That sounds like you play rotationally in the sims 3? In sims 3 I just play one household, that's it. Legacy style. I do play rotationally in Sims 2 but not 3. Not that one can't it'd just be more difficult. I enjoy playing 2 and 3 differently.

There are some hacks to make the aging last longer, in S2, just in case anyone forgets.

And if one has a fully filled out neighborhood, one day does feel like one year when you're playing rotationally!

My sims 2 ageing is 48 hour pregnancy
Baby 2 days
toddlers 8
Children 14
teens 10
Young Adult 10
Adult 74
Elders - unknown.

The longest sims 2 ageing mod is by Almightyhat and it is very long. All i can recall is that toddlers were 12 days when i tried it and of course all ages were lengthened accordingly. You can set an age mod to however long you want.

In fact, Inge has a modifiable age hack that one can set to any length of life one wants.

Group Age Tweak

and the previously mentioned:

It's the Proportion (Gestation-Based Age Duration Mod by Almighty Hat)

To me, sims have a human-like essence but they and their world also run on their own logic. I don't care for trying to make my game more "realistic". I also don't like when the game makes references to real-life countries and places because I prefer viewing it as a world of its own.

To some degree I can draw a parallell between sims and story-characters, and I get attached to my sims in a similar way though for the most part the dynamics are completely different. For one, I don't plan out stories in The Sims, it's more about just experiencing their lives along with them and see what narratives unfold from there. I do open up for bad stuff to happen, but I don't purposely create those kind of events and my aim is to make my sims happy on their terms. They're less realized as characters than the characters I write, my imagination does fill in a lot of gaps and interpret things that make them deeper and more complex than what appears on the screen, but not to the extent that I've seen some people do with giving them full-on human thoughts/dialogue, thought-out motivations and such.

I keep some sort of running commentary in my head when I play, and I've noticed I sometimes refer to sims as "I", sometimes "he", "she", and sometimes I refer to them and myself as "we". But I haven't really seen a pattern in when or with what sims I do what, or how my brain decides which sim is "I" when playing a household with several sims. Then again it's the same with the player characters in other games I play. Despite the occasional "we" I don't really like to consider myself as part of my sims' world any more than I see myself as part of, say, Super Mario's world when playing as him. I've had dreams where I've met with sims of mine and even though I've sometimes been aware of the whole game-thing we've interacted on equal terms, as people (of similar sizes).

That's really interesting; I always think that my sims are aware of me, and just accept me as part of their world (maybe they can see me peering through the clouds at them like that giant baby in Teletubbies? ). They know I meddle because they look at me and complain or cheer sometimes, and maybe their wishes are sort of akin to prayers? I never really thought about that! But I don't consider myself part of the sims world either, more like I have a window in to it occasionally.

@wickedjr89 Sims 3 is a whole thing apart from Sims 2, I think! I never get quite as absorbed in my Sims 3 games- it's like I'm watching, but it runs perfectly well without me. And the sims definitely aren't aware of me, nor do they need me! But Sims 2, the sims there definitely need some sort of intervention! I always play legacy style with Sims 3 too, it suits that style more that rotational play. If I decide to play another family it's always at whim, not in any strict order or duration as I have been with my Sims 2 sims.

But there are those times when you're watching them, they turn to you as if they're saying, "Now what, you dumb genius? You got me into this mess, you get me out of it!", or conversely, "About time I did this! What took you so long?"

It is unsettling to see them turn around and look at you sideways, because you have that creepy feeling that they know you're there and they know what you're thinking-and that they agree with you.

Oh god.


The dynamics between players and sims are fascinating for sure, whatever they may be. This thread reminded me of the sort of proto-Sims game "Little Computer People". In that, the frame story is that these people live inside computers and the game itself basically draws them out onto screen by getting them a house, so there's always a direct link between player and computer person as the player gets to give the computer person stuff and directly ask them to do things, and the computer person can write letters to the player. I guess those pop-ups from sims that directly address the player ("Can't you see I'm not in the mood?") is the closest thing we have to letters.

