RIP, 'The Sims' Pools

The Sims gave many young millennials a God complex from the get-go. In its simulated world, you could control the lives and deaths of poor, unfortunate characters with the click of a mouse. But the upcoming Sims 4 won't include pools, an important and often sadistic part of the game. Which has got the (surprisingly) still-booming community in an uproar.

Erstwhile and avid Sims players alike will understand that the omission is a big one. When the news broke that Sims 4, which comes out this September, would not include pools or toddlers, many people took to the games' site to vent their frustrations. One fan had a bone to pick with a few new elements of the game:

The only way you're going to make things better with fans is to fix the problems with the game. Add toddlers and pools. Make teenagers actually look like teenagers. Make the worlds larger, because right now they're pathetically small. If you release the game in its current state, you're going to have another PR disaster like SimCity. Period. Fix the game.

Yes. If you'll take a moment to remember the big SimCity PR disaster ... oh, what's that? You have no idea what we're talking about because you had also never taken a vested interest in Sims news? Hmm.

At least many of the site commenters could identify a few problems with the toddlers' omission, with many people complaining that an entire stage of life was being looked over.

Yes, that's fair. But while people could come up with somewhat solid rationale behind their fury of not having the tiny characters and missing their important life events, no one could vocalize exactly why they were angry about the pool.

Was it burgeoning architects complaining about their unquenchable creative desire to construct state-of-the art pools in the Sims world? Is it the inability to feed the Sims' sense of entitlement and allow them to chase a fabricated view of the American dream that we struggle with ourselves outside of game play?

No. I'll say here why everyone is mad about it, and what you're all thinking. It is because we will miss drowning our Sims.

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. You take the ladder away and watch your poor, pathetic creature waste into an untimely death because they are somehow unable to figure out how to exit a pool without a device specifically designed for them to do so available and right in front of their tiny, digitized eyes. Then you wait until the grim reaper comes to take them away, and you don't even try to argue for your pathetic little character's life back.

Maybe you killed your new Sim husband for money. Maybe your customized personality traits that you gave your little fledgling human turned them into everything you hated. Or maybe, just maybe, you just wanted to watch the world burn. Or drown, in this instance.

So no, you can't raise tiny Sims into (apparently unrealistic) teenagers. And you can't drown your Sims in the pool. Maybe it's time to give up your totalitarian rule of non-humans and pick up a new hobby. Or you can just stick to Sims 3 and hope they come around for the next one.

Images: Youtube/thesimsdreamer, NatalieFirexx, Galadrielh Lothlorien, zooniamateur