A day in In 2014, 32-year-old musician AJ Luca texted his friend sad and shocking news. “Gina Marie’s mother,” the message began, “just died on the kitchen floor.” Immediately, without hesitation, Luca’s friend responded to her condolences. Gina Marie’s mother, Marie LaRosa, is a successful businesswoman who founded a large resort company with her husband. She died suddenly of old age while cooking. Gina Marie took over the family business after her parents died. And all of this makes sense — none of which is strange — if you ignore the fact that Gina Marie and her mother are Sims.
It’s safe to say that New Jersey-based Luca has always been invested in her Sims. Her (real-life) friend immediately knew what Luca’s stuff about Marie LaRosa meant — and complimented, even though Marie was just a bunch of pixels in one of the best-selling video game series of all age. “My husband and my parents base their names on my Sims,” says Luca, “I talk about them as if they were human.” When chatting with family in the evening, Luca might say something like, “Cash Covington got married to Alysha today!”
Gina Marie and her mother are characters Luca created in The Sims 3but when she buys a gaming laptop to play The Sims 4 In 2017, she formed a new family: The Holts. Elementary school teacher Amy O’Grady is married to detective Jon Holt and they have five children together: master painter Sadie, programmer Jon David, famous athlete Bobby, professional gamer Paul and uncle Veterinarian Andrea. Today, Amy and Jon have eight grandchildren. All that was lost was 5 years of Luca’s life.
For half a decade, Luca played with the same family of Sims—they expanded through marriage to include the Covingtons and McDermotts. As someone who has never played with the same Sim for longer than a week (and who has forced many Sims to swim to their death), I am intrigued by Luca’s gameplay — and the gameplay of the 21-year-old substitute teacher. Shannon, also based in New Jersey.
Shannon (who declined to give his last name for privacy reasons) has been playing with the same Sims family for seven years. While Luca periodically turns off the game’s aging feature so that Jon and Amy Holt don’t die, Shannon doesn’t – meaning the first man and woman in her Sims family, John and Laura Jones, have passed away. ages ago long ago. “She was electrocuted while fixing the dishwasher, I still remember that,” Shannon said of Laura’s passing. “It was very sad.”
There are now 11 generations of Joneses. Shannon uses the ancestry app Quick Family Tree (not related to Sims) to keep track of her characters, and shares the family’s history on her social media account @simmingshannon. Here, viewers leave comments like, “why does this make me emotional.” No wonder Shannon herself is so emotionally attached to her Sims.
“I take pictures of them all the time, and I have this huge wall in their house, which is filled with family photos from all generations. It’s emotional, you have a little bit of nostalgia,” Shannon said. She calls playing Sims an “escape” and “a way to explore different parts of life in a safe space before stepping out into the real world”. In the future – the real world – she hopes to have a large family of her own.
