Premades and Precepts

The Sims has a broad appeal — it draws many different audiences. Pure players, builders and decorators, Sim makers, storytellers, machinima creators, modders and hackers… and then there are those who dabble in a bit of everything.

I’m mostly a player, sometimes a story teller. I’ve been playing since the Sims came out in the early 2000s, after I saw that 30-image preview story on the Maxis website. (Anybody remember it?) I tend to play original characters, usually with names plucked out of random novels.

I’m also an occasional creator, usually with houses and Sims based on real people. I like making stuff, but unfortunately I haven’t got an ounce of originality. Anything I make from scratch tends to suck, but give me a picture to refer to and I’ll make something out of it.

I’ve never played with the intent to write a story, but then I saw some of the great neighbourhoods that are out there on the Internet, all with a cast of characters and their own ‘fictional universe’ that makes them so interesting. This is the kind of thing I want to do for TS3 – basically, blog about a fictional town and the eclectic characters that inhabit it. Of course it’s easy and fun to write about it, but actually carrying it out is another matter. I have to get over my short attention span and lack of patience for things.