SimCity 3000, the predecessor to The Sims, played a pivotal part in my childhood, growing up in Hyderabad, India. Its recreation of the western, urban world helped me understand how cities were planned, designed and financed – and how they provided people with key services like transportation, health and education while preparing for accidents and other hazards.
As an eight-year-old trying to figure out my place in the world, that game offered me a way to make meaning of the chaos that can be life. So, when The Sims launched in 2000 – enabling me to live inside a virtual city, rather than simply build one – I had to get my hands on a copy.
Twenty-five years later, I write this piece in a drastically different gaming landscape, where games offer high visual fidelity and ever-increasing frame rates for ultra-smooth game play. But despite all these technological innovations and the pursuit of photo-realism, the popularity of The Sims’ game designer Will Wright’s satire on American consumer culture endures.
