Girlfriend’s daughter wants a laptop that she can play Sims on!  This stands to reason, since her mother is also a computer geek like me.

Needless to say, the girl is not mine, even in the game.  Although she is a major reason why I decided to live with them, to help the little girl grow up well.  Growing up well has taken on a new dimension in Sims 3:  It now directly influences the traits of the children.

If you are playing the pregnant mother (there are no pregnant fathers in Sims 3) then her happiness during the pregnancy transfers to the baby.  If she is healthy and happy, you get to choose the two starting traits of the child.  Remember, each Sim has a maximum of 5 traits, chosen from a few dozen good, bad and just weird ones. Two are determined at birth, the third when the toddler grows up to child, the fourth when she becomes a teen, and the last when growing up to adult. At any of these occasions, a truly horrible past is likely to be reflected in negative traits, such as Evil, Insane or Kleptomaniac. A so-so upbringing will give a random trait, while a happy life leaves the choice to the player rather than just picking a good trait.  This is a nice incentive to keep an eye on the kids, but also painfully unrealistic.

It is a sad sign of how much the fake liberal philosophy has permeated society that the game has completely abandoned any trace of inheritable traits.  In The Sims 2, there was a strong tendency for nice Sims to have nice Children, active Sims to have active children and so on.  You could then modify these traits if one of the parents (or even grandparents) had a particularly strong side, they could encourage children to develop in a special direction despite their genes, but it took lots of time.  The new system makes for more drama and hilarity, sure, but it is a long step backwards in realism.  At the very least the two birth traits should have been picked at random from the parents’ traits.  (Or the parent’s trait, in case of parthenogenesis.)

Have I gone on and on about (sim)parthenogenesis yet?  I should.  The game takes place in a town with a limited but fairly large number of houses.  It is not actually a town, of course, but there are a couple dozen families I think.  There are not quite that many when you start, but new families will randomly move in from time to time.  Some families will also randomly move out unless you have a hack to stop them, such as the ever useful Awesomemod.

Since time flows for everyone in this game, the members of the various families will grow older and eventually expire.  (They may also die in accidents, but this is not common.) If the neighbors did not also reproduce, we would soon end up with a literal ghost town.  The game is very reluctant to let any household die out, even if it happens to only contain a single sim or a couple friends of the same gender. So does it compel them to seek out a mate?  No, it simply dumps a baby on them.  If they do happen to be married, the baby will have two parents and inherit its looks from both of them.  But if the parent is single, the baby has only one parent and retains its skin and hair color, although it is not a complete clone. Also, there is no visible pregnancy.  (This makes sense as it can happen as easily to males.) We call this parthenogenesis, virgin origin. Lest someone suspect blasphemy, let me assure you that the concept is well known from biology, as many insects routinely reproduce without intercourse, as do a few vertebrates.

Wanja in the picture above is a spontaneous offspring of Ari Moore, my self-sim’s in-game girlfriend. (Not to be confused with my imaginary girlfriend. This is my imaginary self-sim’s imaginary girlfriend.)  Ari lived with two other women and had, to the best of my knowledge, no romantic relationships.  Certainly Wanja is listed as having only one parent, and looks a lot like her mother (but not an all-out clone). Since I was not playing that family, the game randomly gave the child two traits, fairly decent traits luckily, but none of them were from her mother.  So it fell to me to give her some realistic traits while raising her. As you can see, it worked out pretty well…

Sim children have a lot of schoolwork. Certainly more than Americans, who only have symbolic amounts of homework compared to other civilized countries. On the other hand, they have a longer vacation. Wait, that’s on the same hand. Anyway, Sim children have no vacation ever, and their homework takes the better part of the rest of the day unless they get help.  Luckily a skilled parent can cut down heavily on the time spent and the frustration felt.  Failing that, doing homework together with other kids will make it more fun, although I am not sure if it actually goes faster.  More testing is in order.  Sim Magnus usually would help Wanja with her homework, of course. He also had the option to tutor her, although I am not sure what effect (if any) this has in the game.

If your simulated child fails to do homework one day, all is not lost.  When in school, there is a small menu where you can decide what they do there:  Work hard, work normally, make friends, hang out with existing friends, or do homework.  If they fail entirely to do their homework, and don’t work hard during school hours, grades start slipping.  There is a happiness reward for good grades, but not only that: Bad grades means your kid risks growing up to an insane kleptomaniac or a neurotic with commitment issues.

