i'd rather dress my Sim in Fendi boots & bloody socks than deal with late-stage capitalism

thanks to custom content mods, the line between me and my Sim grows thinner and thinner.

and

May 22, 2024

welcome to strong feelings! Essays by writers we love, in which they share their most impassioned opinions on a given subject. In today’s strong feelings, writer Faye Odesser explores the contentious world of custom content modifications on the Sims 4, making her wildest dreams an in-game reality.

My favorite Sim has the maximum number of outfits the game allows — 35. She rotates between a glorious selection of bootleg downloads: digital Blumarine cardigans, Fendi boots, Agent Provocateur lingerie, and Mirror Palais dresses. She lives in my obsessively curated world. Everything is accounted for. When she goes to the beach she wears pants that are rolled up to the knees. Since she’s a world-class criminal, she sometimes has bloody socks. After dates, her lipstick is smudged, and her apartment is filled with detritus: thongs on the floor, pinned-up Fiona Apple posters, half-burnt candles, and Lolita Lempicka perfume. The more I source, the richer her fictional life becomes, and the deeper I fall into the Sims world.

I’ve been a Sims fan for over a decade, but if I played the game as is, I’d probably have gotten bored within a couple weeks. Typically, most super-fans of a game are won over by enduring playability, superior graphics, or a compelling storyline. The Sims 4 offers none of these – unlike previous iterations in the franchise, it offers superbly limited gameplay at bloated prices. While the Sims 4 base pack is free, it’s practically unplayable without the $9.99 - $39.99 packs, which expand the game with new worlds and interactions. The massive cult following of Sims 4 can almost entirely be attributed to its capacity for exploring your own imagination. The game bestows an entirely blank canvas upon its players, but a new league of incredibly talented and devoted digital artists have created a library of custom content mods that make the game addicting.

For the unacquainted, custom content modifications are files developed by individual creators, rather than the official Sims team. These mods are hosted on click-to-download websites like Patreon, TheSimsResource, SimsFileShare, or SimsFinds, some of which are incredibly divisive in the Sims 4 community (but more on that later). The majority of creators operate, distribute, promote, and connect primarily through Tumblr, or, as the community refers to it, “Simblr". The process of painstakingly downloading mods en masse has been appropriately dubbed ‘CC shopping’, and really, for the devotees, digging through Pinterest boards and hashtags is more fun than the gameplay itself.

Currently, with my own mods folder bulging at a cool 45 GB, I’ve been able to curate my own personal heaven. The game isn’t necessarily built for fashion — many who play it will load one singular outfit onto their Sim and start exploring the world — but I prefer to spend most of my time in the virtual dressing room. It’s a strange version of escapism for me, because while the game remains a fictional reality, my characters are forever low-pixel approximations of me. We have the same body type, hair, and facial features. When I go get a real-life haircut, I bashfully pull up a screenshot of my Sims.

"Harlot hair" custom content by Clumsy Alienn on Tumblr.

Designing a digital life so richly filled with my real life obsessions is freeing. In real life, I often find myself joking that if the world was truly a fair place, I’d be able to always afford whatever rare items I’m obsessing over. Until that becomes a reality, you better believe I’m downloading the digital copies. In a humorous twist, CC shopping has become an answer to overconsumption in the most imaginative way. As my folder bulges with more and more files, I don’t have to worry about overworked factory workers or environmental repercussions or budgeting or trend cycles. All I need to think about is making dressing up more fun. As I log more and more hours of gameplay, I maintain my ridiculously specific fantasy life while alleviating the harsh, modern-day-late-stage-capitalist realities that stand between me and my dreams.

I’m not alone in my infatuation. The Simblr cult is forever growing. Scrolling through my Instagram, I see friends and mutuals photoshopping the famous plumbob above their outfit photos, or revealing the thinning divide between their virtual and IRL closets. It’s easy to locate the cause of the attraction.

