Sims 3 Aesthetic
Sims 3 Aesthetic is a social media photography project derived from the Sims 3, it's expansions, and my unique interpretation of it.
The following description/essay was originally published on Facebook. This copy is accurate to January 28th, 2018.
This is a place where I’ll post things that are weird, surreal, strange, beautiful, aesthetic, pleasing, satisfying, or whatever else, that I see or find in the Sims 3.
Mostly this will consist of screenshots from my games, which take place of a multitude of worlds and characters of different types, both default worlds that shipped with the game and custom worlds of my own or other’s creation.
The main purpose of this is artistic and to share my experiences with others.
There are other purposes, which, for those interested, I will explain below.
- Left
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Remove
Nostalgia
From the moment I laid on the screen above, caught in sneak peeks on someone else’s computer when I was a kid, I was hooked.
Your own little world where everything was yours. You are the creator. Make it however you like.
Not only was the world yours, but so were the people inside it. You created their world. You could take care of them, coddle them and keep them safe. Or you could give them freedom.
Or, like most if not many, you could destroy them.
You were their god.
I didn’t get a chance to play it myself until I was older.
After games I discovered, for myself, art. Then writing. Storytelling. Roleplaying games. Then game development and so forth.
Now, as I learn game development independently and through creating games (I make the art, music, audio, as well as working on scripting/development), I have come back to The Sims, the game that first got me into computers in a big way.
Game Development
I am learning, through practice and study, game development and everything that pertains to it. My aim is to use this to become not only an experienced multimedia artist but also familiarize myself with many concepts in engineering and science, mainly computer.
Why Sims 3?
Sims 3 is one of the most ambitious games ever created. Not only did it do what previous games had, it aspired to be more than them, or perhaps any other game in history.
Not only would a simulation of any one lot at a time, but a simulation of an entire world which attempted to be seamless. It was going to be everything.
It was an adventure RPG, a dollhouse, a filmmaking tool, a multi-generational household simulator, a fantasy game, a science fiction game, a sitcom, a designing game with the most minute customizations. It would have everything.
The ultimate game. The ultimate electronic dream.
It was marred by performance problems and didn’t always live up to everything it attempted to be. Perhaps a game so ambitious was always doomed to fail.
The Sims 4 learned from these issues and focused it’s attention on the failures of previous games -- the failure to create compelling Sims being a main focus, one which I don’t personally feel was a failure, yet the Sims 4 put everything into making their Sims more real, both aesthetically and in terms of their programming.
The Sims in The Sims 3 never felt like a failure. I never wanted them to be like real people and I’ve always understood that they were different. They relied not on neurons but programming and, in a sense, learning.
Realism was never what brought me to this series.
Artificial Intelligence & Life
I am interested in artificial intelligence and life.
Sims are essentially artificial life created from the top down. Much like the countless ‘serious’ attempts that have been made, they were made to simulate life, but instead of trying to simulate the complexities of human brains, they were created to interact with their environments.
Their appearance and interactions with us are manifestations of code, and they are created to interact with their environment, another virtual manifestion. Much like how, when our neurons fire due to stimuli our nerves and muscles react producing movement, a Sim, upon receiving a certain stimuli (whether external or internal such as dreams or thoughts) will analyse that input. It will then calculate how it will influence their mood, actions, states, memories and variables, then react, producing, when appropriate actions or an animation, in the Sims 3 composited from facial and body animations.
I must state for the record that I am not an AI researcher and I understand the limitations of Sims and the complexity of the debate and research surrounding AI, however I challenge any AI project to produce content, human interaction and storytelling that can rival the so-called ‘virtual dollhouse’ of The Sims.
Please get in touch with me if you know of any such project.
Modding, Derivative Works etc.
If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders [sic] of Giants.
Isaac Newton, speaking about his Team Fortress 2 mod probably
The Sims 3 is highly moddable, with pure scripting possible in C#, many user-created tools, and an officially-released World Editor.