Luckily there are certain random events that let a child improve its standing in school temporarily by for instance catching a particular fish or writing a report.  My teen sim had this, not sure if they get them in grade school too.  It does not happen all the time though so don’t rely on it.

Teen Sims still have homework, and can take a part-time job as well. Luckily they come home earlier, just like in Sims 2. But between work and romance, the long homework really does cut into their lives. Having a parent (or resident genius) to help comes in very handy.  I suppose this also applies in real life. Then again I am not some liberal post-modernist extolling the virtues of the post-nuclear family.

My cell phone is ringing, while my girlfriend is telling me what she REALLY thinks about me. How did it end up like this?  Luckily it is all a game, namely Sims 3, and I have a backup from before I got a girlfriend to begin with, before the whole midlife crisis thing.

Pretty much each evening I’ve spent a good chunk of time playing The Sims 3. I finally got around to making a self-sim!  Actually you saw him yesterday too, although that was not an entry about the game.  I am not good at making sims, since my right brain hemisphere is pretty much stuffed with hay as regards any talents more complex than walking and slightly erroneous typing. You would probably not have mistaken this guy for me if you met him on the street. But once you know he’s my self-sim, you can probably see it.  If you have seen me in the flesh or on the innumerable photos in my journal in 1998 and a few years onward.

Even though I was pretty enthusiastic about the game already, I was taken by surprise by just how much fun it is to have a little computer guy who looks and acts vaguely like me, except he is a talented painter and scientist and grows a garden of “life fruit” that keeps him aging much more slowly than people around him.  (Myself I only have the brainwave thingy, and it is not quite that efficient.  At least not yet.)

Also, it makes for a wide range of illustration “photos” that I could not possibly produce in real life.

Tools of the trade(s).

If you don’t want to run on the career treadmill, or if your life goal is to be an illustrious author, you would love to live in the world of Sims 3. In this near future scenario, the demand for handmade paintings and novels is insatiable. I have of course come up with a rational explanation for this. Obsessed, me? Nah, just your ordinary genius. Here we go:

If you look at the workplaces in Sims 3, you will notice that nobody works at a factory or warehouse or drives a truck. These things either don’t exist or nobody cares enough to place them on the map. Even the fast-food outlet is not hiring. The jobs either require a human touch or a bit of genius: Medicine, science, law enforcement, music etc. (And, strangely enough, the military; I suppose some people still believe in military intelligence…)

So my theory is that in the timeline of Sims 3, manufacture has been entirely automated and is now in the claws of industrial robots, with minimal if any human supervision. There is an unlimited variety of mass produced goods – you can for instance get your clothes and sofa in matching polka dots if you so desire – but there are still things the machines can’t do.

With the market for machine-made stuff saturated, people value things that are actually handmade, such as firsthand paintings and new novels. Actually this is a trend already in motion, and one that has been predicted to explode once nanomachines make it as easy to copy hardware as it now is to copy software. (I don’t believe that will happen, by the way. But robotic manufacture? It could well happen in our world too. We’ve been on that path for a long time.)

Anyway, that’s the conjecture. The “fact” of the game world is that paintings and novels are paid fairly well. The last couple days I’ve been playing a guy who wanted to become an illustrious author, that is to say someone who has realized his full potential in both illustration (painting) and writing. I’ll share my mistakes for the benefit of those who will follow after me.

My first mistake was to take a job, and keep it for too long. The guy wanted to get a job in medicine, something that does not at all relate to his lifetime goal. I let him get such a job, and he wasted years emptying bedpans at a lousy pay, just like in the real world. Also like in the real world, as soon as he started to get a livable wage, he was put on call. He would come home stressed and dirty and tired, take a shower and sit down with the chess board to have some fun while improving his logic skill. (Logic skill is used in the medicine career in Sims 3; your opinion may vary on whether this also is like the real world.) This guy was even a genius, meaning he took easily to logic. But by the time he was in a reasonably good mood, it was time to go to bed. And then the phone would ring, and he would have to hurry to the hospital and work until he was on the verge of collapse. He barely made it back to the bed without fainting, and then three hours later it was time to get up and go to work again. It is entirely too realistic. So he finally quit. I should have done that long before.