I'm also playing Sims Medieval from time to time, where the player actually is pretty much the sims' god (or Watcher) guiding the player characters to develop the kingdom. Now that's a game that could've really made use of some Sims 2-style fourth wall-breaking, but I can't really recall any at all (though I haven't played all that much yet). Even text about what to do next in the missions is worded more like the sim's inner monologue.

@simsample - Oh, I never thought of that, of sims wishes being like prayers! That's neat. I don't think i've ever thought of my sims in Sims 3 knowing about me come to think of it. Just Sims 2. Same with me and Sims 3, playing legacy style, if I play another family it's on a whim, not anything strict, and in Sims 2 I play each family a certain amount of days and do that for every household before another rotation starts and I do it all over again lol. They are both fun in their owns ways to me.

I wonder if they know I'm stuffing my face with crisps whilst I'm watching them? They probably think I'm such a greedy thing!






I found Sims 3 really liberating, in that I could create a whole world and fill it with sims and just let them do their thing, without having to play them all! The Indie Stone (later NRAAS Story Progression) really made it wonderful, because I could watch sims in the street and when I saw one do something interesting, I could click him to make him active and then take a peek into his life.

Yes! I mean I never paid attention to what the other sims in my sims 3 town were doing but I agree sims 3 is liberating that way. And I love story progression! I have several NRass mods. I don't have nearly as many mods and cc in sims 3 as I do sims 2 (in fact I have NO cc for sims 3, just mods) but NRass mods are a must! Without them the game wouldn't even play ... overwatch is a game saver!

I keep an eye on what all the sims are doing in my hood. Playing community lots is a favorite, and I feel that the vanilla story progression is more than enough for me (and to keep my entertained).

It gives my great pleasure at times when I see Sim A and Sim B dining together (behind my back, while I am playing Sim C). At other times, it freaks me out!

I also get notifications from time to time on community lots regarding sims I am not playing at that moment: Alex has reached his LTW - (Alex is sitting at the bar, chatting to a sim, who has just apparently become his best friend, which means that Alex now has 100 best friends. Cool, Alex, you gave me enough drama when you hit that prof back at Uni that time ).

The community lots in Sims 2 can be eye-opening because those uncontrolled pixels are having a life, too..and you're just watching the effects of it. Then you go into their house and find out what they're up to.
Did you know they laugh at us, thinking we always control them?

"Thought you owned me, huh? Think again, human!"

I tried out story progression for Sims 2, and I didn't like it-because I'm such a control freak it just didn't feel normal.

Never tried 3, and while Story Progression sounded interesting, the fact that 3 was and is so unstable is enough to keep me away from it.

I won't even try out story progression for Sims 2. The story progression I mentioned before is for Sims 3. For Sims 2 the vanilla story progression is more than enough for me to. I do enjoy seeing what the sims do when i'm playing other sims on community lots. Or even at another playable sims house if they happen to be over for a visit.

@wickedjr89 - I've played both TS3 and TS2 rotationally though it's just switching active failies in a heavily Modded TS3 game using a Modded story progression instead of EA's bugfest and I do use a simillar story progression for TS2 only I have to play each day of each family unlike TS3 where inactives for basic management when I played another family for a day then switched back.I had played one household for a few days and returned to find the other family had plated of spoiled food all over the house when I wasn't looking though little else happened except that money went up a fair bit.The vanilla story progression in TS2 is perfect for me since I'm manually doing all of te progression myself and I have is in a more manual mode in TS3.

Not rotationally exactly for TS3, but I can't imagine only playing one household! I would get bored I haven't played TS3 in years though. I kept getting frustrated because it would be a few weeks between play sessions and they would release one of their eleventy billion DLC updates and break all my mods, and unlike TS2 I found it unplayable without mods.

