Apparently, None of Us Are Ever Giving Up The Sims

I made a meme for longtime Sims players and found out I’m definitely not the only one planning to play forever

I’ve been playing The Sims since I was about 10 years old. At this point, I really can’t imagine there being a time when I just stop playing. I could honestly see myself retired somewhere still downloading custom content, decorating my sims homes, and completing sims 4 challenges.

So, when I had to create a meme for a niche community, choosing The Sims community was pretty easy. Sims players have our own type of humor because there are certain things you really only understand if you play the game. We joke about updates breaking our mods, spending hours downloading CC, and playing way longer than we planned. There’s also some dark humor only sims players would understand like getting your kids taken by child protective services and trapping your neighbors in swimming pools.

Making the Meme

My idea came from thinking about just how long I’ve already been playing. If I started at 10 and I’m still playing now, who’s to say I won’t still be playing at 80?

The meme says:

“Nurse: It’s time for your medication.

80-year-old me: Give me five minutes, my Sim is getting married.”

I wanted the picture to tell part of the joke on its own, so I used AI to bring the photo to life. It shows an older woman sitting at her gaming computer completely focused on a Sims wedding while her nurse is standing in the doorway waiting for her. I also used little details that Sims players would immediately recognize, like the green plumbobs on her blanket, wall and desk, and The Sims playing on her computer.

Figure 1. My original meme concept, with the visual created using generative AI.

Creating the meme made me think about Kevin Pauliks’ article on the visuality of memes. Pauliks talks about how memes have become increasingly visual and how digital images are shared, sampled, and remade to create meaning online. With my meme, you don’t really need a paragraph explaining the joke. Seeing an 80-year-old woman glued to The Sims while her nurse waits already tells you a lot.

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How my audience reacted

I posted the meme in the Facebook group “Melanin Sims & CC” with the caption, “Been playing The Sims since I was 10… at this point they’re coming to the retirement home with me 😭😂💚.”

I chose that group instead of randomly putting it on my page because I wanted it in front of people who would actually understand it. That ended up working pretty well. When I took my screenshots, the post had 143 reactions and 10 comments.

Figure 2. I shared my meme with the Melanin Sims & CC Facebook community, where it received 143 reactions and 10 comments within the first 13 hours.

The OkDork article about viral content actually connects really well to my engagement experience. Their analysis of more than 100 million articles found that including images was associated with more Facebook sharing. They also found that laughter and amusement were two of the most common emotions in highly shared content. I wasn’t expecting my meme to actually “go viral,” instead, I was purposely going for something visual, funny, and relatable.

The comments were probably my favorite part of this whole experiment because people started adding their own versions of the future.

One person said millennial nursing homes are going to have gaming rooms instead of bingo. Someone said they would still be downloading mods in retirement, and another said they would still be complaining about Sims updates. My favorite part was realizing that everybody basically understood the same joke: we’re not giving this game up.

Figure 3. Screenshot of The Sims players joining in on the joke in the comment section

Reading the comments really helped me understand Shifman’s meme theory. Shifman explains memes through content, form, and stance. My content was the idea of being a lifelong Sims player. The form was the image-and-text meme, and the stance was obviously humorous and exaggerated.

Shifman also makes an important difference between something being viral and something being memetic. Viral content can simply be passed around, while memes involve people imitating, changing, or building onto an idea. Nobody completely remade my meme, but people definitely built onto the idea in the comments by imagining their own lives as elderly Sims players.

See Y’all at the Retirement Home

The biggest thing I took from this is that visibility doesn’t always mean reaching millions of people. Sometimes it’s about getting your content in front of the right people. I made a joke based on something I’ve personally been doing since I was 10, posted it somewhere full of people who understood it, and they immediately started sharing their own version of the experience.

So apparently when we’re all 80, somebody just needs to make sure the nursing home has good Wi-Fi and a place to store our gaming computers.