If a Sim’s energy bar turns red, they might suddenly fall asleep on the floor if their fun bar runs out, they’ll become depressed and refuse to go to work. Green health bars are shown in a control panel at the bottom of the screen, through which you can identify their needs. (A recent expansion pack is named Sims 4: Laundry Day Stuff.) Each Sim has a different personality: turn-ons, turn-offs.

The game’s creator, EA Games, has slowly expanded the series, from The Sims to The Sims II to The Sims 4 Deluxe Party Edition. I could make a Sim of a pretty, popular girl in my year at school, and prevent her from falling in love. I could invent a Josh Hartnett Sim and command him to kiss an incredibly suave, sexy Sim who, coincidentally, shared my name.

I could throw teachers I disliked into swimming pools. My interminable adolescent thirst to be someone else was quenched. ‘It felt wonderful to return from the incomprehensibly dull monotony of school to a digital world I’d created, a kind of haven of order and control’: a still from The Sims.

It felt wonderful to return from the incomprehensibly dull monotony of school to a digital world I’d created, a kind of haven of order and control. Sometimes I’d play for six hours straight. Back then I averaged two or three hours every weekday, and I’d put in a proper sesh at the weekend. Its follow-up, The Sims II, was released in 2004, and was as compulsive as its predecessor. The Sims, in which you design and build homes in a blank slate of a neighbourhood, and set about creating “Sims” to live inside them, was released in 2000, and is the bestselling PC game of all time. It was like putting Vaseline on chapped lips. Then I downloaded a new-ish version of The Sims, the popular simulation game. But nothing seemed to dissipate a niggling, hollow feeling of worry. Sometimes I read Amazon reviews of household items, which was exciting. Like other freelancers, I began to spend most of my working week at home, alone, making lists, staring out of the window at the pigeons. In 2017, I lost my job – a version of my dream job, the job – and slipped from an exhilarating workplace into the terrifying tundra of freelance life, a transition that led to a period of acute anxiety.

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