Dev Game Club

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on 2000's The Sims. We spend a little time on the gender normativity of the title, sprinkle in some stories about our various households, and also fit in some reader mail! Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: A few more hours! Issues covered: satire and farce, Timmy's toilet troubles, Betty's rapid rise in scientific circles, sexual orientation and the Sims, dark times for Bob, Jeff in the military, whether the game is conforming to gender biases all the time or not, Diane and politics, how Betty got her job, thinking about design decisions around careers, the value systems that the game systems express, working with smaller spaces and the difficulties for game development, the American Dream qua Nightmare, being in the 1950s and the music, "None of my good points are inadvertent," opacity of systems in other simulations vs this game's clarity, a toy vs a