Mod friendliness is something that seems to be threatened in modern game development, which is something I am sad about. Modding your favourite game, The Sims, Minecraft, or TF2 or whatever, in ways that you can is a far more appealing thing to people learning to program than tools like Scratch.
These are, however, copyright materials, and, especially in the United States, copyright law grows steadily more powerful, mainly to the benefit of large corporations than the creators these laws ostensibly protect. Modding may soon suffer from the same persecution that affects copyright violators and pirates.
It seems ridiculous to me even before considering the unhappy state of projects like the many that attempted to capture the nostalgia and qualities present in early World of Warcraft by creating private servers dubbed ‘pirate’ because they are (in my opinion, falsely) accused of taking away profits from Blizzard, long before an official ‘retro’ WoW distribution was ever announced.
Much like how sampling in hip hop came under serious industry fire after so-called ‘white music’ became the target of sampling, the herald of the end of the glory days of modding as an art form may have come in the form of Counter Strike, a Half Life mod. Valve’s Half Life, itself a licensed mod of Quake, became the foundation for the games engine, studio, and behemoth that Valve is today.
The developers of Counter Strike saw none of that success. Their use of Valve’s code and the Goldsrc without licensing caused Counter Strike, one of Valve’s greatest cash cows to date, to go to Valve. One of the developers, Minh Le, is now working on Rust, a game which is, funnily enough, a clone of DayZ, DayZ being a very popular mod Arma 2 mod. Rust is developed by Facepunch Studios, which became relevant after the release of Garry’s Mod, a mod for Half Life 2 that was later published by Valve.
If that’s confusing, you should check out the history, forks and family tree of Unix derivatives, another form of derivative software which has, without exaggeration, become the basis for our modern world.
This is not to blame, however, Mojang, Blizzard, Valve, Bethesda or Electronic Arts or even ‘big bad’ Microsoft for the ludicrous protections afforded to their games/products and demanded by profit-hungry shareholders. Several of those companies release heavily modder-friendly games. These are companies which have dreamers and creators in all departments, and, though certain people may act as though they’ve forgotten, at their core.
Developers, we must not forget, were mostly all once dreamers and the roots of the revolution centered in Silicon Valley are connected with a dream of a better world, and of infinite possibilities.
The bottom line and profit sometimes seem to be winning over creators and dreamers, perhaps more than ever before. Unchallenged capitalism and the increasing struggle to succeed in the world without compromising your values for profit have taken over like a disease.
Independent studios, however, are cropping up all the time and benefit from collaborative start-up incubators which are themselves often derivative works of hackerspaces. Enabled by
It is my opinion that content, especially great content, is always derivative, often to a great extent. If you’re going to build a house, it’s often better to use established tools and blueprints. If in the process of building you stumble on a better way of building the house, a better material, a better technique, it’s your choice whether to share it with the world (where it will be improved upon, critiqued, and unfortunately possibly exploited) or to keep it for yourself, where the knowledge will stagnate and die.
Creators of derivative content are being forced to sit through other creators of derivative content explain why your content isn’t acceptable on Youtube. (Quinton 2016)
I don’t believe that this is right. Youtube was founded on a basis of derivative works. Our society was founded on them. Linux was founded on them, as was Android, MacOS, iOS, and the video game industry.
This page will attempt to present to the public derivative works that are nonetheless the collaborative result of the game’s developers, the modding community, and my own contributions, including photographic framing of screenshots.
The Sims 3 is fairly mod friendly and, for the purposes of Sims 3 Aesthetic, which relies largely on visuals that ship with the game, it will do.
Conclusion: Tl;DR and What Will Be Posted Here
Here on Sims 3 Aesthetic I’ll take screenshots of everything I see that I think is beautiful or meaningful.
That’s more or less it and I’m happy to share them and my experiences in Sims 3 with the world.
Works Cited
Quinton. “Quinton Reviews 'Copyright School'.” YouTube, YouTube, 25 Nov. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmsuRFWV0Gc.
“Usage share of operating systems.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 22 Jan. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems.
“Developing country.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 Jan. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country.
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