Building a Home Used to Be Easy—Especially in ‘The Sims’

If you wanted to cut straight to the marrow of living and skip all the nonsense, like job-hunting or buying a toilet, then you started playing The Sims 1 with the family that came pre-built into the game.

Sitting at 5 Sim Lane, the house of Bella and Mortimer Goth wasn’t especially ostentatious—two-storey, detached, subtly nineteenth-century in a way that befit their name without berating it. Yet it still retained an air of loftiness, a comparative mansion in a suburb full of bungalows. On the Goths’ patio was a dining table with a price tag several multiples above the entry-level Formica square.

Inside, the rooms were studded with symbols of disposable income: a piano, an aquarium, an easel for their awful daughter Cassandra. A bathtub to luxuriate in, rather than the cheap standing shower most starter Sims could afford. A number of relatives were buried in the backyard cemetery and their ghosts would rise, on occasion, to terrify the living. The house had been in the family for a while.

When I first encountered The Sims in 2001, a year after its launch, I was deeply bored by the Goths and their middle-class stability. I was enough of an egoist to thrill at playing god, but in the house at 5 Sim Lane, the divine had already come and gone and made some categorical errors, like leaving a solid-wood table outdoors in all weather. Many hours’ worth of juicy architectural and design choices had already been made for me—starting with the Goths’ house felt like entering at a point that was, quite literally, too late in the game.

I had no interest in their markers of fiscal success because such triumphs hadn’t come by my hand. The break shot that spun out the arc of a life had already been taken, bypassing quotidian early game choices like skimping on carpet for a nicer couch or splurging on a computer to increase the number of job listings. Trimming fat off the present to save room for a future.

The central goal of The Sims is, as the name suggests, to simulate living a life, an open-ended objective that allows the player to take that existence in any direction she desires. Options abound. Some people treated the game like a laboratory for experiments in free will; others tried to make their optimistically hot avatars fuck as many people as possible.

But for me, and for a substantial segment of its playing community, The Sims was mainly about the house. More than pursuing a career in burglary, or having copious amounts of sex, or attaining a maxed-out charisma skill bar—all goals, perhaps worthier ones, that the simulated universe had on offer—optimizing the house seemed the clearest proof of having made a life and done it well.

The game’s earliest stages unfolded with calming linearity: Pick a plot of land. Erect walls and a roof, if you hadn’t bought a place already constructed. Lay the flooring. Choose the furniture and—unless you were relying on one of the widespread cheat codes—gnaw your nails as you watch your money dwindle. To me, these never felt like steps to sprint through on the way to simulating life, but life itself.

The game’s capitalist core offered quick and dirty instruction on the value of a home and the freedom of upward mobility. Because you pay off the house up front with pre-supplied funds, you’re under less stress to seek employment immediately. When you are ready to get a job, it’s very easy to find one—you can cycle through a list of entry-level positions reliably advertised online or in the daily newspaper. (Don’t want to be a security guard? Just wait till tomorrow’s posting, which might solicit applications for pickpockets!)

Career advancement is virtually guaranteed, provided you’ve got the requisite skill points, go to work in a good mood, and catch your daily carpool on time. But my Sims would often stagnate around halfway up the corporate ladder. As soon as I could score a paycheck big enough to support my true calling (perfecting the house and nothing but), I tended to lose interest in the salary bump between, say, bank robber and cat burglar. The universe was one of gameable stability, an assembly line in which upgrades to your living space—a nicer rug, a backyard, a pool, a whole new floor to your house—were never disproportionately hard to attain. I ate it up. No cheat codes necessary. I was nine years old and down for a little class climbing.

It would have been nice for somebody to warn me how useless these lessons would be when I stepped out of rehearsal and into the floodlights. By the time I faced the real-life housing market of Toronto as a renter more than a decade later, a veteran architect of several dozen virtual homes, I’d worn a neural groove so deep I could have fallen into it. But this idée fixe of material progress wasn’t all the fault of a computer game—culture is lousy with reasons to tread the mental path snaking up to a single-family detached home. The image lives at the heart of how we’ve crafted the story of a life, the idea of safety, what it means to live well.

But the steps necessary to actualize that goal—stable jobs, growth in real wages, affordable property—are dwindling into oblivion, and with them the endgame. With housing slipping out of reach for a whole generation, those old narratives have largely lost their meaning. And yet, whether from desire or despair or just lack of other options, we keep reproducing the blueprint.

*

In the earliest versions of The Sims, each newly created family began their adventure with twenty thousand Simoleons—funds that can cover, if you play your cards right, either the purchase or the construction of a starter home. In the original game, this lump sum arrived irrespective of family size: a single Sim would get the same twenty g’s as, say, a couple with four kids or a commune of seven adults. Later generations of the game introduced a fairer metric, adjusting the amount of cash depending on the number of people in the household—which has stayed capped at eight since The Sims 1. But even for a single Sim, twenty large can disappear remarkably fast when your first task, upon entering the world, is to buy a plot of land and four walls.

