A Guide to Becoming God ​
by Lucia Restrepo Brally

Runestone, volume 12

A Guide to Becoming God ​
by Lucia Restrepo Brally

Runestone, volume 12

I.  The Sim and Creation

You begin in a false room, lined with a blue expanse and the absence of reality. A sunny window to nowhere houses an artificial plant, wordy pop-ups spring to advertise an add-on you can purchase amid the contemplative quiet. You can’t escape capitalism even as a god. The Deep, they say, is where god started. This Deep waits for you to fill it. Once you succumb to The Sims’ strange facsimile of an introduction, you can begin. 

Life starts with what your creation looks like, rather than who they are. Sims are essentially human — four limbs, two eyes, and as many ears, all the necessary parts. Despite the appearance of human biology, Sims are simulations, an imitation of our bodies and minds. You never start with a baby, the game won’t even let you. A baby is no good without an adult, even god knew this when he created Adam. Start with someone who can actually live life. You shape and mold this Sim, stretching their skin to preferred arcs, sloping their musculature, dragging their features lower or higher, wider or narrower. An array of sliding scales and cursor clicks will lead to your final form. Make them modelesque, alien-like with blue skin, or ugly, normal, generic, whatever feels right. They don’t have to be beautiful, they just have to exist.

I scrolled to the bottom of my Sim family gallery, down to “My Saved Game 01”. The first girl I ever made was Blaire Langston. She was Neat, Loyal, and Cheerful. Blaire liked playing the pipe organ and riding horses. She cooked a lot, fixed the sinks around the house, or knitted. She disliked rocket science, I guess as a principle; she couldn’t snowboard or fish. I made Blaire tan, with stylishly layered brown hair and big, windowpane-grey eyes. She wore milky, diamond stud earrings with every outfit, and a little silver heart locket. I imagined she kept a picture inside, like the one I had of my Aunt Claudia. Blaire wore a lot of pastel blues and pinks, long skirts, short dresses, and Daisy Dukes. I’ll admit, my Blaire looks a lot like a CW star; she would’ve killed on 90210. She was pretty, flawless, lithe. What I wouldn’t give to be lithe.

Sims are never naked. You can click the semi-translucent Xs over the clothing thumbnails to your heart’s content, but their pastel-colored underthings will remain sewn to their figure. The Sims is sexless, unerotic, another point in its favor. Sex makes things complicated and I don’t even want to examine the voyeuristic nature of ordinary Sims gameplay. Even with the generously pixelated blurring of any bare skin, watching them step into a shower feels like an intrusion. In The Sims, there’s no making out. Kisses are special and infrequent, a big cartoony production. Sex has been replaced with “WooHoo”, as in “Adam wants to WooHoo with Eve.” This act most often takes place under a thick comforter, phantom limbs rhythmically ruffling the blanketed expanse from underneath, implying movement. When the couple is satisfied, clearly denoted by the hot pink hearts floating above them, they tuck themselves into bed, heads safely positioned on pillows. These lives are innocent and easy.

You pre-select set outfits for various occasions (everyday, formal, sleepwear, athletic, etc.) from the endless menus of their universally shared wardrobe — hats, piercings, jewelry, jackets, nail polish, socks, and so on. The articles of clothing are slightly outdated and unsettlingly generic, but the right person with an eye for mid-2010s fashion can make an ensemble weirdly work.

After deciding what they look like and what they wear, the final stage is your Sim’s core. “What do they want?” is the first question The Sims 4 asks you. What is your Sim’s reason for progressing, for living? Every creation has one of 14 single life-long aspirations: Animal, Athletic, Creativity, Deviance, Family, Food, Fortune, Knowledge, Location, Love, Nature, Popularity, and Wellness. I always pick love, hopeless romantics are the easiest to play with, and their wants are the simplest to attain. I play to make my Sims happy, and no one is happier than a Sim in love. This core is only the first major decision; flesh out their identity with likes and dislikes of colors, music, decor styles, and add on exactly three personality traits. There’s a perfectionist trait in The Sims, it was embarrassingly one of the first that stuck out to me. Perfectionist Sims will take longer to craft items, like crocheted hats and refurbished armchairs, but their products usually turn out more “quality.” However, if they happen to craft a low-quality item, their mood worsens.

