The Sims 4 is a deeply flawed game, inferior in every way to its predecessors. This is probably why every YouTuber who covers The Sims is miserable. With one exception.
Your average Sims YouTuber has a pretty limited palate. You’ll see:
- Complaints about bugs, highway-robbery pricing, poor customer service, missing features, etc.
- Reviews of new expansion packs that range from “this was playable, despite being buggy and overpriced” to “there were so many bugs that I was literally unable to play it” – i.e., weddings not functioning in My Wedding Stories, werewolves not appearing in Werewolves, whatever
- A 45-minute video of someone building a three-bedroom suburban home
- Randomly generating Sims and making them over
- The 100 Baby Challenge Industrial Complex
Everyone is out of ideas. Everyone hates the game they’re playing.
Except, again, Steph0Sims.
Steph0Sims is a twenty-something British YouTuber with rainbow-coloured hair. It’s not just that she’s funnier, or more creative, or vastly more entertaining than any of her counterparts–it’s that she plays The Sims like someone who survived a mid-century lobotomy.
Your average Sims YouTuber will tackle the 100 Baby Challenge by creating a pretty Family-Oriented blonde and sending her out to the nightclubs around Willow Springs to chat up eligible bachelors. Steph0Sims dropped a custom-made Jeffree Star into a Barbie Dreamhouse, renamed him Jeffree Blowjobs, and proceeded to stay awake for 20 hours knocking him up and forcing him to birth octuplets. She goes out for coffee and returns three times, allowing the game to run and run, the babies to cry and cry. She bleaches and dyes her hair. She plays the opening seconds of Cupcakke’s “Deep Throat”–“HUMP ME, FUCK ME”–every time Jeffree Blowjobs WooHoos with another prospective sperm donor.
Other Simmers work hard to design and distribute custom content: hairstyles, clothing items, and pieces of furniture that capture aesthetics or lifestyles the official Sims team has yet to acknowledge. Steph0Sims, who is, like, a handy enough graphic designer to be able to do this, devotes her skill and talent to creating Sim versions of James Charles’ assless chaps and Tati’s gummy vitamins.
Most of the Simmers who reviewed the most recent expansion pack, Horse Ranch, released their videos a few days after release; most takes boiled down to “this is fun, but overpriced for what you’re getting, and rife with bugs.” Steph0Sims waited four months to publish her review: a twenty-minute shot-for-shot recreation of the 2001: A Space Odyssey parody that opened Greta Gerwig’s Barbie with an enormous pink horse standing in for Barbie and Sim versions of Trisha Paytas and Colleen Ballinger standing in for the blandly-dressed little girls. She then proceeds to take us on a narrative journey of Trisha Paytas riding a unicorn around town to WooHoo with cowboys; every interstitial title includes the same snippet of a faux-country song that goes, “He’s bouncin’ on my booty/Man, I love the way he rides it.”
Look, here’s what it boils down to: YouTube is a hopelessly banal platform rife with mind-numbing micro-celebrities and petty, inscrutable drama. The Sims 4 is a pale imitation of previous games in the series, and each expansion pack leaves players more disappointed than the last. And all of these people remain on this platform, playing this game, day in, day out, like clinically depressed polar bears in a warm urban zoo, nosing a rubber ball listlessly back and forth across the bare concrete platform they’ve been forced to call home. Some of these people use YouTube to complain about the state of things, to dream about how much better this game could be. Steph0Sims takes what she’s been given and makes it worse. It’s almost a resistive act: these mega-corporations have spent years lowering the bar, and here’s Steph0Sims, playing limbo, delighting in it.
Have you ever heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy? It’s a model of educational philosophy that suggests certain methods of engagement with the world around us are more generative and fulfilling than others. At the very bottom of the pyramid is remembrance: me recognizing Colleen Ballinger’s ukulele, me recalling a Vine from 2015. At the top of the pyramid is creation: synthesizing all that one’s learned into a new, utterly original whole; mining the trashy depths of inconsequential YouTube scandals and using its characters to populate her videos, forcing them to fuck, marry, and kill over and over again–on tropical islands, with werewolves, in painstaking recreations of the sets of Dance Moms. She will pack fifty distinct memes, three profane SoundCloud rap songs, and an epilepsy-inducing swirl of game footage into the span of ten seconds. Her work–I’m calling it work–is a monument to trash itself made of trash. In an age of depthlessness, she is a documentarian of the shallows. I cannot recommend her channel enough.
The Niche 