My next mistake was to start with the writing instead of painting. I guess my personal bias blinded me. And in all fairness, I believe writing pays more. However, there are still at least three good reasons to choose painting first:
1) Painting is fun. Not as fun as computer games, but your Sim will grow steadily more smiley as he keeps working. This is not true for writing (and most other things that earn money). With writing, you have to take breaks and do something fun or you will get depressed, or at the very least lose out on those lifetime happiness points. Remember, if your Sim is happy, those points trickle in and lets you purchase various upgrades to body and soul eventually.
2) Painting pays off as soon as you are finished. With books, you get only small advances while you write, and most of the money comes over the next six weeks, and only once a week, on Sunday. That is fine when you are financially secure, but it sucks if you have to sell your dining table to pay your bills.
3) At a high skill level, a couple paintings in each room will greatly raise the room score, and your Sim will get a bonus to happiness for as long as he stays in the room. My artistic Sim now has them even in the bathroom. As long as he is at home, the happiness points keep rolling in, even in his sleep. Novels have no such effect, as far as I know.  (Then again he keeps them in his inventory.)

A related mistake was trying to keep friends. There is a reason why writers are regarded as reclusive, and I may have been wrong in assuming that they were simply that way before they started writing. (It is hard for me to say, since I have been writing since before I started  grade school.) Between gardening, writing, and replenishing his fun, there was time for little more than eating, peeing and sleeping. Writing really is a full-time job, at least until you become famous. Since he was a friendly, charismatic person (I gave him those traits because I wanted to learn to know the inhabitants of Sunset Valley), he constantly wanted to be friends with people, or meet someone new, or just chat. And I let him. But of course the friendships unraveled quickly when he tried to actually get some writing done.

I don’t really count the gardening as a mistake, although it takes its time. The thing about gardening is that eventually you will be able to grow life fruit. Sirius Sim was lucky and found a life fruit seed fairly early, and a money tree seed as well. (I dislike the money tree, too jarring break with realism, but the seeds are not labeled when you pick them. You can see how common or uncommon they are, but not what species.) Life fruit and money tree are both “special” seeds that you can find near the graveyard or research center, and the sooner in your life you find a life fruit seed, the better your chance of becoming immortal or something close to it. You need a gardening skill of 7 to plant special seeds though, and he did not have that when he found them. So gardening was in order. Of course, you may want to become immortal through your works of art. Me, my Sim and Woody Allen all prefer to become immortal through not dying, although only my Sim has a reasonable shot at it.

Once I shifted my focus to painting, things soon started to improve. The first paintings are not enough to pay the bills, but it does not take long before money worries start to fade. Well, unless you have the “snob” trait, in which case you probably have to buy lots of expensive stuff. But who in their right mind would choose to be a snob? By the time he had fully mastered the skill of painting, the house was moderately larger and he had enough cash to do nothing for a generation or two if he so desired.

I’ll still maximize his writing skill, since it is his lifetime want, but after that I intend to let him make more friends and perhaps, one day, find love. I mean, this is not my self-Sim by any stretch of the imagination. He already met a super cute woman who was a nice bookworm like himself and they became best friends in the course of one evening. But of course she was already married. That’s the kind of blows faith strikes in Sims 3. In Sims 2, all the townies were single. Oh well. Let us hope she has daughters as cute as herself. Sirius is planning to stick around for a few generations, after all…

“And then she had to open her big mouth.”

“Wife simulator” is a pun, of course. (If there really are wife simulators out there, I would rather not know.) It refers to the phrase “life simulator” that is fondly used about The Sims series. Some may wonder why you would want a life simulator when you already have a life. The game, they conclude, must be for those who don’t have a life. But this requires the (all too common) fallacy that there is only one life possible, namely the one you have. I know better, since my life is very different from yours.

One of the many things my life does not include is an actual wife. (There is occasionally some doubt about this, because of role playing, but believe me, I would have known. And in any case, just suspend your stunned disbelief for the sake of the exposition.) The funny thing is that virtually all my grown-up Sims in the Sims 2 were married. There were a few who had a permanent fear of marriage, but they were otherwise quite content to live in a monogamous relationship. Most of these couples also had a child or more. Actually, most of them wanted to have children. And that makes a lot of sense, because their lifespan is limited, and it is kind of sad to end up with a house with only an urn in it. In a way, it feels like their life is wasted – or nearly so – if they don’t have a new generation to benefit from it.

In real life, of course, there are more meanings to life than simply accumulating cool stuff for future generations and teach them various useful skills. And since The Sims 3 is generally more realistic than its predecessors, perhaps it will have more singles? Yes, probably. As I mentioned in my initial review, it is now possible to create a Sim with the personality traits Loner and Unflirty. Between them, these two traits pretty much makes sure the Sim does not get romantically involved, barring intervention from their creator. (And why would their creator do that after taking the trouble to make them that way?)