The game has this baked-in balancing act; for every positive attribute you can give your Sim, there’s a negative effect to balance it out. Action and reaction, the scale evens to equilibrium. The term “hobby trait” means that this characteristic really only affects how the Sim spends their free time and the side ventures they want to go on. In the real world, being a perfectionist is to be insufferably flawed, to torture yourself over nothing. It means that I prefer never trying over doing something slightly wrong. Even the word is annoying, admitting “perfectionism” out loud comes off like I think I’m better than others, but I just end up hating everything I make, and therefore, myself. Maybe “pedant” is the better descriptor.

You can pick how your Sim walks — creeping vampire, bubbly cheerleader, stocky bodybuilder. Is their voice warm like a crackling fire, or something clear and musical? They’ll audition these vocal tones for you with a click of a button, reciting their Simlish language. Common phrases you’ll come to recognize through proximity to English and pure repetition, “sul-sul” (hello), “sass awrful” (that’s awful), “gahnoo” (sorry).

Do we speak the same language as our god? When we ask for forgiveness, can he understand it like I understand you? I imagine god lonely, what else could have urged him to create life? God told Adam and Eve to multiply, conquer the earth, hold sway over the fish and the birds, and the ground-bound animals. I tell my Sims to be nice, fall in love, and eat when they’re hungry.

After all this, give your experiment, your work of art, a name. Choose something from a dream, a book, one of those baby-naming websites, something spectacular like Chrysanthemum or Firework, something ordinary like Dave. Give them their name.

II.  The World

When a Sim is completed, they’re sucked out of the Deep and dropped into the neighborhood of your choice. Sometimes, this is decided in character creation, whether they’ll enjoy city bustle or beach leisure, but most Sims will be happy anywhere. They’ll adapt regardless of anything; Darwinism at work in your lap. Scroll through the pristine, cleanly sectioned residential choices: the sunny island of Sulani or the skyscrapers of San Myshuno, suburban Willow Creek or quaint Henford-on-Bagley. Buying expansion packs means acquiring additional worlds, new subdivisions that pop right onto your menu. Most packs are superfluous, but I, unfortunately, crave trendy wall sconces and a comprehensive variety of parquet flooring for my gameplay. I recommend waiting for one of the frequent sales and bundling packs when possible to stay within budget.

The Sims has pre-made homes ready to move into, however, they come despicably furnished. These are soulless little edifices, an afterthought from the higher powers at Electronic Arts that molded this game for you. They are play sets rather than homes, somehow even more sinister than your average frat guy apartment. The wonderfully complicated part of the game lies in construction, in the careful picking of architectural inspiration, in the research of professionally penciled floor plans. How many bedrooms will your Sim need, how many kids will they have? Is there room for a play area in the basement, a library or office on the second floor, a swingset outside by the pool? Where will they eat — at the counter like an on-the-go family, then there are dozens of kitchen stools to choose from. Or maybe they’ll prefer to sit down, set the table, look into each other’s placid faces as they eat never-ending Garden Salad with you watching overhead. Pick out curtains to match the rug, an ottoman next to the coffee table, the perfect armchair to triangulate with the couch and fireplace.

I moved Blaire into the Potter’s Splay lot on the vaguely New Orleanian neighborhood of Willow Creek. I tore down its original beige bungalow and constructed a pale blue, two-story townhouse. She had a four-poster bed and a shiny white vanity for her array of perfumes and makeup applicators. I gave her a retro-chic kitchen, sparkling and lemon-yellow. She had a claw-foot tub with gauzy curtains, baby pink toile wallpaper in the hallway, a vintage coat rack by the door, and vases of still flowers in each room. It didn’t dawn on me until after I finished that a townhouse looks silly standing by itself. The allure of the game lies in its careful proximity to real life, it keeps a comfortable distance from reality. Close enough to be immersive, far enough to steer clear of the uncanny valley. Take a look into these artificial lives, but don’t get too close. Playing this game isn’t about escaping our world, it’s about controlling your version of it.