Online, there exists an extensive discourse in which players debate how best to make use of this money. “For a simple starter [home],” one forum thread asks, “what is more important”: a small, cheap house on a tiny lot with the goal of buying a bigger place when money allows, or, if you want to craft your own mansion or “[do] a dynasty,” a massive lot on which the player can continue to extend the house’s borders, accommodating a growing family as the cash flow increases?

The replies range from consumerist joy—“I love expanding . . . you can end up with a house worth a fortune”—to Boomerish complaint: “Looking at many of the pre-built starter homes . . . [it] just boggles my mind as to how impractical and money-wasting they are.” Others feel disinclined to accept the premise at all—citing dissatisfaction with the “grind” of saving up to pay off a bigger house in full, one Reddit user asked, “Anyone else wish you could get a mortgage loan?”

If you feel the same way, you can download a player-designed mod that consigns you to a line of credit, an aspect of real-life the developers presumably wanted to give the rest of us a break from. Beyond the forums, players can seek more specific guidance for gaming the system: articles like The Sims Online’s “How to Build a Starter Home” offer tips on how to optimize your start-up funds, covering subjects like “budget landscaping” and tracking the home’s valuation.

This is a wildly different internet from the one in which young people stare down the question of how and where to actually live. Other than a shared agony over the chasm between bang and buck, the contemporary ways we talk about housing and home are closer to dystopian: “Millennials Love Zillow Because They’ll Never Own a Home,” shrugs a OneZero headline. The piece details the wistful way that a nation of perpetual renters scrolls through the real-estate internet, projecting their lives into spaces and levels of affluence they’ll never be able to afford. 

In Toronto, where I live, Twitter threads surface trying to crowdsource solutions to the problem of renting in this city, especially if you don’t have stable employment. Less relatable but more darkly compelling are the Reddit threads full of panicky twenty-something men who work in fields like law or finance, running their six-figure salaries through various calculi to determine whether they’d be better off house poor or cash-rich, especially when that rat-race money will net them little more than a shoebox condo.

While I find my Zillow-browsing generally pleasurable, I can’t pretend that this state of affairs only preys on my material resources. I compulsively check rental listings in areas I have no desire to live in, trying to price out the standard of living and terrified by the possibility that these phantom lives, in which I pour dollars into the pockets of a different landlord, are somehow better value than mine. I flip the search from rent to sale, scrutinizing trends in neighborhood pricing, shuddering smugly at the awfulness of Toronto condos. I’ve memorized the average house prices in the various cities in which I’ve ever felt the faintest glimmer of kinship. I’ve been haunted by the possibility that I’ve only manufactured said kinship so I have an affordable Toronto exit plan.

I’m alert, of course, to the deceptiveness of the entire impulse; that what looks like home and stability and comfort is also, if you squint at its teeth, the wolves of private property and unexamined privilege. So too is there economic predation in continually stoking the value of home ownership when there’s so many who can’t afford it. But I’m also exhausted by the pattern already unfolding: of living forever at the whim and material benefit of a landlord; of uprooting myself for a perpetually pricier space; of teaching my body to move through its shrunken layout; of repeating the cycle a few years later.

I wake and work and live in a diffuse, unshakeable cloud of fury that a fundamental goal, or the choice to even have that goal at all, has been taken from me, my generation, and nearly everyone I love. How, I think, riding the bus in the dark past duplexes and triplexes and houses that exist as symbols of lives successfully detached from anyone else’s, could all of these people have beaten me to it?

*

Over the past twenty years, The Sims franchise has arced away from escapist fantasy and closer to social mirror. Developers have been moving in this direction for a while—landlords have been around since gen two—but the game’s fourth iteration stitches itself more closely than ever to the fabric of the way we live now.

Over the past twenty years, The Sims franchise has arced away from escapist fantasy and closer to social mirror. 

In The Sims 4, you can recreate the facts of your “real” life in unprecedented detail (richer diversity in skin tone and body type, an ever-present mobile device resembling an iPhone, the option to WooHoo with your partners in the shower rather than just under the covers) even if it makes you cringe to have your class cover blown (the addition of a “freelancer” career track, the incorporation of “tiny houses”).

The sophistication of gaming platforms has also changed over the years. Developers can now tweak The Sims 4 “on the fly,” Vice reports, adding “small and large changes . . . in every update” to reflect our own world. While a game that evolves with cultural mores is intellectually appealing to me, I can’t help but read a glimmer of condescension into the way the developers have knocked the goalposts wide open. I got off on the old Sims, the thrill of scoring a cushy life past the keeper. I found comfort in its simplistic economic fantasies; the way that any life, with hard work and good planning, could get hitched to a house and ride that equity off into the sunset.

