My mum introduced me to video games. She will tell you it was to give herself five minutes of peace. I believe her. What she did not anticipate was that she would become as obsessed as I did — to the point where I had to compete with my own mother for computer time, which is not a sentence I expected to write in a gaming blog, but here we are.
The game that consumed us both, most thoroughly and for the longest time, was The Sims. We would collect expansion packs like treasures. We read every feature list. When magic and dragons were introduced, she came home from work, walked into my room, and said "my turn" — not hello, but my turn. We both understood.
Now, years later, I fire it up occasionally for nostalgia — and I notice things I never did as a kid. Specifically: how accurate the game is. Not in a fun, abstract way. In a "oh, this is just my thirties" way.
The Sim Who Won't Pick Up His Plate
A Sim will feed himself when hungry. He will shower when dirty. He will sleep when exhausted. What he will absolutely not do — without explicit instruction — is pick up his dirty dishes. He will walk past them. He will navigate around them. He will stand in front of them and emit a small cloud of displeasure. But he will not deal with them.
I cannot tell you how specifically this describes me at 7pm after a long day at work. The cognition is there. The awareness that the dishes exist is there. The executive function to actually do something about them has temporarily left the building.
This is actually studied. Research on decision fatigue — published in peer-reviewed journals including work by Baumeister et al. in Psychological Science — demonstrates that willpower and self-regulation draw from a limited cognitive resource that depletes throughout the day. By evening, even simple tasks become disproportionately difficult. The Sim isn't being lazy. He's experiencing decision fatigue. So am I. So are you.
The Pool Ladder Incident
Every veteran Sims player knows the pool ladder. You remove it. Your Sim swims cheerfully in circles until, well, they don't. This is cruel, and we have all done it, and I want us to sit with that for a moment before we continue.
But here's what struck me rewatching it as an adult: the Sim absolutely could climb out without the ladder. They have done the physical work of swimming for extended periods. They are not exhausted. They are not weak. They simply will not do it without the prescribed route.
Psychologists call this "functional fixedness" — the cognitive tendency to only see the conventional use of something, even when alternatives are available. First described by Karl Duncker in 1945, it remains one of the most replicated findings in problem-solving research. When the ladder isn't there, many Sims — and many people — don't look for another way out. They just wait.
What's the meanest thing you've ever done to a Sim?
On the Fireworks
When Sims experience romantic success, literal fireworks appear. I initially included this as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more I wish it were real. Not for the obvious reasons — though those are also reasons — but because it would solve an enormous amount of ambiguity in human communication. Fireworks don't lie. You know exactly where you stand.
The fire insurance costs would be significant. But clarity has value.
The real lesson from The Sims: The game is, at its core, a model of competing needs, limited energy, and the gap between knowing what you should do and being able to do it. That gap is not a personal failing. It's documented psychology. Be kind to yourself and your Sim.
What Playing The Sims Actually Teaches You
I wish I'd paid more attention to the mechanics when I was young. The game shows you, in miniature, that careers take time, that relationships require maintenance, that neglecting your basic needs eventually has visible consequences. It shows you that environment affects mood, that setbacks compound, and that sometimes you need a cheat code just to get through the week.
Motherlode. We all need it sometimes.
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