The Sims 4 is nothing without details. There are more nooks and crannies and shadowy corners in the construction phase than in creation. How often have you thought of a roof’s pitch or the color of its trim? How many times have you looked at the flower box in a window and noticed whether it was minimalist or kitschy? This is the part that takes hours, it’s excruciating work. You’ve made your “baby”, but this is making their home, their super-sized nursery. You guide how they’ll live, what they’ll do, how they’ll spend their time. The Sims is a game of choices, endless decisions. Make a mistake, delete it, try again. Eventually, you have to get it right.

This is a reverse of what god did, we create in the opposite direction. Make a person before their home, obviously. I’m surprised god stuck with his first draft. I often make a Sim, get half-finished with their house, and decide to start all over again. The budding idea of a Sim persona won’t slot into the design scheme I catalogued specifically for them. How can the pairing of two ideas be so wrong when I matched them in the pursuit of highly-cultivated lifestyle harmony? These are the times when it feels like my Sims go against me. The first thing Adam and Eve did was disobey god, after all his work. Did god want to wipe the slate clean, take the first draft, make something better, something perfect? It seems he never blamed himself. I doubt myself with every Sim life.

I remember wanting to start over with Blaire. I looked at her, in her flawlessly curated house, and suddenly the picture looked wrong somehow. I had drawn her too beautiful, or not interesting enough, she was too soft and pliable. Even a simulation of a person shouldn’t be a doormat. I couldn’t ruin my save drive with an unimpressive first Sim. But clicking the back arrow to start from scratch made something sharp twist inside me, the warning that returning to the home page would mean deleting Blaire forever. So I loved her how she was, Loyal and Cheerful and Neat.

III. The Living

When there are no lamps left to shift around or credenzas to adorn, it is time to live. Young Adult Sims are funneled either into a University or a Career. There are part-time options available like barista and babysitter if you made one of those creative types, but most jobs are four to five days a week, seven-ish hour shifts. Work is automatically scheduled into your Sim’s calendar after you’ve decided their path. A little reminder pops up at 8 a.m.: it’s Time for Work! One button click sends the Sim off, mindlessly spinning into a Looney Tunes dust cloud as they phase into their mandated uniform. Every job has a uniform. And then your Sim is just gone, somewhere off-screen, off-world, unseen. You aren’t given much information on their whereabouts or even well-being. You become the ghost that haunts their empty house, flickering the lights on and off with no one to notice. You can fast-forward through this part, mercifully. Sometimes, I take a look around to make sure the decorations are up to par and look for any errant dirty dishes my Sim may have forgotten. When your Sim returns, and they always return, they’ll be hungry or irritable, occasionally happy, but it doesn’t matter because at least you’re together again. Sims can visit various locations outside of work — most neighborhoods have a gym, library, and bar. Athletic Sims like to jog on the sidewalks that run along unused roads (Electronic Arts has refused to introduce cars to The Sims 4 despite their presence in earlier versions). There are around 39 possible hobbies for Sims to pursue in life, and I promise they’ll master maybe three.

This is the point where our paths might diverge, where you realize your holy mission differs greatly from mine. I like to construct Sim soulmates, a person that I’ve carefully balanced for their matching half. Someone sullen for someone sunny, a pragmatic planner for a dreamer, a devoted lover for the loyal. If this rings a little too manufactured for you, you can scour the bars for a pre-existing possibility. These “townies” are often generic but nice enough. After only a handful of failed attempts, you’ll find a Sim who loves your creation and wants to be loved by them.

