Sul Sul! In case you missed it, just last month it was announced that a film adaptation of the beloved life simulation computer and video game franchise, The Sims, is in the works with Barbie’s Margot Robbie at the helm. It seems we have all agreed that Robbie is uniquely qualified to turn childhood vehicles of imagination into successful film franchises for nostalgic adults, as she’s also heading up a film adaption of the board game Monopoly, which feels decidedly less whimsical but I will withhold judgment. The announcement about The Sims film, however, did set me to reminiscing about my nearly lifelong obsession with the franchise: I first started playing when it was released in 2000 and have owned every subsequent, numbered sequel to the game and even a few spin-offs. Though a very different product, The Sims has a lot in common with Barbie, which I touched upon briefly in the piece I wrote about the Barbie film last summer. What is particularly relevant about Barbie (the toy) is the way that children (my childhood self included) have taken to her as an avatar of their own imaginations, acting out fantasies and curiosities, dreaming of fabulous careers, friends, and homes, filling in the space around Barbie with fantastic storylines and imaginary—and often even mundane—worlds.
The Sims, too, has long been a vehicle for imagination, play, and exploration both outlandish and tame. It is just as much an outlet for playing out wildly antisocial fantasies and borderline psychopathic curiosities (like removing the pool ladder while your Sim swims) as it is a comfortable and reassuring setting for raising a virtual family, roleplaying homeownership, and following stable, predictable paths toward social and professional success. While Barbie broke social ground by presenting to the mid-century American consumer a fantasy world in which women were the main characters and could pursue anything from homeownership to space travel, The Sims broke ground by creating a world a lot like our own but stripped of the social baggage around race, gender, religion, and sexuality—that last one, it turns out, was partially by accident. The neutrality and inclusivity of The Sims soon became one of its hallmarks, however, and its creators took note. In 2016 for example, in the spirit of truly open play and free imagination, the game’s developers made updates to the current sequel, The Sims 4, removing gender barriers and making a wide range of variables available to players, essentially allowing for the creation of a wide range of gender expression and behavior untethered to the Sim’s sexuality or anatomical features. This is on top of an already impressive gamut of skin tones, facial features, clothing choices, and hairstyles that cover a wide range of cultures.
It is this spirit of freedom, exploration, and limitless play that defined The Sims for its players, both through the sanctioned parameters of the game and, inevitably, through the countless mods, patches, skins, and other custom content that savvy Simmers spliced into their games, a tradition shared by gamers of all genres and titles. Unlike some games, however, the creators of The Sims franchise have enabled and encouraged players to mod their game and share their creations. It is these mods that allowed players to turn The Sims into a fantasy world of their own making, be it one filled with wild sex acts, where pink and green spotted dogs and cats roam the neighborhood, where a zombie apocalypse might burst out, or that might function as makeshift nudist community. That last one is the one I’ll be covering today as we look at how Simmers have, for 25 years, gone to great lengths to incorporate nudity and naturism into The Sims, what that says about us as players, and what role these undocumented, simulated, nude-friendly worlds play in the larger nudist community.
Welcome to the Neighborhood
The Sims represent an idealized version of life in which everything is obvious and happiness is easily attainable. And… I’d argue that our love for The Sims stems from our innate human need for social rebellion. When we play The Sims, almost everyone makes their character do some socially unacceptable things.
-Tara Parekh, “Why we love The Sims: Living boldly, vicariously” for The Stanford Daily, October 27, 2019
If there was any question about whether other children were also stripping their Barbie dolls naked and acting out their childhood curiosities, the collective, all but obscured efforts of modders, content creators, and players striving to do the same in The Sims leave no doubt. Yes. The game’s creators even go to some lengths to guide players in this pursuit. In its simulation of something like real life, The Sims incorporates nudity in situations both mundane and salacious, such as when Sims enter the shower or when they “woohoo” with another Sim (the game is rated “T for Teen,” so that’s about as wild as it gets), always with the famed mosaic censor grid in place to block the Sims’ anatomically Barbie-like bodies from view. Curious players might have figured out that they could use the “move_objects” cheat code to take a look behind the censor grid, but there’s not much there to look at and not much else that a Sim could do nude. Various iterations of the franchise did, however, incorporate other fun nude gimmicks like skinny dipping, streaking, and even a nudist household called Pixel Acres, a comedic reference to the game’s pixelated censorship. The game’s creators seem to enjoy leaning into the players’ penchant for the socially unacceptable or, put another way, the players’ interest in exploring what the world might look like if the rules and stigmas of our own real-world society were set aside, so these kinds of nods to our human curiosity and silliness are pretty consistent throughout the game.
