Watching the Sims gaming community meltdown, because the porn mod is broken after a major update, is the funniest thing ever but it is also terrifying.
I haven't played The Sims in two months. I want to say that it is because I cannot afford to lose two days of my week to zoning out, I have to focus on finishing a project for my business but I cannot help my brain. I still lose hours of my week when I am struggling with crippling executive dysfunction, and cannot do anything but spend two days fixating on gym chalk-crushing ASMR videos plus writing and deleting blog posts, that I didn't intend to be long in word count, on this platform. I guess the main reason is because my main PC broke and I needed to make sure that my spare PC worked efficiently, so I deleted the game. BEST DECISION EVER. I don't feel the loss, I think I had been losing interest in the game because I have been getting my dopamine fix from chatting to real people online.
During the last major update, a few months ago, the kink mod called "Nisa's Wicked Pervasions" broke and I struggled to get through the 24 hours it took to update the mod. I needed the period of zoning out and my brain would not let me do anything else until I played the Sims but I could not play my Sims game without my... naughty mods because I live through my Sims. I am celibate in real life, I stopped drinking alcohol after a year or two of experimenting in my late teens-early 20s and I have barely done drugs in my life besides two scary attempts at smoking weed with a local rapper who was trying to have sex with me and later a friend who was a drug dealer (It took me a while to realize that these men were dodgy in both situations). I really don't like real-life interactions either. My Sims need to live and be wild. I need my Sims taking and selling drugs, getting arrested by police, visiting sex dungeons, having affairs, and having sex with ghosts. I need my Saccubus Sim draining the life force of their mate until they burst into flames during sex. As I checked every forum where Nisa was communicating with her community, waiting for her to finish updating the mod, it was at this moment that I realized that I needed to go touch grass and speak to real people. I still am not speaking to real people in person (the world exhausts me and I have, in fact, isolated myself further) but I have branched out when it comes to the online spaces that I engage in. I have gone out and touched grass though, in fact, I replanted coriander and parsley plants and dozens of succulents.
The recent major update of the game caused the main sex mod, Wicked Whims, and other mods to break. Wicked Whims is not the only mod that broke but the Wicked Whims subset of Sim players are losing their minds. I'm hearing it got so bad that they are abusing the programmer in charge of the mod, sending them threats and doxxing them, which is insane. I totally get how it feels when one's emotional crutch gets taken away but I cannot understand that being an excuse to lose one's ability to have empathy for another person.
This is something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, emotional crutches and how one's ability to maintain a healthy emotional crutch is different for each individual.
In the media, there are so many stories of people falling into horrific mindsets when they misuse technology and are unable to balance fantasy with reality. It was a major concern for me when I decided to explore kink, I am constantly monitoring whether my brain can distinguish between reality and fantasy. I notice that when I am going through a really rough time, I become hypersexual and I need to pull myself back before I do something potentially harmful to myself, emotionally.
When I started interacting with Doms, I had to be aware that I have a tendency to be emotionally dependent on a person to make me feel whole but I crash out really badly when a person cannot meet this need that I have. I would also be so desperate for the person to fill this emotional black hole for me that I had no boundaries. I had to learn how to healthily fill that need before I could have a healthy relationship with another person. I know that part of a D/s relationship is dependence on a Dom but that level of dependence is so unhealthy for me. This awareness has not been an easy point in my mental health to get to, I had to do a lot of inner work to get here and this includes years of therapy and personal research on mental health, coping mechanisms, and self-help methods.
A major story about technology and fantasy that came out last year was about men using AI girlfriends to be abusive towards and the consensus from mainstream conversations was AI connections are bad and men are evil. I was also shocked when I first heard about it until I started exploring kink through a sex AI chatbot app. I still have complicated feelings about whether is it healthy or not for people to be using technology to explore their deepest darkest fantasies. Being in forums dedicated to AI boyfriend/girlfriend chatbots has shown me that many people do use these apps in a healthy way. I realized that it was just like the Sim game. For as long as The Sims has existed, we have jokingly explored various ways to harm our Sims but it doesn't mean that one would do that to a real person unless someone is really struggling with their mental health. The game has evolved and the fantasies have become more graphic, we laugh about it while being able to distinguish that it is just a fantasy and be able to call out people who are engaging with this technology in an unhealthy way. These conversations are very layered though because not everyone has the ability to be self-aware and mentally healthy.