I made Blaire an awfully rugged boyfriend, Edward Birch, like the tree. I’m not very imaginative with boy names. Edward had a thickly opaque beard, and he pushed his overgrown black hair back in a little swoop. He had eyes green like moss, and his nose had a symmetrical notch in it. I made his ears stick out to balance his artificially good looks. I think I was trying to make him look like Robert Pattinson at first but I am unskilled at recreating real faces, so I had to pivot. Edward wore brown leather boots and a variety of forest green sweaters. Naturally, he was Romantic, Ambitious, and Loved the Outdoors. Edward wasn’t going to be the main character anyway, he was more of an accessory. Blaire needed a boyfriend, so I made her one. They were saccharine together.

Frankly, this is where my interest expires, when my eyes grow watery from the blue light beam. Falling in love is fun, staying in love is difficult. The Sims is focused on progress. The game grades your dates, keeping track of how often you flirt, kiss, hug, chat, dance. Everything is a measure, a tally, a point. I strive for perfection, even in relationships, but reaching it becomes gradually more tedious, and even worse, boring. Every person I’ve ever dated was my best friend first and remained a friend after. I meet a boy and think he’s funny. We hang out, gradually pour our guts into each other, make him in the shape of me, or me in the shape of him. Then one of us falls in love and confesses, the other acquiesces, and we have a sweet, innocent, locket-sized relationship. In the end, no one’s heart is broken, and frankly, I often improved at least one aspect of my boyfriends’ lives. What can you call a relationship like that, other than perfect?

A wedding is the second most infuriating aspect you can experience in The Sims 4. The degradation of control begins, no one wants to do what you tell them. I wanted Blaire and Edward to get married in Magnolia Park, where they had their first date. The caterer, Debrah, was tasked with baking the all-important Wedding Cake. Ten guests have to eat a slice for a perfect event score, but Debrah never showed and Blaire started crying by the punch bowl. Edward, our groom, got trapped in some unlucky and unlikely bathroom stall bug, glitched into a continuous loop of using the toilet, emptying himself out over and over. He finally got out with only a minute left in the Wedding Event. I pointed him towards Blaire and sped through the vows, while half the guests refused to watch, more interested in eating the pale potato chips at the bar. Tucked away in the shady corner of Magnolia Park, next to the chess table they played their first game on, Blaire and Edward kissed. I watched as their digital mouths didn’t quite slot together. Their individual sequences of 1’s and 0’s will never fit quite right, hands sliding into each other, passing through, never feeling. And then the wedding was done.

IV.  The Beginning of the End

While weddings are the second most impossible task in The Sims, raising a child is worse. One would think babies are harder to control than their adult counterparts, but the opposite is true. You can tell a mother to feed their baby fifty times, exhausting your trackpad’s strength capacity, but she’ll remain motionless, halfway in the kitchen, halfway out, wailing baby on the floor just inches away. This innocent bundle of code stuck in a miserable animation loop, a face that will never actually wet with tears, a stomach that will never be full. Adult Sims hate changing diapers, picking their kids up, putting them down, they’re the worst at feeding them. The only thing they like to do is play. This is delightful, adorable even, but someone has to keep this baby alive.

Blaire and Edward had a child named Indigo Birch, which is a ridiculous name. But I always wanted to name my future daughter Indigo, and I think it would sound better with Bralley after it. Sim Indigo had her father’s dark hair and her mother’s saucer eyes, and I bestowed upon her the Sunny trait. Blaire was not a good mother, something that I don’t entirely fault her for. It’s like the Electronic Arts employees who programmed babies and the ones who coded parenting tasks worked in separate offices, separate realities.

Sim babies eventually grow up as you play, and you’ll slowly gain more control over them as they enter an awkward, in-between phase. They start to resemble Renesmee from Twilight, not cute, just raw and big-eyed. Toddlers have more action choices, and they can get their own sustenance without an adult’s help, but the glimmering sheen of newness is gone. I realize my Sims are unfeeling little shadows, unable to truly care, so I Save and Quit the game.