While these bits of sanctioned, pixelated, in-game nudity are fun and quirky for most players, it was bound to not be enough for many others. And so the modding began as players of the very first iteration of The Sims began re-skinning their Sims with more realistic nude bodies, re-molding body meshes to feature anatomically correct (a term I am using loosely here) polyhedral penises, vulvas, and breasts, and modding the game to get rid of that aforementioned censor grid. In no time, Simmers could have an entire neighborhood of naked people living normal, everyday lives in the nude if they wanted. Or wild naked lives if they wanted! Or they could decide that just some of their Sims were nudists and that, in their simulated reality, it was perfectly normal for a few people to walk around their homes or community lots with nothing on and not a care in the world. It was up to the player to decide how nudity might factor into their gameplay. Certainly many of those same players were modding all sorts of other features, animations, and skins into their games to customize their worlds and their play in endless other ways. For example, while simple nudity mods for The Sims abound, it’s clear from looking at the kinds of custom content that exists for the game that much of the nudity-related content is sexual in nature, an interesting window into our myriad human curiosities and our desire for both sexual and non-sexual exploration in a safe, private, and nonjudgmental setting.
Following the initial launch of The Sims, each subsequent game has run on a different engine with different systems in place for the game’s mechanics. Each game also had a unique system for how the Sims’ bodies, skins, and clothing work, forcing players to quickly reverse engineer each new game release in order to build new mods, workarounds, and tricks to get their Sims naked. This has usually only taken a few days from a new release or update, but the task is no easy one and is complicated by the game’s increasingly complex customization options and sliders, and the addition of new age groups, fitness levels, gender variations, and skin tones. What was once three body types in three skin tones across two genders became a virtually endless array of increasingly realistic Sim bodies and it takes much more time and care to get those simulated bodies naked in their simulated world. Along with increasingly complicated bodies, however, have come increasingly complex worlds that the Sims can occupy and enjoy, with increasingly intricate interactions, motivations, and social structures, features that have in turn opened the doors to more sophisticated game mods.
One particularly sophisticated mod—or suite of mods, perhaps—has allowed players to turn The Sims 4 into either a giant orgy or a nudist utopia… or anything in between. Wicked Whims, a mod package well known for incorporating highly customizable levels of attraction, sexuality, body functions, and reproductive cycles into the game also introduced nudity that Sims can enjoy separately from their sexuality by way of an entire “Naturism” gameplay feature. It adds Naturism as a skill that Sims can hone and practice, as an interest that they can pursue and get fulfillment from, and as an activity around which Sims can form clubs and hangouts. As Sims practice naturism, they find themselves more and more comfortable spending time nude at home, outdoors, and, eventually, in the company of others. That’s kind of a big deal.
NudistCommunity.package
In the long, decades- if not century-old history of the nudist community and its makeshift, clandestine spaces, the struggle of maintaining a connection to the rest of the nudist community in the off-season seems to be a consistent battle. And so the nudists adapt, they take to social media communities, committee roles, art and literature, and online meet-ups, if they’re not actively traveling to warmer climes where they can enjoy the sun and warmth on their skin. Though I know we would not normally think of an alternative, simulated, nude-friendly environment like a modded copy of The Sims as part of the nudist experience, I would argue that it plays a similar role in our collective curiosity about the human body, our exploration of social nudity, and, perhaps for nudists, it also can play a role in our connection to the nudist community when it’s less practical to engage in person and in real life.
