Before I met Five, I had been playing The Sims. I had all the expansions minus Makin’ Magic. Five had also been playing The Sims, though maybe a bit different from how I played. We were together when The Sims 2 was announced, and we got the sims-creating demo Bodyshop to play around with, when Five was visiting me. I did install and play it on my own once it got out. But it was so much more fun when we first were able to install it on a laptop that could actually run it smoothly. As opposed to my ancient computer. It wasn’t long before I got a new computer, specifically to run the game.Playing The Sims 2 with Five was always fun, and unexpected. When I played on my own, I wanted things to be ‘perfect’, but that usually ended in a very boring game. Five knew how to shake things up and make things happen. He made our sims do things, I would never consider! It was kind of like he messed it up, and I straightened it out.

From the original game to The Sims 3, I have loved the building part most of all. And though the basegame of Ts2 came with plenty of things to build and decorate with, I was happy when the first expansion was announced. I bought most expansions, but Five also bought me some. We think he bought Pets and Bon Voyage, and possibly Seasons. This was still before we moved in together, so I was mostly playing on my own.

Though we did not write stories just yet, we did create some interesting sims. After we had watched Fawlty Towers, we created the hotel and staff and guests. The Polly sim actually looked like Polly! After that, I did create a few short stories, but nothing that we saved.

With the expansions Seasons and Freetime, and the discovery of the Inbreeding challenge, Five saw the possibility of creating a story. We basically just played, made choices together for the family and posted the episodes on our forum. By this time we had moved in together, and it was a lot of fun writing and creating these episodes while being in the same room. As the story went on, we pushed the limits of free play and geared more towards planned stories. We also started planned story with sims of our forum members: The Disaster Family.

The expansions brought not just more stuff to build, decorate and create with, but also sets of interaction and sims-actions that we took full advantage of when creating the stories. But because we had very specific plans for some episodes, we soon turned to some third-party modifications for the game. It made making the stories a lot easier.

Again, I never got the last expansion. But we were ready for The Sims 3, with new computers and a new apartment of our own.