Culturally, we’re in a rut when it comes to self-expression. Creativity never dies, but brick-and-mortar stores certainly do. It’s hard to find unique clothes in this day and age, and even when you can get your hands on something, most of my friends don’t have money to shop anymore. What we’d previously spend on clothes is now relegated to rent money and basic living expenses. But, as we all move deeper into the online landscape, The Sims 4 offers a form of creativity that is infinitely customizable, largely inexpensive, and completely free from public scrutiny.

For those who make CC, there is equal reward, and an even more heightened degree of customization. I spoke to two designers – Jordan, a Miami based creator who goes by Sims4 bradshaw, and Ana Clara Statzner, the Brazilian based creator behind Serenity-cc. Jordan and Statzner have each logged over a decade of gameplay, and began modding out of a desire to expand the game more intimately. Each spoke of an incredibly thorough process of designing – researching vintage pieces and runways, while also using their own imagination. “Everything I create is something I would love to wear in real life too,” Statzner notes. “In the past I even designed collections from scratch. It’s fun to be able to have my own clothing store where people could shop… I don't consider myself a stylish person, but my Sims definitely are!”

Jordan had a similar sentiment: “It basically comes down to me just not being able to find something that I’m searching for. The Sims 4 is a great game but the options for clothing are limited. I only make things I like, or [would] like if they existed. It feels like playing dolls... the game offers what can't be replicated IRL.”

serenity_cc

A post shared by @serenity_cc

What truly astounds me about the world of The Sims 4, however, is just how thin the veneer between imagination and reality truly is. The simulation is glitching: What plagues society now creeps into the Simblr-verse. Simmers make Black Lives Matter and Free Palestine posters to stage digital protests and, since 2019, there’s been an influx of modded N95 masks.

Conversely, Sims screenshots are subject to real-life censorship. In 2022, Ashleigh Nicole Tribble, a Sex Coach and Creative Director who’d been playing The Sims for 22 years began sharing Sims content to her 101K followers. This included intricate gameplay posts, character designs, and softcore screenshots from the massively popular NSFW mod ‘Wicked Whims’. The ‘Spicy Sims’ content garnered so much positive engagement Ashleigh created an OF channel for her main character, but disaster struck after she posted a screenshot of two nude, plus-size, Black female Sims cuddling in bed.

Her main account, which she described as “fundamental to her development as a young adult” and a “priceless archive” was permanently deleted. “It felt like a nightmare,” she recounted, “I kept telling them that the characters weren’t real as they were flagging the post and account for ‘sexual solicitation’.”

Images courtesy of Ashleigh Nicole Tribble.

Looking back on losing her account, Ashleigh reflected: “My relationship with the game has changed dramatically. Dolls have always been a way for me to not only play, but a way to socialize, explore, manifest, and express myself.”

While those who play the game experience censorship on other platforms, in an even more meta twist, the creators behind the mods are feuding over paywalls and monetization. In 2022, Electronic Arts, the company behind The Sims 4, updated their terms and conditions to essentially block modders from charging for their content. It was a heavily celebrated rule by the majority of the community, including myself, as a growing number of Sims creators had been extensively paywalling their content, sometimes charging the cost of an official game pack for a small range of items. To fight back, Robin Hood-esque digital pirates systematically downloaded the expensive content and distributed it en-masse. A righteous distribution system was established until the (understandably furious) initial creators caught on. Fierce debates were sparked. Artists, surely, had to be compensated for their time and effort. But how much was it fair to charge? Many of the paywalled artists rarely interacted with the rest of the Simblr community. Was it their right to make a living, even as relative outsiders, in a notoriously free-of-charge subculture? Was it fair for anonymous blogs to essentially steal original content to re-distribute? To this day, a massive percentage of digital creators defy EA’s new rule, and a huge culture of pirating continues to grow in response.

While it’s not the chicest reference, when I think about simulated reality, I remember the scene in the Office where Dwight downloads a game to recreate his life, blow-by-blow. The already massive canon of media exploring the limits and opportunities of digital avatars is steadily expanding. What role can a game like Sims 4 play? In the daytime hours, I like to consider it sociologically. But truly, at the end of the day, my laptop fan whirring desperately while I’m in my fictional reality, my brain is mercifully happy — totally at rest.