The Sims: Coping With Death Through Humor
The Sims is a widely successful video game franchise where players can simulate life experiences by controlling a customizable character or household through a series of interactive choices. Throughout all four versions of The Sims, players have the option to customize almost every aspect of their sim: from their tattoos, makeup look, race, gender, zodiac to their favorite music genre. However, when it comes to a sims' mortality, players have limited control. Users can anticipate and plan birthday celebrations but there's no stopping time, or youth potions, just like real life. Well- kind of.
IGN. "Create A Sim" mode to customize in game players
Throughout sims history, sims developers have introduced more interactions surrounding end of life with their release of new game versions, updates, and expansion packs. The Sims 3 Seasons introduces death by frostbite when a sim is excessively exposed to cold weather. The causes of death in The Sims vary from realistic circumstances such as a kitchen fire to unimaginable circumstances such as dying from laughter in The Sims 4, where a sim gains the "very playful" moodlet from corresponding interactions. Across all extensions of The Sims empire, the gameplay depicts death as an event that can manifest as unanticipated, frantic, devastating, and accidental, or an event that is humorous, peaceful, and arguably dignified to the player's desired gameplay.
Types of Deaths
In the original version of The Sims, causes of death ranged from realistic to fictional, adding a feeling of whimsy to real-life experiences—a staple value of the video game's brand. Sims could die from starvation, electrocution, fire, and drowning. Or, sims can fall victim to obscure deaths, such as death by guinea pig disease after getting bitten by a guinea pig, or by getting launched into the sky and never returning from using a 'skydiving simulator' on low energy. Once sims die, the Grim Reaper appears, and gathering sims witness the death. They can attempt to plead for their loved ones' lives, but nothing is guaranteed.
Sims will always die once they reach the end of their lifespan. The Sims is rated 13+ by the ESRB, therefore, sims cannot die by violence from other sims, and players cannot directly kill their sims... without getting a little creative in accelerating the processes of fires, drowning, or having their sims engage in risky interactions.
TheSimsWiki. A popular sims phenomenon where players take actions such as building walls around sims to trap them in fatal circumstances and enact their forcible deaths.
In-Game & User Loopholes to Mortality
Throughout sims history, players have had the freedom to build or destroy households as they please. However, there are some restrictions to the simulator gameplay. Each sim has a lifespan of a fixed amount of days. When this period ends, the sim ages up until they max out of days. The average sim lifespan is categorized into age periods of infants, toddlers, children, teens, young adults, adults, and elders. In-game settings allow players to choose the option of a "short, average, or long" lifespan where the users can select the duration of these life phases. However, this has not stopped internally and externally implemented attempts to prolong sims' lives, stagnate them at a certain age, or resurrect sims that have passed.
Carl's Sims 4 Guide. The ingredients necessary to cook "Ambrosia" in The Sims 4, a dish that brings sims back to life, or the beginning of their life stage.
The Sims 4 allows users to cook the ambrosia dish using angelfish, the potion of youth, and the death flower to feed to the ghost of a sim who has already passed in order to resurrect them back to their material form. The potion of youth can be obtained with enough currency or simoleons, which, similar to ambrosia, reverts an already living sim back to the beginning of their current life phase. Not only is there a prevalence of ghosts in this franchise, but sims can bargain with the Grim Reaper for more time with their loved ones. If that doesn't work, they can routinely mourn at the sim's grave to "strengthen the spirits connection to the physical world, " which allows that sim to roam around as a ghost, who can still interact with others in a limited capacity, and ultimately allows for the possibility of resurrection through ambrosia, or a youth position if desired by the player. The Sims creates a a reality where people have a sense of control over death, and have the possibility to bargain their grief for themselves or their loved ones with the personification of the angel of death himself.
CBR. Displays the Grim Reaper appearing after a sims death, another sim pleading for their loved ones life to the Grim Reaper, and a ghost sim eating Ambrosia to come back to life.
Cheats
TheSimsWiki. Shows in-game cheat options to control age settings of sims.
"Cheats" in the game enable "full edit mode," letting players select any age period to play at any time. The sims community often uses game cheats to ease problems with aspects that conflict with their gameplay goals such as finances and mortality. Players often avoid aging or letting their sims die, showing the strong connection players can form with the sims gameplay. This bond is an essential function to acknowledging how the game expresses end-of-life values to players, as the cheat system allows complete control over the lives of sims if desired.
Grief
CurseForge. Mourning moodlet that displays after a sim's loved one dies.
Sims who have a relationship with a newly deceased sim will receive a sad moodlet that lasts longer than typical moods. Sims who witness the death also receive sad moodlets that affect sims default behavior, mood and interactions. In various game versions, sims may cry at a tombstone upon death or cry under the covers of a bed to reduce the moodlet's duration, promoting the expression of processing grief by letting feelings of grief out. Sims can also talk to others about their sadness to help alleviate the moodlet.
Cemeteries have been part of The Sims, but detailed end-of-life planning and commemoration were not included until the recent release of The Sims 4's "Life & Death Expansion Pack" on October 31st. This expansion allows sims to create wills, heirlooms and funeral preferences, as well as customize funerals with interactive features for mourning and celebration. Players can also choose peaceful death options for their sims, such as passing away in their sleep as loved ones gather to grieve, and can even pursue reincarnation after death. These features represent a significant shift in how the game addresses mourning and grief; utilizing end-of-life gameplay as an opportunity to demonstrate mourning as a culmination of love, purpose and belonging, instead of perpetuating death as a freak accident that elicits a solely devastating impact on sims.
Dextero. Displays a new feature from The Sims 4 Life & Death Expansion Pack where sims can host a funeral service.
In 2024, The Sims 4 reported over 80 million people globally had played the game. As one of the most popular video games of the past two decades, marketed for ages 13 and above, the sims franchise has had significant influence on user attitudes to life and death. Evidently, since the games creation, The Sims has brought an air of simplicity and comedic relief to the seriousness of death, allowing sims to die in playful ways that somehow preserve the sims dignity. A sim with the "goofball" trait dying of laughter emits a sense of comedic relief and almost, peace. A goofball would die of laughter, right? These humorous deaths add a humaneness that many contemporary end-of-life experiences lack.
Productive?
As Elisabeth Kübler-Ross discusses in her bestselling book, On Death and Dying, death has become more mechanical and impersonal in modern times. Meaning, that many people come to the end of their lives in hospitals; where medical machinery is primarily responsible for assessing and treating patient health. In The Sims, illnesses that may occur are fictional, showcasing a perspective where illnesses are not serious, and are not heavily correlated with medicalization. The rare instances of terminal illness in The Sims that can occur such as death by guinea pig disease suggest that illness and perhaps death, are a randomly selected, unserious, and external force.
The Sims has used humor and randomness to create its own definitions of end-of-life experiences with various options for players to regain control over their sim's mortality since the beginning of the franchise. Kübler-Ross asserts that intentional communication and exposure to death is beneficial. However, unsuccessfully balancing coping mechanisms such as humor and control can threaten truly productive grief. If responding to death with humor and control -in virtual reality and in reality- borders on a refusal to accept mortality, humorous definitions of mortality displayed in games such as The Sims may encourage humor's acceleration from a coping mechanism to a harsh hindrance of achieving satisfactory end-of-life experiences.
