The Good Place starts off putting Eleanor in a similar position.
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I can choose to have her marry that man, leave him for the artist who’s in love with her, or just totally ignore both men. Let’s take Bella’s adult daughter Cassandra in The Sims 2, for instance, who’s engaged to the town casanova (who may or may not have been involved in her mother’s disappearance). If you’re playing one of the premade families, the suggested storyline can guide how you want events to fold. The brilliance of the Sims games was always including soft underlying hints to an overarching storyline that you never really have to follow. The neighborhoods all seem like idyllic places, with parks, amenities, and colorful NPC characters. Save for excursions to sub-neighborhoods like “Downtown” or “University,” Sims in the early games were confined to just one ‘hood for their short lives. Much like in The Sims 1 and 2, The Good Place starts off in a contained neighborhood. Where does The Good Place come in? Let’s start at the beginning - with season one and the first two generations of Sims games. This is especially true with story progression in The Sims 3, which means that I don’t even have to load the Goth family household for Bella to just do her own thing, be it divorcing her husband, reaching the top of her career, or randomly generating some really weird outfits. In each version of the Sims, you can choose to play out her story anyway you want, basically, following the loose plotline Maxis hints at or going rogue and making Bella a mystery-solving mermaid. The games all supposedly take place in the same timeline, but they don’t have to at all. In The Sims 4, she’s married with two children. In The Sims 2, while her family is there and older, she only appears as an NPC in the mysterious desert community of Strangetown, after being abducted by aliens. In The Sims 1, Bella Goth is married and has one child. Let’s take Sim icon Bella Goth, one of the most popular pre-made Sims who is likely familiar to even casual fans. While a big component of The Sims franchise does involve playing with player created characters, there have always been premade sims, some of whom continue to reappear throughout the series, albeit with slightly different storylines and alterations in order to fit each generation of the Sims series. I mean that The Good Place is like the actual experience of playing The Sims - specifically the actual experience of playing with premade Sims. When I say The Good Place is like The Sims, I don’t mean that The Good Place is like life. NBC/EAĪt the end of season one - the moment Michael hits reboot on the neighborhood - all those pieces floating around in my head about The Good Place and The Sims clicked at once. It was all a very loose idea - till the end of season one. Even though they were just living life, there was clearly something else going on. It wasn’t just the aesthetic similarities, but the components of Sim gameplay that I began to see pop up in The Good Place: the idea that this neighborhood was just a save file, manipulated by someone working behind the scenes.
![sims 1 game sims 1 game](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/h8XbWG9a3qZ34AjN2foBKM.jpg)
I couldn’t escape the connections each time I watched an episode: This is just like The Sims! I laughed in my head. Soon, I started seeing even more similarities: cheeky censorship ( The Good Place’s forking and The Sims’ woohooing) the fact that the first season takes place in a contained, impossibly beautiful neighborhood and the assignment of points to actions (Sims games usually given some sort of numerical value to actions that Sims want to do, while doing something “good” or “bad” in The Good Place changes someone’s numeric worth).
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![sims 1 game sims 1 game](https://www.freegamesdl.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/The-Sims-1-The-Complete-Collection.jpg)
The theme song of The Good Place is about 10 seconds long, but the moment I heard it, I thought of the soundtrack of The Sims games - and a brief glance at the YouTube comments proved I wasn’t alone.