14 yo DC wants Sims . . . yes or no?

[Anonymous]

I have no experience with Sims. DC played it a few weeks ago at a friends' house on a computer and has been obsessively begging for it, will say with own money. Is it appropriate for 14?

I tried looking it up on "Commonsense Media" and now it looks like there are actually a million different versions . . . guidance on which is best, or general opinions on the Sims generally?

Thank you.

[Anonymous]

The original is wonderful: you build and manage a city. Then there are Sims "people" or something like that, which I found quite boring, and focuses more on developing relationships between characters.

[Anonymous]

My 11 yo has sims4 and the cats and dogs expansion pack and loves it. She could spend hours playing it, but other than that I had no idea it was inappropriate. How?

[Anonymous]

I’d say it’s fine for a teenager aside from the fact that it has the potential to be a huge time suck.

[Anonymous]

^^ yeah it simulates , furnishing a house with limited funds she has to make sure her “sims people eat and exercise, and even found out that one “richer” sims could buy an extra house and rent it out to increase his wealth.

Her main interest is building and learning about architecture. She advanced to Sims from Minecraft.

[Anonymous]

Seems pretty innocent when you consider the things out there for a 14yo!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Seems pretty innocent when you consider the things out there for a 14yo!

+1 I can’t imagine saying no to sims.

[Anonymous]

Good point about the time suck. Is it one of those games that sends you messages saying, "You haven't been visiting your farm and now all the animals are dying!"?

It's something I'd want to have clear time limits on -- maybe weekends only?

[Anonymous]

DC won't be doing anything else

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Good point about the time suck. Is it one of those games that sends you messages saying, "You haven't been visiting your farm and now all the animals are dying!"?

It's something I'd want to have clear time limits on -- maybe weekends only?

I don’t know about alerts- you should be able to turn them off. When you log out of the game nothing happens; you pick up where you left off, so there’s no need to worry about what’s happening when you’re not playing.

In the sims you don’t get the satisfaction of winning a game, so there’s no real natural time to log off. That can be good and bad- you can easily log out at pretty much any time and pick up again later. But without the satisfaction of “winning,” and gameplay moving so slow, it can take more time to feel like you’ve achieved anything in the game.

[Anonymous]

Both of my daughters (16 and 14) have Sims on their laptops. They really enjoy it. They download a lot of free things for them, use a cheat code for unlimited money, and have a lot of fun creating.