To me, my sims are fictional characters, the sum total of their story being a combination of:

- Story details that were stated by Maxis, if the sim is a premade
- Mechanical & gameplay elements that the sim decides to do in game (playing wants-based and allowing for a lot of autonomy)
- Story details that are imagined by me as I'm playing

So, when I'm playing I'm taking the mechanical input that the game gives me (for example, a sim rolls a want to do something) and translating it into the story. And I can deviate from the game's random elements if it makes the story work better for me, because there are aspects of these fictional characters which can't be represented by game mechanics.

A good example, in Strangetown there's a lot of premade story elements that exist beyond the confines of the game mechanics, like General Buzz Grunt distrusts aliens... but there's nothing in the game mechanics to stop him from becoming perfectly friendly with any given alien, so instead I as the player can intervene to make the story work better. So if (for example) his kid Buck brings Jill Smith home from school, I might do something like have Buzz ask her to leave and then lecture his son [I have a mod that enables you to direct the lecture interaction at any time] to represent that story of him disapproving that his son is trying to be friends with a half-alien.

Or, I once had a story I was trying to play about a sim trying to keep an unplanned pregnancy a secret but since there was no way to do it in the game, I kind of made a random mechanic like I was playing Dungeons & Dragons... I rolled a 20-sided die + the one sim's Charisma skill (to represent lying) and another die + the other sim's Logic skill (to represent figuring out the lie) and whichever was higher, determined if the lie was successful.

And because the priority is for me as the player to have fun & enjoy the story, if something happens in the game that I really dislike or that doesn't make any sense I could always wipe it away by exiting without saving, or cheating to "undo" it (although I haven't really had anything like this happen for a very long time that wasn't because of actual glitches). And if a certain household is starting to feel boring to play, I'm allowed to introduce something new & different even if the sims don't roll wants for it because it's more fun that way (I have a random scenario generator for this).

I've got only one couple in my Pleasantview town so far and have Mods to allow histical play so they fetch water from a well and work from home or at the service center to earn moeny instead of taking a regular job as that's not realistic in a new town just starting up.I've hacked my game to get rid of lots pre-populating on loading and use other Mods to disable too much activity and too many visitors to make it look more real like a newly settled town.I've got one of the braches of Goth family ancestory moved into Pleasant Valley and the Pleasant ancestors are coming in about a year.

I view my sims similarly. I see them existing in their own sim universe full of aliens, grilled cheese fanaticism, and hula zombies. On a micro-scale, my sims exist in regions established throughout the franchise. In TS2, I like to think every neighborhood (excluding the vacation hoods) exists within the borders of SimNation as depicted in this lovely world map I found. Viewing my sims in this manner helps me appreciate the wacky yet colorful world-building done across the series. It also inspires me to try and tie it all together somehow.

Wow, that map is made with a lot of love! Even locations from The Urbz and the MySims games are put in a context ! I've sat with the enlarged map for a long time trying to find my favourite locations from all the games and being surprised at where I found them.

That map is amazing! I too always wanted to have an idea of what my sims world looked like. In SimCity 4, I made a whole region for my previous world, Lacuna Delta. That way I knew where the roads out of Lacuna went to, and I could picture where the sims were going when they vacationed. I uploaded them here:
https://modthesims.info/d/309624
Lacuna was right in the middle.
My new world just has a single map I made, I'm nowhere near wanting to add any subhoods, so for now it's just a bit of land in the middle of nowhere! I'm starting to feel at home there though- but it was hard to start again after so many years of playing my old hood, and I really miss those sims! It was time for a change. So perhaps I should fire up SC4 and finish the region I made the Badlands map in, and that would give me a better feel for the new place.

FranH pretty much summed up my feelings and views for my sims in her post.

To add to it, my sims live in a world not much unlike ours, not humans but very human-esque. They are pixel people. Shakespeare might exist but California doesn't. Real languages aren't spoken anymore, but are long-dead and used aesthetically, and all sims can read it. Real places have simlish counterparts, brands might have a jumbled name similar to our world but just not exactly. They have faith in a platinum plumbob but aren't very religious. Meta things happen all the time to them to make them suspicious of some kind of puppeteering overlord. Time moves fast for the overlord but slow for the pixel.

