For this project, I wanted to do something a little more lighthearted due to the heavy circumstances that the world is currently facing with the pandemic and growing death toll. Therefore, I recalled a fun piece of writing that detailed the life of a family created in the Sims and the author wrote out their lives with supplemental screenshots for the story. I took this idea and tailored it to be more fitting for the current times.
I created a family in the Sims 4 to keep in quarantine and see how it affects life even in a fictional setting. I tried to make a realistic situation for them and show how their lives and futures have in effect been put on hold due to circumstances they are unable to control.
The purpose of this project is not to make economic capital, but more to make cultural capital. The pandemic has shifted lives in a way that people have been shocked by a drastic change to the culture and ways of life they were used to.
Onto the content contained within the project, which will be made on a separate blog to this one and made public soon. It follows a young woman who lives with her grandfather. Due to his age, her grandfather has to be especially careful during the times of quarantine, and the young woman has to take precautions due to this higher risk factor affecting someone with whom she lives. Unfortunately, this isn’t an unusual situation for people in the real world and they are having to take risk factors into consideration that haven’t had such devastating consequences in the past.
The young woman has to put her dream of owning a bakery on hold because of social distancing rules and the risk that being in a public place could pose for her grandfather living with her. So, she is put in a situation where she needs to put her plans aside and find a way to make an income and pay her bills while also having the money to take care of their two cats and a dog. The best way for her to do this is to find some sort of income that can be made online, because the Sim government is not providing help in these financially difficult times, so she’s working on learning programming and becoming a freelance programmer until she can continue pursuing her true pastry-flavored dream.
Meanwhile, Gramps is trying to be helpful by writing his memoir that “everybody will absolutely want to read” as he’s certain that this newfangled internet will love his stories as much as his family pretends to. The blessing in his writing is that it helps him pass his time in quarantine.
Their pets, at least, help maintain a semblance of normalcy in their lives. The pets don’t know that anything is wrong in the world, but their humans are home all the time now and that makes it seem like whatever is happening is the best thing ever.
The first of my two questions is: Is there anything I can do to emphasize how the quarantine impacts families through using the Sims beyond what has already been mentioned?
The second question is: Beyond Bitzer and Bourdieu, what other sources would be good to draw from for this project? It isn’t entirely economic capital that is being gained as much as cultural capital (or so I believe).