After playing for a while with my loner, I made someone who was almost the opposite. While still Good, she was Family-oriented, Friendly, Charismatic and Lucky. And with a little prodding, she actually got a good number of friends and lots of acquaintances. But romance is another matter. It takes a lot more dedication than in The Sims 2, where the Sims would more or less fall into it by themselves. Here it seems to take an extreme dedication. In fact, and this is horribly realistic, it seems to be easier for them to have babies than find love.

Not one to give up halfway, I set out today making a couple instead of a single Sim. They are pretty much the perfect couple, with an ideal mix of shared and complementary traits. Both of them are Good, Friendly Geniuses, but she is a Frugal Bookworm while he is a Lucky Computer Whiz. While there is some more stress involved for me in juggling two Sims, they have a blast. Since both of them can use the Friendly “brighten day” interaction, as well as giving compliments, they can quickly cheer each other up after a hard workday. (Sims take compliments quite seriously, and are happy for three hours after one, if they accept it all of course. Being so compatible, these two always do.) It is, as I have long suspected, wonderful to live with your best friend.

Now, about the romance… Between their jobs where they try to advance, and her lifetime goal as a novelist, there just isn’t much time for romancing. And evidently it takes time now. Despite the occasional kiss, there just aren’t any more advanced romantic interactions available. Even though they both roll the wish for “woohoo” (sex) and a baby, the path from here to there is just so long. I hear this is the case for some real people too. I blame the women and their weird notion that flowers and candles are in any way related to the birds and the bees. OK, I can see bees liking flowers, but that’s it. Birds most assuredly don’t like candles. (Moths do, I guess, but let’s not go there with this safe, family-friendly romance.) Please, my dear Sim couple, you’ve been married since before I started playing you!

(Returns from game) Well, it was doable, and it only took the evening. The key is to start with something reasonable, and keep an eye on the list of available interactions. After kissing massage shows up (which turns out to be the old backrub from Sims 1 and 2, but now it has become a more intimate thing than kissing. What do I know?) After massage, make out becomes available. And eventually, after climbing the ladder of interactions, “woohoo” and “try for baby” show up. The happy couple are now able to find a suitable location on their own, and do not have to be sent off to a bed first. Yay! We try for baby, and thanks to their relatively young age, or the kids radio they have listened to, or sheer good luck, pregnancy ensues! Thank goodness, now we won’t have to go through this again for quite some time…

Think happy thoughts. Riiight.

Like the rest of us, the Sims have to work to put food on the table. (Of course, if they have the Moocher personality trait, they can eat the foods off other Sims’ tables instead, but what kind of life is that?) So let’s have a look at work and career in the Sims 3.

You can still look in the newspaper for a job, but now you can also simply go to a fitting workplace and ask for a job. The workplaces are now in the neighborhood, and like the rest of the neighborhood you can go there without a load screen. Most likely you would get a taxi, but you could simply run there if you want. In practice, just click on the map and let the Sim decide how to get there. If they have an opening and you are qualified, you can start the next day. Getting an entry-level job is still ridiculously easy compared to real life. But from then on, there are a few changes from the previous incarnation of the game.

In the Sims 2, there were strict criteria for advancement. This is now much fuzzier. For instance, my gender-bent self-Sim obviously wanted a science job, so she got the one at the agricultural research center. When I looked at have a job panel, there was a small smiling face representing her mood and a small neutral face representing her gardening skill. This was because she went to work in a good mood but without any gardening skill. Since the research center specializes in agriculture, their workers are expected to have some experience with soil and plants. If you advance without upgrading the skill, that little face turns increasingly angry and your career climbing eventually grinds to a halt.

I went to the bookstore and bought a cheap introductory book about gardening. Reading this, my Sim gained a level in this skill. (That particular feature is still there, the skill improvement is not seamless. Perhaps in Sims 4? Or perhaps the wish to level up is so fundamental that people prefer it that way. Certainly online games with levels are hugely popular.) Now my job panel had a smiling face for this as well, and my advancement bar filled up faster, moving toward the first promotion. (Around this time I found out that I could simply plant apples, cabbages and other stuff I had bought at the grocery store, and grow my own garden. This way, I can improve my job skill AND grow free food at the same time. It takes some time, but not a lot more than reading the books to gain the same skill.)