I also recognize that The Sims is not the only game regularly and widely modded by its players, and it’s far from the only game modded to incorporate nudity, naturism, or sexual activity. It’s almost never recognized by the gaming community for the size of its content creation community, but others would attest that it really ought to be, though the game’s majority female fanbase might contribute to its lack of recognition. That said, there’s something different about a game like The Sims compared to other commonly modded games like Skyrim or Fallout. Unlike games with puzzle solving, guided missions, and combat as central mechanisms, the point of The Sims is just living life and sharing a community, which makes it a much closer approximation to the real world we know and a perfect vehicle to either reimagine our own life or live out an entirely different one. This phenomenon is exactly what makes The Sims one of the most successful PC games of all time. Some of the earliest reviews of the game took note of its player’s tendency to use the platform to play out their fantasies, be they innocent, wacky, naked, or murderous. Use of the game to test socially unacceptable scenarios is well-documented:
When Jennifer Kersten was passed over for a job after a grueling interview, she went home and played The Sims on her computer. She created characters based on the people who rejected her, then killed them off over and over by drowning them in a swimming pool without ladders and starving them in a room with no food.
"I'm quite normal and professional," said Kersten, a 35-year-old Web site producer in Milton, Wis. "Until I get home and get into the game."
When it comes to The Sims, the most popular computer game of all time, Kersten's not lying; she's the norm.
-Patrick Kampert, “Living vicariously through the Sims” for the Chicago Tribune, October 7, 2002
Nudity is just one of those socially unacceptable scenarios, but one that real-world people do actually get to participate in as well. Because of this, The Sims has undoubtedly become a makeshift nudist retreat when the real thing is out of reach. It’s a home-away-from-home where, even in the dead of winter or hundreds of miles from the nearest nude beach or club, nudists and non-nudists alike can live their best nudist life vicariously through the virtual world they’ve painstakingly built. These isolated, obscure, often unmentioned spaces are a sort of nudist space, too, and part of an even larger community of people who just have a more open mind about nudity and the human body in general. I personally have dipped into my own simulated world during just such a cold winter or rainy weekend knowing the virtual world of The Sims would be virtually sun-drenched and ripe for a virtual nude hangout by the virtual pool. While I do know some fellow nudists who play The Sims to get that same nudist fix, I can’t help but imagine there are countless others who would never call themselves nudists but who are using these mods to liven up their fantasy worlds with social nudity and naturism, too. For posterity, these private virtual environments deserve a place in the nudist archives for the role that they play and the experiences they facilitate.
Welcome (Back) to the Neighborhood
In preparation for writing this piece, I felt like I should dive back into the original The Sims game from 2000 to replay the game I spent hours and hours and hours playing after school growing up. As it turns out, the original game that released for PC 24 years ago is not actually compatible with modern computer hardware, which complicated my mission but stoked my conviction to make it work. The entire process of installing the game, hunting down mods, and replaying The Sims prompted some comparisons in my mind to the modern nudist community… to the extent that it felt like perhaps I should include my thoughts on that experience in this piece as well. So, here goes!
For starters, the original The Sims game is not a piece of software that you can just go out and buy in the year 2024. It exists only as a bootleg download of the PC version of the game in a dark corner of some Internet forum, hosted on a shady looking server, with vague instructions on how to get it booted. The Mac-compatible version of the game is seemingly lost to time, so even though I use a Mac computer, I was stuck trying to install this turn-of-the-millennium PC software on a decidedly not-PC piece of hardware. I spent an hour prepping my computer and downloading a third-party utility that would then allow me to download and install this bootleg version of The Sims. Then I spent hours actually installing the game, followed by another hour or so trying to troubleshoot why it all still wasn’t working. Making this PC game operational on a MacBook Pro a quarter of a century after its original release took a whole evening. But it didn’t end there, because I also wanted to find those fabled mods that would give me that low-resolution, simulated nudist utopia. I soon found, however, that finding resources that are still online and available was more difficult than I had expected, and locating a nude male body mesh that wasn’t sporting a permanent, massive erection took several nights in a row of rifling through nondescript mod files in online archives. This would have been much easier 24 years ago when the myriad websites and forums and modders that had sprung up to rework and augment Maxis’ original creation were still around. Most have long gone defunct, their contributions to the game have been all but lost.
