Originally published at: Why The Sims is a game of comfort for so many neurodiverse people | Boing Boing
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Hey! Sims!
I wanted to take a second and shill for a game I played recently from Studio Drydock - an Aussie game studio with a bunch of ex-EA, ex-sims-freeplay devs.
This is a beautiful, LGBTQ±friendly, farming sim with a rich, detailed story and world. for the neurodiverse amongst us, you can disable or remove several game mechanics to make playing as stress-free as you want, and I have to say that I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed my time playing this. Stongly recommend for those of you with Apple Arcade accounts (or, who can grab this through the imminent Steam release!)
They took what I think are the best parts of a sims-type game, removed a lot of the sort of gamification mechanics you find in the actual sims series, and focused on the “comfort” part.
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Looks well designed.
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There was an interesting episode of This American Life where a daughter recounts her mom’s time-consuming obsession with the game, to the detriment of her interactions with her real family. Eventually she took drastic measures:
This sounds suspiciously adjacent to my determination that Stardew Valley is actually most especially a power fantasy, despite not overtly resembling typical video game power fantasies, because it’s all about a world where personal happiness and social and professional success are achievable by systems carefully engineered for enough complexity to feel rewarding and enough simplicity to be comforting and ultimately tractable.
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