They have fewer social stigmas in their world. I play them very generously, always striving for them to be happy though through story means they come up against conflicts with family or romance, finances, and unexpected changes in life plans due to fire, ACR, and whatnot (glitches).

I could probably write more but it's late, though I really do like this question @simsample !

For what it's worth, I tend to think that EA (or at least Will Wright) tried to depict a world where skin color, religion or where you come from does not matter to another person-as if they're blind to those factors.
A more rational world.
Instead they disagree on external matters like politics,(as most of we humans do, too...) or for playing around when the other pixel isn't in the mood or has the characteristic to do so.
A very simplistic view of pixels shows them to be as deep as a shallow pool of water, so comparing them to us is always bound to fail, but I've know some people who come close to them-at least in personality-very shallow and not aware of others. To know them is to pity them for the lack of depth in their emotional lives.
They're empty shells inhabiting a human skin is all-which is what a pixel seems to be-an empty shell inhabiting a electronically produced form of pixels.
They're not human but they sure do make us compose long epics on what they mean to us!

My Sims are Sims, and as far as I am concerned, Sims are a distinct humanoid (usually) species with their own needs and quirks that humans may or may not possess. In addition, cats and dogs (for example) are Sim cats and Sim dogs, thus not obliged to behave like their Earth equivalents regardless of how much visual resemblance exists. I imagine they are of a similar size to their Earth equivalents, but that their universe's space is much like a TARDIS - you'd have to be the size of electrons to physically enter it, but once a human were in there, that human would become the same size as a Sim.

Sims live in their own plane of existence, where physics and chemistry (let alone other sciences) simply works a bit differently to the universe of humans. One of the easier ones to remember is that certain forces can be proven to weave the Sim universe into stories. On the other hand, that existence is completely encapsulated in a digital space, within a hard drive, and none of the Sims know that this is where their universe is physically located. So these two scientific universes can collide. I see myself as such a collision, although I am open to whether that makes me a natural force or a supernatural one. (In SimHampton, there is a division of opinion ranging from "customary part of the universe" for those following local traditional belief to the Valgonian belief in "sacred code". However, I would not call myself a true deity with regard to my Sims because all of them have a concept of deities that specifically excludes me from being one (to SimHampton's Sims, deities only count as such if they are capable - at least in theory - of directly manifesting themselves as Sims or another living creature in the universe. A definition that would exclude plenty of deities believed in on Earth, but that's not an argument the SimHampton Sims are ready to have). The "cyberstorms" SimHampton sometimes experiences, I imagine as being caused by something bad happening to the computer, or its simply not being used for a while (the downside of being in a digitally-defined universe is that the energy has to come from somewhere).

Most Sims can't tell if the game's been paused, though I believe a few can. (In SimHampton, I associate the ability of highly-skilled members of the League of Mystics, Valgonians in tune with the "sacred code" and powerful witches/wizards). Likewise, most of them have no idea if the game's been turned off, and I imagine they simply carry on having adventures (and what I see is only a sample of what they do with their lives; even holidays are longer in the Sims' experience than portrayed in the game).

The history and culture of SimNation is obviously quite different to Earth, but unlike Earth, I have no hope of knowing even the slightest outline of the majority of it. Only that which occurs in the parts I can access. In SimHampton, there are multiple religions, none of which exist on Earth for reasons that make perfect sense (Earth is not exactly overloaded with deities who steal newspapers, nor do (most) humans rely directly on code to exist), There are several different communities, spread across at least four different planets (SimHampton has fairly casual space travel and not just for the aliens).

I see my Sims as my own little characters. I too see them as living in a fantasy world, but in my case, they live in different worlds (one for some of my OCs, one for my Life is Strange Sims, one for my Disney Sims, etc.).

The main thing is that they're my little people who I can do what I want with (even though I don't play play as much as I create play).