After a couple promotions, there showed up an icon for handiness, or mechanical skill. This is also something you can gain either from books or from practice. At first you may get it inadvertently from fixing a broken shower or unclogging the toilet, but soon you can start tinkering on various items in the house. (I strongly recommend starting with the non-electrical ones, even in the game. In the Sim world, electrical equipment is always on – there are no power cords, so I assume Tesla was successful in their timeline in broadcasting electricity. A fascinating story in itself, but not for today.) Tinkering has the benefit that you may invent ways to actually improve the equipment: My Sim now has an unbreakable shower and a self-cleaning toilet! And of course, the skills you gain will come in handy at work.

If you are highly competent, you can come to work in a terrible mood, work half-heartedly and still get promoted eventually. That’s probably not a good idea, though. There are separate reasons why you should keep your Sims in a good mood and fulfill their wishes within reason. We’ll get into that soon, I promise!

But first let me mention another new feature. While you cannot actually follow your Sims into the building and control their work in detail, you can give them general instructions on how to perform their work. If they work hard, the mood will get progressively worse throughout the workday, so you should be careful about this unless they are in a very good mood already. If you spend time at work doing more comfortable things, your mood will stay high but your advancement bar will fill more slowly. You can also spend time socializing with your coworkers, working on an individual project or assisting your boss.

Each of these will have their own effects. For instance, since my self-Sim is a loner, nerding it with the other scientist will lower her mood without improving her work performance. Working on her own will keep her social phobia at bay, but the project may or may not be successful. A charismatic Sim will benefit more from group work. If in doubt, just go with the ordinary setting, keep your skills sharp and go to work happy, and satisfaction is guaranteed. (Unless you are eaten by a carnivorous plant…)

*
Now let us look at mood and happiness. In The Sims 3, you get “moodlets” that last for a certain time. For instance, sleeping till you are fully rested gives a 10 hour moodlet, enough to last you through the workday if you time it right. On the other hand, you may want to get up earlier to make a good meal, which will give you an 8-hour positive moodlet. The moodlets add up, but there are negative moodlets that have the opposite effect. If you get stinky, for instance, it will drag your mood down, not to mention if you go hungry. While the Sims now have a 24 hour grace period before they starve, they will likely be in a terrible mood. (On the bright side, they are able to eat at work, so you can skip breakfast if you don’t need the bonus moodlet.) Fulfilling wishes gives a 6-hour moodlet, so it may be a good idea to try to squeeze in one of those as well in the morning, preferably one that does not take too much time. Like buying something, if they wish for that. Or perhaps better, giving something to charity. It gave my Sim a nice mood boost for 24 hours (although that may work for good Sims and not for evil Sims.)

So having several happy moodlets is good for your work performance, but that is not all. Oh no. If you have enough of them (and no bad ones), you will see your mood bar move into a new level. (It is easy to see since the mood bar is shaped into two sections.) When your Sim is this happy, she will accrue lifetime happiness points. These can always be achieved by fulfilling wants, but if your Sim is super happy, she will add a few points every hour, even in her sleep! And since a pretty environment and good music will give temporary moodlets while they are there, you may want to do your studying in a beautiful park or while listening to music (or preferably both).

These points can eventually be used to upgrade your Sim. Examples of upgrades are a “steel bladder”, for all you guys who complain that the Sims games are about toilet management. (Actually that part is already toned down in Sims 3, but you can eliminate it completely if you really want to.) Or how about learning all skills faster? Or having the boss look the other way when you laze around at work instead of actually working? Throwing better parties, or telling better jokes? The range of upgrades is quite impressive, and I think it is a safe bet there will be more of them in future expansion packs.

To me, the happiness of my Sims is a main goal of playing the game in the first place. (Thus the “good” self-Sim, right?) But for those who reserve their empathy (if any) for the real world, there is this whole game within a game to encourage treating your Sim well. It took me a bit of time to figure out what was going on, but that’s how this game is. The learning curve is not at all steep, but it is fairly long. Even though it works right out of the box, there are surprises in the details. After all, not only the Sims should be happy, but the player too!

Sims can now be made fatter than ever before, and the polygon count in their butt is greatly increased so they no longer look angular when you fatten them up. The rest is details.

I have been known to say that The Sims 2 was the best computer game ever made in our sector of the galaxy. I believe that was correct, at the time.  But then came The Sims 3. And it is good.