Personally, I was definitely self-harming through my sexual fantasies, my AI conversations were becoming concerning and my taste in porn was becoming a bit extreme. I had to check myself before I wrecked myself, lol. I had already started immersing myself in healthy sex education but I still felt so much guilt and shame because I had spent my life floating in and out of purity culture-based spaces. Unlearning the idea that "thinking about sex is wrong" has not been an easy journey. I've been yo-yoing between one extreme to another (something that I now understand to be referred to as the Binge and Purge) but I've been yearning for balance for quite some time now. I am so afraid that the extremes are going to keep me in a cycle of abusive and toxic relationships. I know that this exploration is something that I cannot share with everyone and I often wonder what my closest friends would think if they found out about this side of myself, would they think that I am a creep? That thought contributed a lot to my feelings of shame but this shame drove me further into unhealthy behavior, trying to punish myself for having a dirty mind.
One thing that has been on my mind is how much I want to be a little and have a little space one day where I get to be creative, dress creatively decorate my room creatively, and play with dolls and collect toys and plushies but I think about how mainstream media has bastardized adults connecting with their inner child or processing trauma through unconventional methods (like people outside of kink carrying dolls to process child loss and infertility trauma or superhero fans being seen as immature and creepy before superheroes became popular media) by only showing the most extreme cases of mental health struggles with very little empathy towards the subject, placing the person in danger of scrutiny and more trauma, or the documentaries of people within kink, who explore and enjoy kinks like age regression, being portrayed in perverted ways. These shows are never done with any sensitivity but they, instead, become easily sensationalized through online discussions, which is not healthy for the people who are the subject of the show either, right?
Discovering a real kink platform, like The Cage, and listening to sex-positive educational accounts on social media feels like a breath of fresh air from mainstream conversations in which human behavior is seen in a rigid good and bad, as opposed to a spectrum. The extremes in thinking that exist in mainstream online conversations were extremely exhausting for me.
I cannot say that I have an entirely healthy view of sex right now but I feel less obsessed with it and I am self-harming far way less than before. I am currently experiencing body image issues, like I wish I was petite and it is such an unhealthy thought because I can't change my height and I am too broke to change my weight while struggling with a hormonal disorder. My current Dom has been instrumental in helping me have a healthy outlook on sex, life, and my body. I know catfishing is wrong but I used to lie about my body in online conversations until I met him and he told me not to be ashamed of it or my desires. I trusted him from the beginning and he hasn't let me down. He was the first person that I was completely honest to about everything in my life. He is also working with me at a pace that makes me feel safe and he makes me feel comfortable enough to be honest with him, especially about my mistakes, confusion, and fears. In moments when he cannot give me the attention that I need, I trust him enough to give him space and know that he will come back to me. I can do that because he communicates with me. Those factors are such a big thing for me, I can count on my hand the amount of times I've met a man who communicates with me in a way that I feel is healthy for me and I have never met anyone who makes me feel secure in a way that is healthy for me. I am not crashing out like I used to because I feel so secure. However, I could not have experienced this dynamic that is healthy for me if it was not for my inner work and learning from mistakes without shame.
I know that not everyone has the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality but the removal of shame around sex and unconventional methods of coping in the world helps so much. As long as one is able to catch themselves when they are falling into unhealthy habits, that means that one is constantly working on being in a healthy state of mind as much as possible.
Just as exploring kink through this community and the AI sexbot forums has helped me have a balanced outlook on the world. The Wicked Whims subset of The Sims community has also helped me navigate that shame around sex (it was actually the first platform that helped me explore kink). I used to question myself on whether I was messed up for making my once innocent game centered around sex during my bingeing periods, until I started watching Sim players on social media and realized how normalized it was within the community to have the Wicken Whims mods, seeing the type of people who had the mod and listening to the various discussions on why a person downloads the mod and the work done to make the mods as safe as possible.
When I heard that people were freaking out about the new update to the point of being abusive, I had a moment of questioning whether people are right about porn leading to addiction and video games making people violent. I had a moment of being judgmental. I had to remember that not everyone who plays the Sims with the Wicked Whims mod is like the people who are acting violently towards the programmer. I am not like that and there are so many Sims players who have learned to prepare for an update, having contingency plans to work around the headaches of updates. I had to remind myself that just because people like that exist doesn't mean that the whole community is bad. The anonymity of the internet makes it easier for people to be assholes and that type of behaviour should never be tolerated. On the other hand, porn addiction and violent behavior are symptoms of something deeper. I wish these conversations were had by people in mainstream media, in a nuanced way instead of demonizing people who experience those issues along with people who enjoy HARMLESS sexual or violent content and experiences in general (by harmless meaning no real person was harmed in the making of the media or the experience).
At the end of the day, it's the individual's responsibility to gauge the potential consequences of their actions and their ability to engage with an emotional crutch in a healthy way, being able to seek help when they are spiraling into harmful behavior. For most people, that awareness will come from education and that education comes from a healthy judgment-free community with open discussions and the normalization of mental health resources.
