It’s Time to Get Parasocial, or … Paralives?

The Sims has been a franchise that’s been with me since the mid to late 90s. A thing that started, for me, with one of the very first SimCity games, on a school PC in a computer lab. This was before The Sims was even a glimmer in anyone’s eyes, and if you would have said, “I wish I had a life sim to play,” people would have had no idea what you were talking about. It didn’t exist. Other memories I have involve watching a friend play SimCopter with a joystick on his much better PC that I was really jealous about, and then, finally, one day while I was living in a for real, actual haunted house: The Sims came to my hand-me-down PC. I still remember the first time I played the game. I didn’t make my own sims. I joined the Goth household and renovated everything so that the entire thing was a death trap, and then I’d just spend hours building more houses around the neighborhood. Later, I, of course, played The Sims Online, which I spent a lot of time in just … chatting with people. As if…