I Married Nora Tschirner

I’m basically the reincarnation of an IKEA lamp—useful only as somebody else’s decoration, no real existence of my own. So I needed to build one somewhere. The Sims 3 seemed perfect. You can make anything in this game, so I made a version of myself with everything sorted: stable job, beautiful family, no consequences for anything. The life that only exists in games.

Then I created a version of Nora Tschirner and married her. She’s a German TV personality; in my game, she’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. We have a red-haired daughter named Nami, a villa with ocean views, and I disabled aging so we stay young forever. I’m a surgeon. Everything’s perfect.

The Sims 3 is the Sims 2 sequel, which was the Sims 1 sequel—a game I never played. Not much changes between versions. Better graphics, more possibilities, same basic loop: build a life and watch it either work or collapse depending on whether you remember to keep your characters fed. There’s something honest about that structure.

Then somebody made a nude mod. Conceptually great. Practically devastating. Because Sims don’t come with genitals. So my character’s naked but anatomically incomplete, Nora is nippleless, and I’m staring at this pixel-level disaster thinking about how even when you control absolutely everything, you still manage to wreck it.

The only recourse was the pool. I’ve been systematically drowning Sims to see if I can empty the whole city. It’s weirdly soothing.