best in Amadeus: Come on now, be honest! Which one of you wouldn't rather listen to his hairdresser than Hercules? Or Horatius, or Orpheus... people so lofty, it's as if they sh*t marble!

That sentiment holds true here – you aren’t hoarding mana and tearing the earth asunder, you aren’t hurling lightning bolts at wayward peons, you’re not even sending troops off to battle. Your priorities are so mundane that they mimic real life with uncanny accuracy. Work, comfort, suburban life and family drama – all on the relative comfort of your screen. And it works because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Anyway, enough vaguespeak. Rather than talk in airy fairy terms like this, I will describe the opening stages of my Sims 2 experiment.

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