In the real world, the reasoning behind certain lifestyle changes can be harder to string into something coherent. The day I moved into my second Toronto apartment, affluent passers-by watched from their SUVs and porches as the truck was unloaded. They offered various words of welcome, with greetings evenly split between “welcome to the neighborhood” and “get off my lawn.” These were the kinds of people I lived around, now. I’d moved from the west, near one end of the subway line that cuts across the city, to its opposite extreme. Rent was higher and rooms fewer, but the unit afforded more privacy, the bathroom walls weren’t crumbling, and “non-smoking” was more than a neat idea.

Only days into the relocation, I began to experience the tilted shame of feeling like an interloper; a renter on homeowners’ turf. This was also the case in the west end, of course, but there the properties were less sprawling, the produce more affordable, the real estate ads stuffed into my mailbox in smaller handfuls, and so the wealth disparity felt less ostentatious. I go for fewer walks than I did when I lived on the west side; to creep past these looming house fronts—one of them containing, like a peach pit, my landlord—on my own, unaccompanied by a child or leashed canine, feels like an invitation to suspicion. When I pass a dog on the street, pissing aggressively on a lawn, I wonder if it feels my silent cheering. When I pass a human on the street, I wonder if it bleeds surplus cash out of tenants housed in an investment property.

I find it hard to place my current situation—this apartment, this “stage” of my life—into any sequence of narrative events that I can understand. If, for reasons beyond my control, I may never call my own the totality of where or how I live, I’m not sure what else I trust as a substitute metric. Minimizing the visible class disparity? Eking out more square footage? If I’m not so hot on this neighborhood, am I supposed to haul ass back to the other end of the city, where I’ve convinced myself that I feel more at home?

If I want an extra bedroom to convert into an office so I can devote more time and space to my writing, is that a laudable commitment to my desired life, or an unwise funneling of funds into another rich white pocket? A present claimed or a future lost?

I’m wary, perhaps too much, of being lured into a false sense of progress under economic circumstances so rigidly fixed to rebuff any hint of actual success. To bend to that fiction of movement, to read any kind of headway into that literal, lateral shift back and forth across this grossly inflated city, would feel like helping nail shut my generation’s coffin.

As if she sensed my vitriol, when I was in the home stretch of drafting this essay, my landlord announced she was raising the rent. Law school tuition aside, this was my first subjection to that kind of flex and I did not take it well. I’d only just become properly intimate with my four-figure monthly sentence; the sharp slashes of its first two digits and its rounded second half, and then this new turn of the screw.

The number was ugly before, but it’s uglier now. It turns out my reactions are, like the price I’m charged to live, also subject to inflation.

*

My allegiance to The Sims declined around the time the game shifted into its second generation. I’d been motivated by all the goals of the old, first-gen expansion packs—sex in The Sims: Hot Date, stardom in The Sims: Superstar; animating garden gnomes in the delightfully weird The Sims: Makin’ Magic.

But The Sims 2, with its promise of faithfulness to the life that I was stumbling along trying to live, failed to stir me. The point of it, for me, was never representation; it was to build and succeed at lives far different from my own. I did make “myself” a few times, but it was more to laugh at the options for skin tone and hair texture and perhaps aspirations; any interest in my alternative life fizzled shortly after conception.

The one time this conviction slipped was with the advent of The Sims 2: University. It mostly has to do with where I was in my life then—applying to universities, predictably—but this was the first version of the game that sparked in me a more human desire: to craft, in granular detail, the kind of future I might have. To establish goals—intellectual and creative ones rather than my former allegiance to the economic—and see if the game allowed me to rehearse what I dared hope the real thing might look like.

I don’t think I lasted more than a handful of hours. It was sensory overload in which I had a personal stake in every catastrophic variable. I wanted my Sim to be a novelist; she gave no shits about ignoring the steps needed to actualize that goal. It was, impossibly, even harder than it had been in real life to pick a major. I tapped out before my Sim was supposed to leave for college, slinking back to The Sims 1 and its two body types, its helmet hairstyles, its reductive ambitions, its fiction of total control.

But that was a decade ago, and I was different then. I have a job now. I have an apartment and a landlord and a bone-deep animosity. If what used to terrify me was the unchecked infinity of possible life outcomes, I’m in far enough that that’s obviously no longer something I need to fear.

This morning, The Sims 4 was on sale for five dollars. I’m open to, but not counting on, the chance that I’ll find some catharsis in its weird hall of mirrors. Maybe I’ll become an influencer with a tiny house. Maybe the house will be in my name.

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