Jey remembers the feeling of sitting down to play The Sims, more than two decades ago, and just becoming engrossed in building the little digital doll houses.
"I was like, 'Whoa, this is so cool to be able to control a simulation, a life that's not your life, but you can kind of make it a life of your own in this game'," she says.
"I would sit and watch my sister play for hours, and then finally, when it was my turn to play, I would sit there for another few hours. It just sucks you in because you can do so much in the game."
The professional video game creator, known as JeyJey Bink, streams herself playing The Sims 4 to tens of thousands of fans online. The game also inspired further study.
"I actually applied to be an interior architect, and I also applied for an architecture course because I loved building houses on The Sims growing up."
"You've got an empty plot of land and you can draw walls and add windows, add doors and design your own kind of architecture, and it opened my eyes to these possibilities."
The Sims has just turned 25, celebrating a quarter-century of house building, relationships and creativity.
Pushing boundaries
A lot of people who grew up playing The Sims would remember an odd quirk: you can use a cheat code to remove the ladder from the pool while your Sim is swimming, drowning them.
It's these kinds of unexpected scenarios that had a big impact on people, says Jini Maxwell, video game curator at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. ACMI is holding a special event celebrating the Y2K aesthetics of the early 2000s and nostalgia of the series.
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"The Sims creates a kind of domestic sandbox [that] facilitates so much, like, social, creative and imaginative play, and I think that kind of play, it gives you a sense of agency," Maxwell says.
"[The Sims] lets you hone a skill or develop a skill, lets you explore different social dynamics, you know, exorcise the demon, remove a pool ladder."
While the video game series has been played by around 500 million players so far, it was originally thought to be a relatively niche spin-off of the popular city-building and planning game series Sim City (created by designer Will Wright).
Maxwell believes this smaller scope meant some of the gameplay design decisions ended up being very groundbreaking socially, including the very first gay kiss ever portrayed in video games.
"The Sims was not conceived of as a blockbuster, high-budget video game," they say. "So when Jamie Doornbos, one of the engineers, just decided that gay relationships were going to be an option, nobody really saw a reason not to, nobody really saw a reason to cut it."
Creativity and culture
It's the humour and level of wish fulfilment in The Sims that video games researcher Jacqueline Burgess says has given it broad enduring appeal, especially for women and girls.
"The Sims is funny in a lot of different ways," she says. "The tone of the game is sarcastic and satirical and, indeed, the entire game is a satire of suburbia — that made the game and its humour familiar and accessible for players.
"It was also a sort of dream simulator for some people: maybe you lived in an apartment or a city but you could move your Sims into the dream suburban home. By just entering cheats, you build and buy all sorts of combinations of houses, so it gave players a lot of agency and control.
"Because of the game's focus on creativity, it also appealed and still continues to appeal to female players who, despite making up nearly half of all video game players, are stereotypically not considered the gamers."
Maxwell says the games continue to evolve alongside society.
"Video game history isn't just technology history, it's also cultural history, and thinking it about it that way is a way of humanising that experience for both players and developers," they say.
"Beyond the shocking and scandalous gay kiss, a recent expansion introduced polyamorous relationships, because that's something that's in the cultural Zeitgeist now.
"The Sims is a really perfect example of how the game sort of continues to expand and reflect the society that we're in."
EA presents The Sims 25 is at ACMI from February 21-23. A ticketed panel discussion on the games will be held on Saturday, February 22 at ACMI.
