Are they Becoming Real To Us? Isn't it funny how quickly our Sims have become "real" people to us? Like charectors in a novel or a movie? I find myself rooting for them. I have favorites I play almost daily. I even told my son the other day that I had to have some Sims Time "So I could see how they are doing today." When Social Services took one sim's children away, I couldn't sleep that night, trying to figure out how I could have been a better "mother" to them. I had created those kids in Body-Shop, then cared for them from toddlers all the way up to several days of "child" stage, and I cared too much about them to have them taken! Another Sim, poor little Mavis Yokel, seems so real to me I worry about her. I caught her, soon after giving birth to her second illigetimate child, worrying about growing old alone. I had originally created her to be a "White Trash Ho", with a whole legion of children. But, seeing her worry, I felt very guilty. I turned the game off, turned on body shop, and made her a smart, wealthy man named David and married her off, with a huge spectacular wedding beside a pond. She's now pregnant with his baby. Anyone else experiencing anything like this? I never felt emotionally attatched to my sims in TS1. It was more about how lavish I could make their houses, or how I could run their lives. I never "cared." Maybe I need a visit from the social bunny?
I think the TS2 sims are MUCH more emotionally realistic then the ones in TS1. And I'm very fond of my favourite family. And I sometimes do feel a bit guilty when playing the bad family. You see, I have one favourite family that I micromanage much more then the others, thus making it more sccessful. And at the other end of the spectrum, I have a socipoath family that I micromanage to do badly. There have been four murders in that house allready. The other families in the neighbourhood are more normal.
Oh, by the way! If you did save after your kid was taken, you can probably get it back. 1. Have another family adopt. It will probably be that child. 2. Have a member of that family move in with the family that had the child taken, and let the kid tag along. 3. Move that other sim back to it's old household.
i got to admit ts2 is extremly motionly.when i started a fight i kinda felt guilty for the innocent especilly when he rain off cryin .its probaly gonna haunt me to nite
I really like the TS2 a lot more than TS1. I can actually watch my sims write their own stories for me where I had to stage my stories in TS1. I'm currently running a neighborhood dynastic style game in a neighborhood I created. I run 8 families, and I run each family for three days at a time so every family stays together for the purposes of having good marriage ops for the kiddies. I definitely get a distinct feel for each family. That's something I never had in TS1. I also go to bed at night replaying my day's simmy events in my head. That's also something TS1 never inspired. I also find it fascinating to see how couples in identical house plans with identical items in each house have really seperated themselves. None of my houses looks the same as any other now, and one family, the Wyndhams, has even been able to move into a bigger house. I guess the biggest improvement for me (despite the bugs) is the fact that these sims are so much less static than their TS1 counterparts. Their lives actually happen instead of being an endless routine. That makes them so much more realistic IMO.
I also become VERY attached to my Sims. That's why I have had the game since it came out and Just the other day got the nerve to turn "aging on" on my first family and have the main guy die of old age. He was the first one I made in this game and it was sad. I feel guilty starting fights too. I think it is because you can see the facial expressions of them now. More emotion. I keep trying to make sims go bad but always start to feel guilty and improve their lives. I am so glad to see I am not alone on this!!!
Yeah, I had my first sim death Thursday. Poor Nisus Tassou and his wife Dael have had a rough time of it. She's a family sim and he's a popularity sim. They had their first kid and then immediately got pregnant again. This time they had twins. I actually had a toddler overlap where I had three toddlers in the house! Talk about upset parents. The first kid grew into child ok, but the twins are bratty terrors. To make things worse, Nisus was unsuccessful in his job, so they were all poor and didn't have enough space. Then I made a bad career choice and he lost his job. After working overtime to get him happy enough to look for another job, the computer broke. He was fixing it when he got electrocuted and Dael was at work and couldn't save him. Dael was already depressed over the state of the home, but losing Nisus like that put her into natural nervous breakdown. Now she's stuck in depression with three boys (two of them brats) and no time to socialize properly. I call that one Hell House and dread having to play it because it's so depressing.
It's a very emotional game now, although it is... just a game. LOL After playing it obsessivly for the first few weeks I have now calmed down and can play it for very short periods of time so I can still go out and have a real life. BUT, whilst I'm out living my life I do find myself thinking about how my sims are and how I can help them achieve their goals. My alien quads are all grown up and a couple of them are married now and one of them even has 2 kids. I keep wanting to go back and check how they are and how their father is getting on with his new 'senior' love. She's such a sweet old dear, I hope they'll want to get married one day. aharris: I have a house in my game that's depressing to play too. It's that Beaker house. Ick! I hate that house, I try not to play it but I can't help myself. It aggrivates me so very much, Circe and her husband Loki have broken up and I deleted Nervous Subject cause he was an annoying prat. But now Circe is so depressed she can barely go to work and Loki is walking around like a freaking zombie and crying ever few minutes because he's divorced. *sigh* At least they didn't have a whole bunch o' kids I guess. Cass. :cheeky:
I'd say I'm probably more attached to my actual sims than I am to any real people. When real people, total strangers, die, I feel nothing. When my sims die unexpectedly, I am annoyed, the sense of annoyance one feels when one's prized robot spontaneously explodes, forcing you to duck for cover or be perforated by the flying shrapnel bits. At the same time, I feel nothing if I kill a sim I made specifically to kill in the first place, just as I would feel nothing if I had made a disposable machine specifically to undertake some dangerous task from which survival was more or less impossible, and it completed the task, and was destroyed in the process as expected. To me, my sims are my creations, and to this, I have a sense of attachment, but it's hardly emotional.