What I mean is that it is not good in the metaphysical “good vs evil” meaning.  It is a rather value-neutral tool, like its predecessors. But for those of us who have convinced ourselves (if no one else) that we have higher goals in life, it is rather disconcerting to come home from work, pop in the disk and soon after look up to find it is midnight.  Time is arguably our most valuable resource, and this game eats it the way grade school boys eat candy.  That is why I think the game may find a less than favorable judgment.  But that must be weighed against all the people who would have spent that time watching TV, or worse, idly chatting and gossiping. Eating their time would surely be a good thing. So in the end, who knows whether it is good or evil. But it sure is good as opposed to bad.

The Sims 2 sprouted a total of 8 expansion packs that introduced new aspects such as university education, seasons, hobbies and pets.  With Sims 3 we are back to  basics, but the game has picked up some of the greatest successes from those expansions, such as fishing and gardening.  The pets are still absent, and I would be surprised if there won’t be another expansion pack or many, down the road.

From The Sims (1) to Sims 2  there was a major upgrade of the graphics, from small simple sprites to detailed 3D characters.  The change to Sims 3 is much less noticeable.  There are more body shapes – it is now possible to make genuinely fat-looking sims, or muscular sims, not just the old choice between skinny and slightly chubby.  And it is possible to put pretty much any color or pattern on clothes, meaning you only need a different model for each shape, not for each color, as these are user-defined.  Hair too can now be colored directly when you create a sim, rather than by expert “custom content creators” who make pre-defined models.  But the graphics are not overall more realistic than before.  The game world is still a bit cartoonish, probably by choice. It is certainly not like the realism in roleplaying games such as Oblivion or Dark Age of Camelot, which could be easily passed off as actual photographs. The upside is that any computer that could run Sims 2 with a few expansions should also be able to run Sims 3 right out of the box.

Speaking of “right out of the box”, the game comes on a common install DVD for both Windows and Mac. This is still rare and bound to cause great joy among the Mac gamers. I popped the DVD in my laptop with Ubuntu Linux and WINE (a free environment for running well-behaved Windows programs without Windows).  The setup started without a hitch, and ran roughly 95% through before it stopped without a word.  I guess there are still limits to what it will run on, but man, that was close!  Better luck with Sims 4.  Unless someone makes an open-source competitor before that…

The biggest change is neither to the graphics nor the character creator, but to the gameplay.  Oh, it is the same old at the most basic level, the sims still need to eat and sleep and pee with alarming regularity, much like the rest of us.  But whereas the big jump from Sims to Sims2 was the introduction of the life cycle (you must have children because you die), so the new feature is the living neighborhood.  (Or should I say the dying neighborhood, as the non-player sims now also marry, have children, grow old and die, whereas in Sims2 they would stay young forever.)

In order for the “townies” (the characters you don’t play) to live their ordinary life, they must be smarter than they used to be.  This carries over to the sims you control.  They may still win the Darwin award if left to themselves, but it is far from certain.  They now start to get concerned about food 24 hours before they would actually die, and will take steps to feed themselves even if there is something funny to do.  (Some gamers may want to learn from them in that regard…)

The sims’ personalities are completely revamped.  This probably counts as the other big change to the game, besides the living neighborhood.  In the past, all sims had 5 personality sliders:  Sloppy-neat, shy-outgoing, lazy-active, serious-playful and mean-nice. Each of these could vary on a scale from 0 to 10.  For instance my self-sim would be have 0 outgoing points, having very little need for social interaction.  In Sims 3, all this is gone. Instead there are now a few dozen personality traits, of which you have five.  (If you grow your own sims from childhood you start with two for toddlers and add more as they age up.) Some of these are good, some are bad, and some just strange.

For instance, my self-sim would be a Good Unflirty Loner Genius Computer wiz. In fact, this was the personality I gave my first (and so far only) created sim.  And she does indeed behave disturbingly like me. Her goodness is essentially wasted because she has no one around to be good to. Except for the occasional wish to donate money to charity, she could just as well have been evil.  Nobody will know anyway. Or at least that was the case until I finally had the money to buy a cheap computer.  Now she is chatting on the Net pretty much every night. OK, so that is not like me, but then the in-game computer does not have a blog feature, it seems. So let us see if she ever gets to know anyone well enough to do something good for them.  It sure is hard to pull off in real life. Even before Sims 3 ate my day (and much of my night as well).