Now Playing: "Limestone Trail" by T1na Badgraph1csghost
I had to uninstall The Sims 2 from my computer recently. I accidentally left the Apartment Life EP disc in the drive when I shut the computer down a few months ago and, when I turned it back on the next day, the computer tried to boot from the DVD-ROM. Haven't figured that one out, but it made Windows 7 less than willing to read it anymore, so I uninstalled it. Fortunately, the virtual drive I'm using now seems to work a lot better.
Anyway, I've installed at least some of The Sims 2 on 4 different computers now; my new-millennium Windows Me computer, my Windows XP laptop, my Windows 7 studio computer, and a Windows 10 laptop that didn't work very well that I returned to the store several years ago. As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time playing it... more building with it, rather than actually playing, over the past 20 years. I've almost launched Homecrafter Plus and Body Shop more often than the game. Since, for a grand long while, my only computer was a Windows Me American Megatrends with an Intel Pentium III, The Sims 2 was a time-consuming program to load; plus, Maxis really nerfed the in-game sim builder so that people would carry on using Body Shop after the game was released. So, I spent more time making sims and clothing recolours in Body Shop than actually playing the game.
This is the oldest-surviving outfit recolour I have. Sure, there were probably older ones, but I was really into deleting unwanted files back then. Explorer tells me that the last time this outfit's PACKAGE file was edited was 17 July 2006 at 16:05. I know precisely where I was and what I was doing back then. I can tell you everything I was thinking, everything I was feeling, and everywhere I went at that time, just by looking at this outfit in Body Shop, here. I hadn't done very well in high school (secondary school), and I'd had to take a summer curriculum every year. Unlike regular school, it was a half-day thing, from 0800 to 1200; but this was the last one I'd have to take because, once it was done, I'd be allowed to graduate. I was spending a lot of time after school everyday with my friend, J, because he had nothing to do at home and I was sort of using him to substitute for the friends I would have preferred to spend time with. Don't get me wrong, I liked doing stuff with him, but I couldn't do the same things with him as C and A. I remember making this outfit in Photoshop 6 while J was sitting next to me, playing some YuGiOh game on the Game Boy Advance SP I'd sold to him for $20 when I got my Nintendo DS. He didn't play any instruments, while I could play the violin and the piano, and I had my Yamaha PSR-290 MIDI'd up to the computer so I could route MIDI files through it; I think that dazzled him a bit. Not that I was trying to be dazzling; to me, it was just a thing I could do, no different than throwing a football or riding a horse (I can't do either of those). Since I also had NoteWorthy Composer, I was able to see the notation as it played. He'd found some songs on VGMusic from some Final Fantasy game—I don't remember which—and he wanted to see if I could play any of them. I think he wanted me to play it on the piano (Yamaha PSR-290), but I couldn't read music for piano at the time, I got it figured on violin eventually though.
The next-oldest files in my SavedSims folder are more outfit recolours from 9 August and 7 September of the same year. By that time, I was already in (and failing miserably out of) community college. J still came over occasionally, even though he was still in high school, and I was making preparations to shift flats. I never saw C or A again; A accidentally chatted with an Army recruiter on the phone and inadvertently got enlisted that way, so he was off in Afghanistan (19 fucking years old, he's over in Afghanistan with an assault rifle—don't ever tell me America isn't a police state) and C was at the University of Nebraska in Kearney doing who knows what. I talked to both J and C over the phone briefly after I'd shifted flats, but that was the end of my old life. It wasn't great, sure; but my "new" life really isn't any better. I guess we can blame society as a handy scapegoat, but I was happy back then... or at least, I knew how to be happy. Since I've moved back here, I remember "happy", but I've never experienced it. That seems to be a commonality with millennials and gen-x'ers, really, doesn't it? I don't know a single millennial who isn't depressed somehow.
It's sort of like The Sims 2, in a way. Socialising and self-actualisation play a far more advanced role in that game than Classic, 3, or 4. It's easy to neglect your relationships and let them decay back to nothing, easy to lose your nerve doing something you don't want to do and have to spend the next week in self-care while the bills pile up and your boss isn't buying your "I'm sick" dodge anymore, easy to make a fool of yourself out in public by simply existing there. When it was new, we had great fun intentionally setting up sims for failure, because we were young and it was novel. Now, when we play The Sims 2, we realise that they come into the neighbourhood with their sanity already hanging by a thread, and we pour all of our time into making them happy, because someone should be happy. They don't live in a society that's constantly trying to kill them for being poor, they're not bound to the meaningless toil of the corporate feudal state, and that mansion on the hilltop is only a couple of cheats away.
All this because I accidentally sorted my SavedSims folder in ascending chronological order. I guess what I'm getting at is, The Sims 2 is a leftover from a time when I had a purpose. I knew what was expected of me, and even though I never met anyone's expectations, at least I had my day predetermined for me. Don't get me wrong: public school in America is broken. It was showing cracks even as far back as the '90s, and I can't imagine what's holding it together now. I felt more stress on a regular basis at school than I would ever feel again, but it's the routine of the thing. I used to dream of school letting out for summer holiday and then never going back into session, but I didn't realise just how much that would trip me up when it actually happened. If anyone aged 8-18 is reading this, here's my old-people advice:
Tell people how you feel, find something to hold onto, and appreciate where you are right now.
Because, when it's over, it's real over.
--10 April 2024--
"Limestone Trail"
from "Untitled Videogame Project G1", written and performed by Tina Rosenthal (LCI)
Copyright © 2023 LCI Music. License restrictions apply.