Indigo Birch will never grow up. I’ll keep her encased in the digital resin of my Macintosh Startup Disk, innocent toddler face forever frozen into a smile. I can’t bring myself to delete her or let her live. As long as she stays like this, she’ll be perfect. She’ll have done no wrong, like her parents. I guess this feels like freeing her from the torture of Sim parenting, and I like the idea of purgatory more than damnation. This is another benefit of The Sims, you can keep the world paused, limit your reality to this one moment in time. The world takes things from you, the natural end-point of nearly everything is entropy and decay. The Sims can last forever. My aunt Claudia (pronounced CLOUD-ya, not KLAW-dee-uh, as she would often correct me) suffered from colorectal cancer throughout much of my adolescent life. It came back three times and the last round finally got her. We had this one warm night in August, in between chemo sessions and overnight hospital stays, where we sat on the corduroy couch in my dad’s apartment and watched TLC reruns. I held her frail papery hand, and outlined the veins underneath her pale skin as she made fun of the couples on 90 Day Fiancé. The plasma screen’s glow upon her face, the tension in my stomach from trying to suppress giggles, I was sure that no one in the world would ever feel like her. I wanted to stay paused in that dark room forever, with her eternally alive, her nails still painted burgundy, and my life pleasantly stagnant.

She would get sicker a couple of months later, and a priest would gather our family in my childhood bedroom, which had been converted into her temporary hospice suite, to read over her. Claudia was devoutly catholic, but I can’t remember if she was even awake as he read verses in Spanish to us. All I could do was beg a god I didn’t believe in to be real, to let heaven become her home, to let this all be worth it. I’ve never let a Sim die in my games. I’ve prevented the common disasters of combustible ovens and lightning strikes, never let a Sim get too tired or hungry. Suffering has never been familiar to my creations.

What kept me going back to the game was my pursuit of perfection. In an ideal setting, it is possible to perfect a Sim, something unreplicated in natural life. You can scroll through their Rolodex of friends and lovers and acquaintances, and see nothing but even rows of filled fulfillment bars, green and pink tubes to prove they’re loved beyond a doubt. You can push your Sim through the ranks of whatever career you choose, please their bosses until you reach the top of the hierarchy. Your Sim will eventually amass enough wealth to not worry about the weekly bills, send the kids off to college debt-free, and afford frequent outings to a local restaurant.

This is nirvana: knowing you, a god, are good. Better than good — perfect. That you’ve made everyone love your creation. It’s theoretically possible, not easy, but nothing’s worth it when it’s easy. This is my light at the end of the tunnel. If I can puppeteer this digital project through a faultless life, I can do it here, too. If I can’t do it in this world, maybe it was never meant to be, and maybe I was made for The Sims.

V. A Note on the Sanctity of The Sims

I semi-willingly acknowledge that not everyone thinks like me, so not everyone plays like me. The Sims is fairly open-ended and non-linear. Players can choose any particular achievement to work towards or even utilize outside resources to keep the game fresh. Mods, short for modifications, have been developed by the player community for over a decade, since the advent of The Sims 1. Some mods are so popular that they are referred to as if part of the game canon, like Wicked Whims. The WW mod adds explicit nudity and viewable sexual positions, overwriting the pixelated showers and innocent WooHooing to give you a pornographic look at your Sims’ interrelations. This mod is sacrilegious, godless, antithetical to the game’s vision, as are most mods. How can you meticulously craft your Sim, usher them through life, and feel the urge to watch them engage in prolonged, complicated Kama Sutra poses, dictating where exactly their fake bodily fluids will be expelled? It’s perverse, only slightly less so than the proto-torture other players engage in. I saw a how-to video years ago from some anonymous Simmer, he showed me how to drown a Sim. He sent his creation off to swim in their backyard pool before he deleted the side ladder. He fast-forwarded as the Sim swam in dizzying circles, her Need bars slowly depleting. Eventually, the Sim exhausted herself, and she drowned. The Grim Reaper arrived, quickly severing the glimmering Sim soul from her still body before apparating away.

