I will be the first to admit that I have a gaming guilty pleasure and I would not be surprised if many others of you also share the same symptoms. I bet you there is some hardcore COD4 player who has unlocked all the perks and plays hours a day, but on the weekends, he or she is sending letters to a longtime panda friend about new furniture in a town they have been keeping up since Animal Crossing came out for Gamecube. A gaming guilty pleasure is some obsession you have with a particular game or series of games that others would find humorous or do not understand. Today, I will share my fixation with the Sims franchise and why I have a passion about it.

I am assuming that I am not alone in my guilty pleasure of loving the Sims, as it is the best selling PC game franchise of all time. The droves of casual and simulation lovers can not account for the staggering sales, so how is it that the Sims 2 expansion and stuff packs keep making it to the top of the NPDs? The franchise’s prestigious title is due to gamers like me, who collect and keep up with the various expansions that Maxis spits out every several months. I like to consider myself a non-discretionary gamer in that I play all types of games; simulation, RPG, side scrolling, shooter, FPS, RTS, sports. No gaming genre is safe from my hands and I love experiencing everything that the medium has to offer. It is no surprise that I own the Sims 2. However, many of my gaming friends just shake their head when they hear I have every single Sims 2 expansion.

I played the heck out of The Sims, but did not get any of the expansions because I was too young and did not have any money. However, when the Sims 2 came along, I decided that I would try and get every single expansion that came out. Little did I know how far that goal would take me. Unless you are fan, I doubt you keep up with the Sims 2 and its expansions. If you dislike the Sims, stop reading here. Don’t say I did not warn you.



The Sims 2 is a game about controlling the lives of “sims”, or the digital people that populate various neighborhoods in the game. You can control all of their actions from basic bodily functions like sleeping, eating, and waste management, to complex social behaviors like proposing marriage and advancing in careers. This sort of omniscient control is what leads people to call the Sims a “god” game. You also get to decide where Sims live and what they live with, building complex houses and filling the interior with designs of your choice.

Upon creation of a sim, one will choose its appearance, clothing, personality, and family relations. Then you send it off to one of several lots in the neighborhood where you then buy stuff (with in-game money, simoleans) to put in their pre-made house, or you can build a house from scratch. Once you have the essentials; a place to eat, sleep, and use the rest room, you start directing their lives. If you are feeling particularly devious, you can drop them on a lot without life's essentails just to see what happens. In fact, there are many people who set up elaborate torture situations just to watch sims die. I do not often delve into the darker side of things, and I like to see my sims thrive and live in style. What they do is up to you; do you make your sims become workoholics, slobs, swingers, clean freaks? If you choose, sims eventually get married and have children. Your original sims could die and possibly become ghosts, and you will continue the game with their children if there are any. You can follow the lives of any household in the neighborhood and engineer crazy outrageous stories.

One of my favorite experiences in the Sims 2 is the first time I got the game, I booted up the neighborhood set in the desert. There is a pre-made family here of three male room mates. One of them is obsessed with looking out into the stars. Since I wanted that sim to fill his desire of stargazing, every free chance he got, I sent him up to the telescope on the roof. After a few times, a UFO appeared and abducted the Sim which happened to be one of this Sim's aspirations. He eventually was returned, but with a remarkable difference; he was pregnant. I could only assume the aliens where the cause of this suprise, and I led the pregnant man through his terms. Eventually, he gave birth and my gameplay experience turned into three men and a little alien baby.

Though the above situation was with a premade Sim family, I did not have to direct him to stargaze and he may have never been abducted. Even more outrageous situations can happen to your custom sims. The base Sims 2 is so full of possibilities that the options added in the expansion packs make it absurd. Make your sims learn to teleport like a ninja, own a business selling computers, become a vampire, werewolf, zombie, become obsessed with grilled cheese (Sims 2 fans, you know what I am talking about). The endless possibilities are where my obsession stems from. Even if I do not get to experience all of the options that owning all the Sims expansions provides me. Its like an entire living community is waiting for me inside my computer where almost anything can happen. Feel free to divulge your gaming guilty pleasure in the comments; after all, it can not be as bad as owning all the Sims 2 expansions.