Twenty Plus Years of "Simming"

I spend a lot of time playing sims... I get to make different people, play out different scenarios and design different kinds of homes for them to live in. Sometimes my sim is rich, sometimes poor, sometimes they want huge families, and sometimes they live alone. Sometimes I make them very successful, and sometimes I let them fail and have tragedy just to see what happens then...

I was thinking about it and I have actually been "simming" most of my life! When I was a toddler my mother tells me that I would spend hours and hours playing with my little people. I remember my little people but can't remember what their story was and what I was imagining them doing for all those hours!

I moved on from the little people and began to actually cut all the people out of the Sears catalogue. I would organize them into families, find them a suitable house out of my pile of home designs, and the different scenarios in my mind would begin.

As I got older I got more interested in drawing up different home designs. I designed the perfect house one time and loved it so much that my mom bought me a huge piece of construction paper and I spent WEEKS transferring the small design to a large version on the construction paper.

I would then have the paper people live in the house and would move them from room to room on the construction paper. It was truly a manual version of the sims!

I decided that I wanted to be an architect when I grew up and that I wanted to design and build houses. I especially wanted to design my home from the construction paper and live there forever. I took my first and only architect drawing course in grade ten... and it was in that class that I first played a new computer game they had installed on the computer at the back of the class it was 1990 and the game was SimCity by Maxis.

I don't remember ever drawing up any more house plans after that class... but while my architect dreams dwindled away I see now that my simming days were just about to begin.