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I did it, though! I found the information I needed, I found the mods I was looking for (such as a flaccid penis and furniture that looked a little less like it belonged to Frasier Crane), I found the ruins of the custom content sites I once frequented regularly, and I found a small flicker of a community still actively trying to maintain the old content and create new. You can see the proof of my hard work in the screenshots above! Impressive, I know. His name is Clark. Anyway! All that work and time spent hunting for the tools to turn The Sims into a simulated nudist experience, wading through outdated websites, and stumbling across the few remaining enthusiasts reminded me a lot of the nudist community itself, of the state it’s in today. It was not so different from finding resources for nude recreation in the real world: tucked into private, clandestine corners of the internet, hindered by outdated or expired websites and blog entries, and often only made possible by a handful of committed, under-appreciated enthusiasts who see the value in sharing and maintaining those resources. Similarly, akin to the nudist historians and librarians cataloguing nudist history and artifacts, so do a select few Simmers rescue the files, mods, and codes from shuttered modding websites and long-gone content creators, archiving them in secure, centralized databases like Sims File Share, where the hosts promise to store the files permanently.
I share this because I worry often about where the nudist community is headed, as our websites are often outdated if not defunct, our clubs are closing, our beaches are endangered, and the enthusiasm behind social nudity seems to be waning. It also has me concerned about the nudist history that’s taking place right now online and on social media that’s likely to be lost to time as well, as content is removed, accounts are deactivated, and platform popularity shifts. I am grateful that there are still a few people working to maintain what’s here, but unlike The Sims, the nudist and naturist community isn’t fading because a series of shinier sequels were released that made it obsolete. It’s just fading because it’s not being effectively maintained or marketed and it’s resting on unsteady ground.
Save and Exit
Ultimately, The Sims is not just a sandbox that players have modded to explore and express body freedom and nudism. It’s also become a place for safe gender and sexual expression, world exploration, architectural and design experimentation, magical imagination, homeownership role play, relationship building, and career testing. It has forced players to get creative in how they tweak their game to suit their needs and help them play out the exact fantasies, lives, and socially unacceptable scenarios they are unable to experience in the real world. For the nudist community, I think this is particularly impactful, but for the sake of our human curiosity about all sorts of other experiences, The Sims is an important outlet that spans all variety of interests and motivations.
It all speaks to a desire to explore lives and worlds that we don’t have access to, that are not socially (or even legally) sanctioned, or that we might be embarrassed to admit. That is an obstacle that the nudist community also faces in its pursuit of welcoming and engaging with curious newbies. I think this look at The Sims also should serve as a reminder of the importance of archiving and documenting these spaces and resources for future enjoyment and education, but also as a reminder to recognize that nontraditional spaces and communities might be overlapping with and contributing to the nudist community in unexpected ways. The nudist community would do well to appreciate that. In researching, re-playing, and writing this piece, I certainly have found a new appreciation for the work that the Simming community has put into creating a makeshift nudist space for myself and others, and I hope you’ve taken something from it as well.
And, if you’re feeling inspired to dig back into the original The Sims game, good luck to you! It’s a heck of a task but a lot of fun.
Really love this piece. Although I (Justin) was not an avid Sims player (I did invoke my fair share of hypothetical disasters in the original Sim City), I've considered myself a competitive PC gamer for the majority of my life to date. That said, I can draw a lot of parallels and relate to a lot of the content here, especially as my passion for PC gaming has been surpassed only by my passion for naturism over the past five years or so. Thanks as always for your deeply thought-provoking and incredibly well-written posts that always seem to resonate with me in one way or another.
IIRC there are some RPGs that allow you to play your character nude.