It was 1999, and not fearing Y2K, my dad had taken me to the PC world in Kingston to get a new computer. As he chatted to the shop assistant about the upcoming Windows 2000 operating system, I’d slid off to the video game section. And that’s where I first saw it.
A thick, sealed box, emblazoned with the words “Sim City 3000”. A futuristic aerial view of skyscrapers, a shimmering gold logo, the weight of multiple installation CDs, I was tantalised. It was there, the future, in my tiny little hands, not yet dented from holding my phone too much. What then pursued was a heated 10-15 minute conversation with my dad, where I begged incessantly for him to let me take it home. I had to have it. I needed it. It was educational. Maybe my arguments were particularly persuasive aged 7, maybe my dad just couldn’t bare hearing it about it for the next month. Either way we got the 285 home with the box laying heavy in my lap.
What my dad didn’t know is that he had quite literally changed my life. This was the end of the old me, the analog me, the collector of Girl Talk. No, she was dead. Welcome to the new me - someone who is going to spend an inordinate amount of their life on the computer.
Some people may think that’s sad, that my youth was taken by pixels too soon, and that my brain has been worn away to a nub by the shiny blue light. But I feel quite the opposite. Je ne regrette rien.
I spent the next few months building my digital world, learning about a huge array of socioeconomic factors through game play. It was here, for example, that I learnt that you don’t really want to build a casino in your town, as gambling attracts crime. And whilst much of the life lessons of waste management went over my head, playing Sim City 3000 during my allotted computer time helped me become very au fait with the PC, and the internet in turn. As the months of 1999 drew closer to the Millennium, Google had led me to another obsession to cram into the precious minutes I had been allocated. Neopets.
If you don’t know what Neopets is, I’m surprised you made it this far - because to understand the lore of being terminally online, Neopets is a founding text. This game levelled up from Sim City, because, crucially, it introduced avatars as opposed to just digital brick building. In the utopia of Neopia, I learnt the concept of free will and the stock market, as well as how you might cook an omelette. It was here I started my first blog. Never mind what happened next (losing the entire summer I was 10 to a pretty heavy Sims addiction, creating my first website on Geocitites, discovering the perils of Chat Roulette, getting onto Bebo, which eventually led to say, a decade long spanning career in social media). It was the turn of the century and I had found the soft calm of the cursor. I was building extensions of my very vivid imaginations into the digital sphere. And, much like Patrick Bateman getting a good table in Pastels, checking on my Neopets and Sim City population let relief wash over me in an awesome wave.
The year now, of course, is 2025. And due to a series of unfortunate events and a pretty intense case of burn out, I was unsurprised to find myself back in the fugue state I found myself in 26 years ago. I wasn’t getting enjoyment out of scrolling in my down time, I needed something less real Sims and more, well, Sims. It was in this moment I accidentally downloaded a casual farming and city building game called Townships. It was advertised to me so aggressively whilst playing bootleg Tetris on my phone, I felt compelled to grow crops, produce goods, and build libraries for the citizens of Unwindington (the name of my town might give you a clue as to my mental state when I downloaded this game). I check on the cows and the sheep and the people in my co-op. I sell milks and eggs and dig away in a mine for gold ore. It is entirely addictive and I must delete it. But the calm it creates, the scratch it itches, it’s too hard to ignore. I need to dig the fork down the cast of my broken mind and give it a good go.
All of this is a long way of saying, that in the 26 years that I’ve been “online”, I have always found myself drawn to the world we build. And whilst I find sowing wheat more relaxing than scrolling feeds, my propensity toward social media and how and why people use it, has been entirely born out of a world in which I happily observe, check in on, and log digital avatars. Some of those avatars are chickens. Some are ex love island contestants or girls I went to school with.
This Substack is called Sim City, because that is what social is to me - a crowded digital game we’ve built for ourselves one by one. It can only exist if we participate, but to participate is to be watched. It’s meant to be lawless, but there are many unwritten rules. It’s dark and perverse, and fun and joyful, and whilst my husband says he’d like to switch the internet off tomorrow, I know if that happened I’d be naming rocks and organising them into groups within a week. Because none of this, crucially, is about likes or views or any of those deeply depressing metrics I have to obsessively monitor for work. It’s about people, real or otherwise. It’s about stories. It’s about imagination. It’s about culture, and anthropology, and also just being a bit nosy - a crucial part of the human experience. I like these things just as much in real life, more so even, and I’d always rather participate in community initiatives that put these factors into practice. But, life is pretty real - and has been a bit too real for me of late. The stakes of the virtual world are low. And who doesn’t like to engage in a bit of escapism from time to time.
I’m not advocating for plugging yourself into the matrix and hoping for the best, but through this Substack I hope I will peel back to the covers on some of the wiring that both defends and denies the power of an online world. I hope you enjoy reading it, I’ll certainly enjoy writing it, and like that another foot print is made.