The Sims gets a climate-friendly makeover in Eco Lifestyle
Love The Sims, but wish it were more in line with your green sensibilities? The famous life-simulation game has had an eco makeover in its new expansion pack T he Sims is often held up as a shiny, romanticised example of the capitalist ideal: work hard, earn money, acquire stuff, and happiness will follow. The game is stranger and funnier than that in reality browse Sims YouTube for half an hour and youll quickly see that the stories players tell within this world are far weirder and more diverse than get money, get happy, often involving ghosts, thwarted dreams and scandalous pregnancies but its still very much Conspicuous Consumption: The Game. Last week, however, The Sims went explicitly eco-conscious with a new expansion pack, Eco Lifestyle, which lets you design Sims and neighbourhoods around sustainability and climate-conscious choices. Or sack all of that off and live in a filthy, smoggy nightmare town covered in trash. The Sims has never judged you. Eco Lifestyle adds features that The Sims enormous Gen Z audience had long been asking for, such as septum piercings and boho fashions that would look great down the allotment and loads that surely nobody was asking for, including candle-making and the attractive prospect of having sex in dumpsters, thus fulfilling every older pearl-clutchers worst imaginings about the filthy eco-conscious young. How your Sims live affects how their neighbourhood develops, and they can vote on and participate in community initiatives that will eventually turn a run-down port town into a renewable energy-powered green oasis. Every neighbourhood has its own eco footprint that most interactions feed into, explains George Pigula, the games producer at developer Maxis. Your neighbourhood could be on the industrial end with a bit more smog and pollution: this gives bonuses to power generation, fuel burning slower, and maybe a few more trash piles. Or you can go green and have your solar panels produce more power, your plants grow better ingredients, and you get to marvel at auroras overhead. Power and water utilities now have to be managed. You can continue to buy your power and water off of the grid, or you can generate it yourself. You will have to choose green options or fuel-burning options, and then live with the consequences of each. Pleasingly, these systems make Eco Lifestyle more than a superficial eco aesthetic featuring dungarees, kombucha and plenty of indoor plants. It doesnt overtly push the player towards any particular path of action, but it does lay out the relationship between how we live and how the environment responds, and offers some satisfying fantastical ways to live well such as fabricator machines that can make rugs and furniture out of trash, or reclaiming old railway lines to make sky gardens. It can even free Sims from the need for money altogether, if you choose to go full freegan and found a neighbourhood where everyone shares, or pull discarded furniture out of the trash and fix it up. (In a cute touch, discarded furniture resembles old designs the very first Sims game.) I wouldnt describe The Sims: Eco Lifestyle as overtly educational. It is a playful stage-setting themed around sustainable living, not a game with a message about what were doing to the planet. Real-world climate change is an issue that the best minds are constantly working on. I dont think we will solve that here, agrees Pigula. But we are allowing the player to play around with the concept of changing everyday habits that all feed into a larger system. In the real world, the climate crisis is of course about more than just individual action: it is about corporate and government engagement to change the way the world works. The video games industry is itself a significant contributor to global emissions. PCs and consoles are made of plastics and rare minerals that must be mined somewhere, not to mention the immense energy used by both players and development studios. A UN-backed initiative called Playing for the Planet has encouraged some (but not all) of the industrys biggest companies to sign up and work towards the idea of carbon-neutral game development and educating players about global heating. Electronic Arts, the company that owns The Sims developer Maxis, was not among them. The Sims: Eco Lifestyle does not reflect this bigger picture, focusing instead on the potential of individual action and choices. But it was, according to Pigula, inspired not just by players demands but by the changes that the people making the game have found themselves making to their lives. Ive upped my recycling game, insulated my house, and switched to a wooden comb. Solar options, water reduction, reusable bags, meatless Mondays and electric vehicles are hugely popular among the team members, he says. A lot of the Sims is about taking a lens to everyday life and embellishing it towards joy. I will say, I dont think bills and recycling are fun in real life but we have made them fun in Eco Lifestyle.