#SIMS 2 ONLINE COM MANUAL#

Specific forums were giving way to broader sites like LiveJournal and WordPress. The Sims 2 was not the first game in the Sims franchise to cultivate this specific type of storytelling, nor would it be the last, but it came at a very pivotal point of internet culture.

That all of this happened outside of the game and on the internet was crucial. Pretty soon, softer interpretations of her expanded across the Sims storytelling community. There’s no set story mode in The Sims games, which allows any interpretation to be considered “canon.” Of course, this can lead to a lot of tropes - the bad girl Lilith Pleasant secretly being misunderstood, while her preppy twin was a raging bitch Bella Goth’s daughter Cassandra being hopelessly oblivious of her fiancé’s cheating the femme fatale Caliente twins becoming evil masterminds - but as the community evolved, so did these cliches, which became more subversive.įor instance, Dina Caliente, often villainized as a gold-digger who was behind Bella’s disappearance, found a new life as a bubbly, opportunistic, would-be Cinderella in one story. For one, they’re told both with written words and screenshots. These original Sims stories are like fan fiction, but with some key differences. The preview picture for Dina Caliente’s family implies gold-digging ambitions. We could follow the game’s clues carefully, use them as loose inspiration, or just throw them to the wind and come up with our own takes. If that didn’t work, we’d all just share our own versions of how it happened. In The Sims 2, cross-neighborhood gameplay was impossible without the use of mods, but players quickly made it a mission to reunite the Goths in-game. Perhaps most strange is that she shows up wandering another neighborhood as an NPC. Yet Bella actually isn’t completely gone from the Sims universe.

But there’s nothing that explains specifically what happened or what will happen to Bella. There’s hints about it sprinkled throughout the memories of the pre-made families and the included photo albums among them are her family’s memories of alien abduction (this does happen to Sims in the game, but they always return) and town casanova Don Lothario’s memory of being rejected by her. In The Sims 2, one of the big overarching stories in Pleasantview (the updated name of the original Sims neighborhood) is Bella Goth’s disappearance.

There’s also an included picture of Bella hanging out with Don and using his telescope. Maxis gave brief backstories for the previous game’s pre-made families and hinted at even deeper things in the pictures included in each neighborhood’s storytelling album.īut the most brilliant thing the developer did was not making every character’s secrets explicit. The Sims 2 expanded upon the world of the original Sims, skipping forward in time 25 years and adding two more neighborhoods. While some players used their own Sims for their own original stories, lots of others were built upon the game’s preexisting canon. Players were encouraged to create their own stories to post on the official (now defunct) Sims 2 website.

#SIMS 2 ONLINE COM MANUAL#

The Sims series has always been an entirely flexible experience: Do you want to ruin your Sims’ lives or help them flourish? Do you want to raise a successful family or build lavish mansions? Depending on the type of player you are, the Sims games can be used for many different things.įor me, The Sims games - specifically The Sims 2 - are a fantastic way to tell stories.Ī big part of The Sims 2, highlighted in the gameplay manual and the tutorials, was its storytelling capabilities.

Sims 2 online com