How Having Sex As a Vampire in The Sims Helped Me Understand My Desires

Like many, the financial struggles of the pandemic forced me back to my family home, where I spent lockdown as the only under-60 in our isolation bubble. I was also in the midst of an identity crisis. Returning to an economically dependent position, living in the single bed of the spare room in a cottage, I felt myself regressing to my teenage self. With a lack of sexual intimacy, even with myself, I found my connection to my body wilting. Stuck in an earlier life, I returned to an early outlet of my budding desire: The Sims.

The Sims 2 framed my teens. I loved making a future version of myself, with an immaculate fringe and the winged eyeliner I struggled to perfect, complete with a look hugging my curves. Some people play The Sims to make glorious houses, others like to play as a cruel and sadistic God — I played to make out with as many characters as possible. While the WooHoo action led to Sims throwing themselves under the covers to enact a cartoon style version of sex, repeating the actions “make out”, “smooch” and “cuddle” on sofas and beds was the closest simulation you could get to a dry hump. To me, this was the main motive of the game: to do all the naughty adult things I couldn’t wait to experience in real life.

I also found the Vampire game pack for The Sims 4, and quickly became engrossed with my hot, fanged avatar, her super-human sex appeal and her ability to fly across the room.

Today, the Sims series has advanced drastically, but WooHoo seems to be the only action that hasn’t evolved as the game remains PG-certified. Except now I wasn’t satisfied to rub my Sims against each other on the couch in the same way kids amateurly mash together Barbie and Ken. So, I did what I never could on the family computer: I downloaded mods!

I removed the blurry bits from the shower scenes and attached every sex mod I could from Whicked Whims. My Sims could now masturbate, bleed and have sex with multiple partners. You could even determine how their breasts bounced and style their pubic hair. My sexy vampire fantasies went from Twilight to True Blood. The immortal sex goddess could ride her partner while levitating and have sex atop a coffin. With no limits to my Sims’ abilities, they acted out threesomes, foursomes and enjoyed many same-sex couplings.

That’s how I came to understand that my sexuality was queerer than I had thought. Before the pandemic, I had assumed I was straight, but I was now able to reflect on my desire and where it stemmed from.

Watching pornography is a passive act, as you have no control over the actions of the bodies moving on screen. However, as I enabled the actions of my Sims, I began to understand where the focus of my attention was. I honed in on the female pleasure that unfolded in my horny vampiric universe. Occasionally male Sims appeared in the scenes I created, but they acted as virtual strap-ons, only offering themselves to further the women’s desires rather than fulfilling their own.

Uncertain about my sapphic desires, I wondered: “Do I want to be her or be with her?” As a teenager, I loved creating my female avatar more than I enjoyed playing the game. Whether that was designing the hottest gangster babe in Saints Row or choosing the fighter with the shortest skirt that flashed her knickers as she kicked and flipped across the area in a fighting game. At the time, I thought I wanted to be them, but while playing with my adulterated Sims, I finally understood that I wanted to be with them.