Clearly, killing a Sim is different from killing a person, the way most people see it. But even if you aren’t unhealthily attached to the miniature avatars you create, killing them is unnecessary. The people who kill their Sims, either by starvation or drowning or locking them in a room to pee themselves to death, could have let them live forever on a forgotten save file. The only thing I can compare it to is a sea monkey farm. Imagine you bought a palm-sized tank and sea monkey eggs, and you filled it with tap water from the kitchen sink. You named them, watched as they grew, imagined what they were saying to each other, and then you poured your sea monkeys down the drain when they relied on you and nothing else.

VI. Save and Quit

When I first started, before I could even build a two-story house with working stairs, I imagined what it would be like living as a Sim. How the unnatural horror of never being in control would settle in, being forced into outfits I never picked, a job I couldn’t ask for, a wall color that I didn’t know I was supposed to like until someone (something) told me.

I thought of what it would feel like, entering the world as an adult, no amniotic fluid to preserve me from the cruel atmosphere, just airbrushed skin and strands of permanently styled hair I couldn’t even touch. When you create a Sim, you’re starting a new ancestral line. I wouldn’t have any parents or any family at all. I would be the first, rootless, armed with only the vaguest notion of who I was because of a laundry list implanted somewhere unreachable in my internal code.

Ok, I like pink and green, I hate red. Ok, I like singing and knitting, but I hate gardening. I like blues music and not classical. I prefer French Country Decor to Boho, because that’s just who I am.

I would start with no friends, suffering through the first day of Kindergarten, but as a fully-formed adult. On the inaugural move-in day of whatever house I was dropped into, my neighbors would parade over for a little housewarming party, always armed with a fruitcake suctioned to a tiny contact lens of a plate. No one will ever eat it. I’ll let it sit on the counter for a few days before the toxic stink lines waft into the ceiling before I finally drag it into the trash can. A trash can that I had never purchased, because Sims don’t get to have stores. I was washing my hands in the kitchen when the receptacle just popped into the corner. Nothing there one minute, suddenly there the next, replaced again with a sleeker model, stainless steel this time instead of black plastic. Sometimes I’ll go to work, and come back to find my bedroom entirely different. And I won’t feel anything. I don’t register shock to this change in my environment, no fear that someone has messed around in my things while I was gone. It’s just a fact of this Sim life, I’m always being watched.

I’ve logged over 800 hours in The Sims 4, which converts into at least 33 whole days spent sucked into their world. If you could see my activity over the last years plotted out on a graph, there would be impressive spikes over the summer and winter breaks, when I have nothing but time and exhausting proximity to my real family. I’ve started over 80 households, molded different sets of couples and babies and roommates and siblings. I’ve built Victorian houses and industrial apartment buildings, landscaped lakes and renovated coffee shops, all from the quilted tent of my bed.

Blaire was a Journalist, exactly what I had wanted to be ever since middle school. I dutifully sent her off on shifts, never taking a sick day. I coaxed her into completing all the daily tasks, editing articles, and interviewing other Sims. Okay, I fell in love with her. Not how you love a girlfriend or a pet or a baby, it’s unlike anything in our world. I loved her as a Sim, my Sim. My Blaire, who was Loyal and Cheerful and Neat, with grey eyes and light freckles, in her pink bedroom with her boring boyfriend. I could do nothing else but love her.

Despite my lengthy experience in the role of creator, I have acquired no additional faith in any god. I think my spotless record of zero deaths might put me just a hair above the other all-powerful beings noted in scripture. However, the unwavering love I have for Blaire gives me some hope that, if such a god exists, maybe they have the same love for me. There is an entity that sleeps in the clouds, and they don’t care that I’m an annoying perfectionist who watches bad TV shows and sleeps in late and doesn’t recycle. Someone already thinks I’m perfect.