My favorite games to play with other people are not multiplayer games.
Multiplayer games turn me into a competitive Mr. Hyde. As much as I enjoy good competitiveness I do think multiplayer games tend to focus on putting us against each other. That can be fun, sometimes, but I personally realize it’s not usually the environment where I connect with other players.
But you know where I did find a community? In The Sims 2. Which is weird as it is a deeply single player experience as a game. A very time consuming one at that. For the uninitiated, there’s a huge community (or there used to be) around modding the game. Sites like modthesims.com used to be the place to gather around and marvel at people’s creations. There was a lot going on, from homes created in game to super complex mod tools that completely changed the game. It was vibrant too, I remember just logging in every day to see what was new and find new modders to follow.
I was not a cool kid in high school. Barely had any friends and didn’t get invited to any parties at all. For me The Sims 2 started as escapism: finding myself building the life I wanted to. But after that, The Sims 2 turned into something more special: A place to build. After a while I wasn’t as much into “playing the game” as I was into building things for the game. Be that building homes, making mods, recording stupid videos, The community was a big thing for me. I was following my favorite modders, learning from their skills, following the drama.
I don’t exactly remember how I stumbled upon sims2carsource.com but it was serendipitous. I loved cars. I loved The Sims. This was the right place.
And soon I was making friends, which turned into becoming a moderator on the forums, which turned into learning the craft to mod new cars into the game and publishing creations. I was actually finding my community.
That’s the magic of the internet and games all at once. The Sims 2 didn’t require online multiplayer to become a social experience. Just the fact that it was so open and encouraging to modders and the openness (and friendly anonymity) of the internet in the 2000s made it easy to find your own community of geeks into whatever you were into.
I am sure it keeps on happening today in other corners of the internet (Discord, Reddit) but I do feel we lost a little something not only when games started to go full into services and become less open to mods, but also when the internet itself became less open and siloed.
My teenage years weren’t easy and I don’t look fondly at them. But there’s something to be said about the role The Sims 2 had into me. I found the marvels of connecting to people all over the world, of different ages, different experiences and backgrounds yet open to talk daily to a guy sitting in front of an O.K. PC in Mexico about cars and daily stuff. We weren’t playing The Sims 2 at all anymore, but we couldn’t stop creating for The Sims 2. It was the thread that bound us.
(I so much wish I had made a backup of all those things.)