Machinima & The Sims 2: A Love Story
By: Jesse Martin-Miller
Tags: The Sims, Machinima, Film, Personal Essay, Ea Games

Machinima & The Sims 2: A Love Story

Do your fondest preteen memories involve sitting at a computer?

From 2005 to 2007, I used The Sims 2 and Youtube to sustain a brief career as a creator of “machinima”. Machinima is the use of computer and video games to create computer animated films. I just called it ‘making Sims movies.’ I thought to myself, ‘some day I’m going to be a director,’ and using The Sims 2 to create movies seemed like an obvious way to explore that. Everyone around me — figuratively, of course, because it was the internet — was doing it. All of my favourite songs had music videos made with The Sims 2. Machinima stems from a long tradition, originating in the mid 90s. Most scholarship on the phenomenon of machinima can be attributed to Henry Lowood, a collections curator at Stanford University. He describes machinima as “community-developed content”. Lowood’s research in machinima production emphasizes the “bottom up” growth of machinima, “driven by enthusiasts and accidental filmmakers [who learn] how to deploy technologies from computer games to develop new practices for expressing themselves”.

I was introduced to The Sims by a friend who had it on his family computer. In 2003, I had The Sims: Bustin’ Out for the Nintendo Gamecube, which would lay the groundwork for The Sims 2 in later years. While the original The Sims relied on isometric projection that gave the illusion of a 3D environment — a holdover from the Sim Cities games of the 90’s — Bustin’ Out took place in a totally 3D world. It was addictive. EA recognized that children have creative urges and gave them an almost limitless virtual toolkit to express them. The AI of both playable and non-playable the characters let them be independent. It looked and felt more real than the previous Sims. Following the release of Bustin’ Out, EA began development on The Sims 2. Released in 2004, it innovated gameplay further by including the possibility of creating buildings with multiple stories, the ability to create toddlers and teenagers, and genetic information coded into families. The immersion was more complete. You could build your dream home and breed a family into eternity. EA exuded to players the promise God made to Abraham in Genesis: I will make you exceedingly fertile, and make nations of you. The players looked upon the neighbourhoods they had created and said: This is good. Across the world, Barbies lay dormant in dusty plastic houses — infertile, possibly carcinogenic — while children tended to generations of Sim families.

Helena by Jaydee

To native creators of machinima, The Sims 2 was promising. The gameplay could be manipulated easily for filming. Lowood writes, “Making machinima with The Sims 2 offers control of the camera, navigable anywhere in the 3D environment” but conceded that “controlling the characters is limited to prompting them into certain moods so that the AI induces a desired reaction”. Youtube became the primary method of distributing Sims 2 machinima, whereas previously most machinima was distributed on websites like machinima.com, which later became a Youtube Network under the ownership of Time Warner.

In 2006, a Youtube user named Jaydee227 uploaded Helena — Sims 2 Version — My Chemical Romance, a music video created using The Sims 2. The cinematic quality was unparalleled. The narrative involves a woman in an abusive relationship who is comforted by the ghost of an ex-lover. The ghost torments the woman’s husband, who is revealed to have beaten him into a coma. There is an elaborate wedding scene in a gothic church and believable depictions of violence. The imagery is infused with the emo look that permeated the mid-2000s. This was a departure from previous incarnations of machinima, like The Strangerhood, a series commissioned to Rooster Teeth by EA in 2004 which largely followed a sitcom format. The Strangerhood seemed amateur by comparison — at least visually. As an 11-year-old with the requisite tools at my disposal, I wanted to do the same thing as Jaydee227. I experimented with the in-game image capture tool, built sets, and used characters to act out scenarios. I created my first music video in the winter of 2006, uploading it to Youtube a year later.

The protagonists of Must Have Done Something Right as teenagers in a shadowless low-res world

Must Have Done Something Right is the story of a couple who grows old together set to the song of the same name by Reliant K. There is no polish to the finished product. I had not yet learned how to manipulate Sims’ behaviour with cheat codes or game modifications. Filming involved a more hands-off fly-on-the-wall method than anything I would create later, but I was very proud of it. The characters begin as children, playing in a low-resolution 3D world with no shadows and little texture. Their mothers, who do not feature in the plot at all, can be seen sitting in the background of the set. It was not possible to use children Sims without having an adult present on the lot. In regular gameplay, the absence of a parent would result in the removal of the child by an in-game social worker. I filmed clips of the couple growing old. In post-production, I didn’t have enough clips to lay over the entire song, so I reused clips to create a flashback sequence. Having discovered it was possible to age characters backwards with a cheat code, I reversed their ages until the elderly couple were children once again. By the time the couple reached adulthood, their mothers had died. The newly minted children, now in the house without parents, were promptly removed by a social worker. The last clip shows the car taking them away.

A sim dressed as a French maid is pulled into the floor in Horror Movie

Horror Movie, made in 2007, was my first attempt at creating something scary. The premise was that a ghost was killing the occupants of a derelict mansion. The ghost would appear and characters would die. By this point I had discovered it was possible to kill Sims at will. Deaths included in the film show people burning to death without fire, drowning without water — which created the effect of being pulled into the floor — and being struck by a meteor. There were still many mistakes. I had not yet conquered their AI, so Sims would cry at the off-camera tombstones of dead characters. Even the ghost wails uncontrollably, surrounded by dead Sims. There is also no sound. Horror Movie was inspired by my burgeoning interest in horror movies, prompted by films like Darkness Falls and The Grudge, neither of which I was allowed to watch but was fascinated by nonetheless. Entire movies were now available online, albeit illegally, and 12-year-old me could watch all of them. I had a story to tell, and I wanted it to be disturbing. In subsequent films, I remade

From “The Curse” (2007)

sequences from The Grudge. I made a total of seven videos inspired by The Grudge, called The Curse. To recreate a scene in which a woman walks around after having her jaw torn off, I edited a character so that their chin and mouth were shrunken and pushed back into their neck. I painted over the skin texture in Photoshop to make blood. The result was unconvincing but I thought it was really cool. As The Curse progressed, so did my ability to create more interesting scenes. While nothing I created would parallel Helena, The Curse part 3 and Horror Movie stand on opposing ends of an uncanny valley.

Windows Movie Maker

The filming process generally followed as such: I would plan the project in a notebook. If the game did not provide the appropriate costumes for characters, I would download them from creator sites like ModTheSims2.com. I constructed sets on “soundstages” in order to spare myself the effort from constructing entire buildings I wouldn’t use. To film, I would use a cheat-code to suspend the Sims’ AI . I would use different codes to remove extraneous features like speech bubbles or progress bars that indicated whether or not Sims were happy. They would stand in place until I needed them. I would prompt them to perform a series of actions while using the in-game camera to record. The camera was integrated into standard gameplay, which Henry Lowood describes as a “virtual image capturing tool that mimics the optical function of a standard motion picture camera”. Once filming was done, I would upload the clips to Windows Movie Maker to edit. Using a mix of illegally downloaded music and royalty-free sound effects, I would overlay the sound onto the clips. I wrote subtitles because I never wanted to record myself for dialogue. I was too embarrassed by the sincerity of speaking into a microphone alone in my room.