Were more attached to our Sims in TS2 than in TS1 for a few reasons. For most of us, we take grate care in creating how our sims look like, often spending more time on one family than it takes to build a house (unless youre the type thats O.C.D about building houses). As opposed to TS1 where you take a pre-made face and decide what outfit theyll ware. Youd only really be attached to a sim in TS1 if you started them off in a one room shanty up to a large mansion without cheat codes, but even then the level of attachment is nowhere near that found in TS2. Another reason why many of us have a higher regard for our sims is the level of emotion they display. Their body language and facial expressions coupled with how they react to their surrounds makes them feel more human where as in TS1 if your sim wasnt happy, itd just pass off as being annoying and wouldnt hesitate having an accidental cooking fire.
Well, actually, it can take me hours to build a house, if I'm attempting to create a work more complex than a compound shack. Fortunately, houses are slightly more reusable than families, since I just figured out how to keep a house from defurnishing everytime a family outgrows it and moves out. Hmm, no, that's not how it works for me. If anything, I find the way they constantly attempt to badger me more annoying than in TS1, and I never killed a sim merely for that, it would have defeated the point. As in TS1, however, I am not at all above creating entire families of sims to be slaughtered for what suits my purposes. What I *HAVE* noticed in TS2, however, is that Sims I originally created, while not specifically to be killed, as mostly throwaway filler characters, often take on a life of their own, and while I had originally intended to more or less neglect them, and let them do their own thing or stew unplayed on a lot, I find myself often drawn back to these filler characters. With TS1, you simply didn't MAKE filler characters in the same way, because it wasn't really necessary: Their presence didn't really significantly impact the way your other sims responded, as opposed to TS2, where the presence of these characters can often have a dominating effect on the behaviors and aspirational wants of the others: For instance, the father I originally created as "drone to go make money" for a family, became a significant character in his own right, where as in TS1, he would have been slaving away forever at a gnome bench.
Okay, just a quick repsonse that I know noone will care about. If you find yourself in ANY of the above mentioned situations. - Save your Sims2 game - Quit Sims2 - Turn OFF PC - Go outside, find a real person to interact with and GO DO SOMETHING
I've more or less stopped with the stay-up-till-2AM-every-school-night playing habit, and play a bit more sparingly now. Nevertheless, I definitely care a lot more about my Sims here - in TS1, I simply did not find much excitement in playing my Sims, it was more the "bigger, better" objects you could buy as you earned money. That was it. Here, I couldn't care less about the "newest thing." It's a strange feeling. Anyway, the way I played the original quickly turned it off on me and it was relegated to the storage bin, uninstalled, and never touched again. I classified it as a letdown from Maxis (I had played and loved SC/SC2k/SC3k) and could never quite figure out how the hell it kept selling expansion after expansion. To this day, I'm still not sure I know. So, having recently jumped on the Sims bandwagon once more, it should mean a lot that I'm happily addicted to the game since the release and it shows no sign of letting off. Until Half-Life 2 and Halo 2 ship.
Well, that stands to reason: In TS1, all Sims were, essentially, fortune sims. The only way to really make them happy was to buy them stuff. Lots of stuff. Stuff they didn't need, stuff they never used, stuff that didn't always even match the floors and walls. And we know how annoying this can be in TS2, yes? Plus, there's that entire "generational" thing. In TS1, ultimately, everything you did was static. In TS2, well, I started out thinking like TS1, but once I had a solid grasp on the game, that quickly started to bore me again. So in the beginning, perhaps, you feel like you want your Sims to live forever....then you realize you already went through that in TS1, and it's gotten boring and old. So you let 'em go. The King is dead. Long live the King. Having your Sim die off is only the beginning, and you no longer have to murder them. It's like a sandwich. Some days you eat the sandwich, other days the sandwich eats you.
LOL! That's good advice. But, see, you must not have the sickness the rest of us have. Because the whole time that we are interacting with other people, we are thinking about our Sims.
I loved TS1, and was very addicted to it for months after we bought it, and would start a new "addiction" when a new EP would come out. I loved downloading new things and playing out scenerios with my Sims. I also got a ton of pleasure rasing sim babies into sim children, but since they didn't grow up I didn't care much more about them past keeping them out of military school. The only EP that I never really liked or got much use out of was Vacation. My poor sims never went on vacation. They stayed in "Simsville" and maybe went downtown shopping or to eat, but very rarely did they leave town. LOL Now, I wish I could take my Sims from TS2 somewhere exciting, like the beach. I could just see some of them in a tent! LOL
Good thread, Rose! Yeah, I have become quite deeply attached to my little tribe in Drakesfield. I have got the first few grandchildren running around and i just moved a sim "me" into the hood. The slut immediately snared a highly unsuitable beau and woohoo! I was soo engrossed in their little life I didn't realise that I had 2 babies on the go and erm ... one of 'em had been around for most of a week. Oops. I'd turned aging off and forgot. So that was my first experience of "twins" ... no problemo! Both toddlers walking & talking and 90% potty-trained by end of day one. Now I wonder if I got time to fit in a double birthday party before bed ....
Nah, I have it, I'm just responding with an eternal struggle to stave off the addiction. I can't count the number of times I've looked up at the clock and had to go oh s*** I gotta move it out now. LOL
Ooh yes, I know that feeling. That was what happened to me the first couple weeks following my purchase of TS2: I sit down at the computer at 9PM, aiming to put a bit of playtime in during the night. Just a couple hours, no fuss. Next time I look down at my watch... it's 1:30AM and I've got to wake up at 6:30 and go to school the next day (which, technically, is today). Cows.
