The other day, as the two of us were sitting in our small apartment that costs us approximately one million dollars a month, we had an epiphany.
Hang on.
Where the f**k is the diving board?
And the fountain? And the 46 windows evenly spaced around our mansion?
The hedges? The feature wall? The hot tub?
In our early teens, when all the cool kids were kissing boys (eww) and spending their parents' money at Supre, we were in front of our computer playing The Sims. And it was potentially the most fun we've had in our entire lives.
There was the catchy music, the exciting intro scene, and SO MANY POSSIBILITIES.
Watch: This is potentially the most nostalgic thing we've ever watched. (Post continues after video.)
In retrospect, yes, The Sims might have (definitely) been an overt indoctrination into capitalism. It was all about earning money and then making mansions so impossibly big your Sim would pee themselves before making it to the closest toilet.
But we feel fundamentally misled. The Sims implied that being an adult was all about the carpool and "woo hoo", and if you didn't like someone all you had to do was invite them over for a swim and delete the pool ladder so that they'd drown.
So here are six ways life isn't anything like The Sims.
We feel like maybe our access to 'rosebud' and 'motherlode' contributed to our fundamental misunderstanding of how money works.
You see, there were two types of Sims players: those who used cheats to gain an absurd amount of money, and those who built their house from scratch, making their wealth through sending their Sim to work (a.k.a. losers).
In real life, sure, you can steal money from the bank.
It just means that you will go to jail for a very, very, long time.
Maintaining a social life as a human adult is very different to maintaining a social life as a Sim.
It turns out you can't just invite strangers to your house and have nonsensical conversation. You have to... have things in common. And act normal. And try not to talk about your interest in The Sims.
Most surprisingly, jokes actually have to make sense, instead of being like: "ba harmy putar! Harch." *laughs*
In The Sims, all you have to do to improve your social skills is practice the same speech to a mirror over and over again. In real life, this is absolutely not a cool thing to do. No one is making friends by speaking jibberish alone in their bedroom.
Watch: People share the last text they received from their best friend. (Post continues after video.)
We expected entry-level jobs in whatever industry suited our interests, promotions in a number of days, and praise for simply not missing carpool.
You guys... there is no carpool.
Work is hard. And you can't fast forward the hours you're there. Oh, and apparently playing chess non-stop for hours at a time doesn't even qualify you to be a surgeon.
What. The. F**k.
Which is definitely a good thing.
If there was a fire when we had friends over, we would be so embarrassed...
Which is frankly bulls**t.
In The Sims, you met someone through dialing a random number on your home phone, dated them for approximately one week, and then you magically got married (symbolised by your Sims spinning around in confetti). Somewhere in this timeline, you would 'woo hoo.'
For those not well-versed in sim-speak, 'woo hoo' means sex. And in The Sims, it looked like so much fun. There were bodies flying everywhere, the bed was shaking, and then lo and behold: a baby was born.
THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS.
Relationships require serious time and effort, as does conceiving a child, and the process of birthing that child was NOT AT ALL represented in this goddamn computer game.
But sometimes, just sometimes, The Sims really got the whole 'human' thing right. And when they did, it was perfect.
Our mum keeps insisting we are two different people. For more from us....
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