“It’s Time to Go on a Low-Carbon Diet”: Carbon Footprints, Solar Panels, and the Eco Lifestyle of The Sims 4

The focus of The Sims 4 is on simulating a simplified version of life, a peculiarly American vision of it. Its mechanics revolve around consumption: buying, and buying more and better items, is a tangible, mechanical benefit in the game. A necessity, even. Since the game rests on equal parts simulation, architectural design, and consumerism, it is not surprising that when the game attempts to simulate environmental concerns it does so through an entirely personal lens. The game connects consumption to environmental causes, making the issue of Climate change, carbon emissions, and pollution are problems that can be solved by the individual. The Sims—and consequently the player—can and should fix it, first and foremost through their consumer habits. Structural issues such as environmentalism are necessarily flattened into the personal. An analysis of the gameplay mechanics of The Sims 4: Eco Lifestyle, and how it augments and builds upon the previous (and subsequent) expansion packs, reveals how environmentalism is conceptualized through the prism of liberal capitalism which turns the structural into the personal. What then the game simulates, I contend in this chapter, is personal environmentalism, the kind advocated for by British Petroleum and other corporations. It is the commodification of environmental causes for fun and relaxation, and individualist satisfaction.