So, I was reading an article on the BBC News website about a small village in Alaska and reading it totally made me want to create an Alaskan village in The Sims 2! I seem to really like small, isolated places (at least in terms of wanting to recreate them in my game - I'd hate to live in one!) as the last BBC News article that inspired me was an article about Tristan da Cunha! And I would still quite like to create an Arctic/Antarctic research base as (part of) a 'hood.

Thinking about the real-world places that inspire me for The Sims 2 (though I've never actually got round to creating any of these 'hoods, mind!) made me wonder if anyone else had examples of places that inspired them to create/want to create 'hoods in TS2? Could be specific places, could be generic "types" of geographical place (like a small town in the mountains, a seaside village with a large retirement community etc). How do you/would you make your 'hood seem more like the place/type of place that you've been inspired by?

I always love reading about people's 'hoods! :-D

I've noticed that you love making new themed hoods.

Well my latest grass roots hippies living on an island I just updated to the What's happening In Your Game thread. Four couples, and an island with plenty of trees, berry bushes, fish and fresh water. They are all camping in tents at the moment with items I feel they could reasonably take on a boat. No bills, no newspaper, no electricity. They will make and barter or maybe open a couple of shops, I haven't decided. I got an idea off Nook's Let's Play to use paintings represent furniture. So a painting of a group of chairs will be replaced with 4 wooden chairs. Any plastic items they will have to go to the mainland for. Small wooden items like a potty I will probably make a toy and then replace with the item. I just want them to actively make what they use as much as possible. I'll overlook that the potty insert is plastic since I'm not flying to the mainland for a potty. I might have my sewer make a quilt to represent bedding. Inspired by the 'grass roots movement' Not a political one, more of a hippie self sufficient one. Which is slightly taken from my real life some 37 years ago when my parents literally moved us from the city to a hobby farm and I lived in a tent. I have both fond and nightmare memories of that time, but I'm glad that we did it.

Mine are generally genetic places only found in the sim verse since they usually have some elements of the supernatural about them. My medieval hood has witches and dragons, my modern hood has a plantsim and will have aliens and probably a servo or two in time. My test of Time hood has a werewolf. Also I would find it tiresome to recreate a real place as I am sure to feel it isn't close enough. Being made up gives me more leeway to do what I like.

Technically I mostly love *thinking* about making new themed 'hoods! :-D


Can you explain this further? I am intrigued but don't understand!


I have noticed this as well! :-( Have you ever posted pictures of this 'hood, I would love to see some! :-)

I think Toronto's Distillery District is so charming. I really want a small urban hood whose shops and living spaces are designed like re-purposed Victorian-era warehouses.

I just posted pictures about about 15 minutes ago on the thread I mentioned. Also some on the page before.

On Nooks video his idea was because there is no actual way to make a chair, table, bathtub etc in game, he would have a sim use the drafting table and do a custom sketch of a bathtub, or chairs or a table. Once the picture was complete he would sell the picture to the air and place down the item the sim had just drawn. So while the sim can't make a real chair the time taken and the picture represents their making the item. Does that make sense? I figure making toys on the work bench can represent smaller items like a potty, wooden toys. I'm sure I will think of more as I go. The sim will make, delete and replace it with the catalog item I need.

That's such a good idea!

*steals idea*

Well, on the much-less-realistic, much-more-science-fiction side of things (not to mention not actually real world! (well, not this world anyways)), if I ever finish the $%&@#% thing, I'll have a challenge that basically sends people on a quest to create a thriving colony on Mars, kind of along the lines of a few Martian-themed lots I've posted, so that's about as much small and isolated as you could ever get!

Given where I grew up, I also have an affinity for the people who actually live in the places most people only ever vacation to, and the little communities in National Parks and similar places have their own quirks that could be fun to act out... I haven't actually done it, mostly because I can't figure out what the best way would be, but I have a whole headcanon for the people who live and work in Three Lakes (can't say the same about any of the other neighborhoods, vacation or otherwise...)

*lengthening post so it will actually post *

Do you have a link to Nook's Let's Plays, Jo? And do they write about the game anywhere or just do videos? It sounds like their style of play may have more ideas I can nick! :-D

Sure You will love how his new space hood looks. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?li...wkm3yR5NIIVapGt My simself is one of the poor colonists. At least she has a bathroom with walls now.

If one wants to build furniture from scratch while marooned on a island, there's always this from PBK to pretend the island has reeds and the rest follows:

PART 1: REEDS CRAFTING STATION

I love this too :-) I'm excited to have a way to make wooden furniture as well, though, even if it is mostly in my imagination! :-D I hope that Sun&Moon will eventually release wooden furniture making stuff as well, but having seen the list of things they want to make I think it'll be a while! They have already made trees that can be chopped down for logs, though :-)

Yes I have the reed station that but I also want wooden furniture plain and painted for variety. One of them can stomp grapes and I will pretend they are making dyes and paint.

Blergh. I get enough real world - but I do loosely theme my hoods around real things.

Riverblossom Hills (Cheston Graithe) is always my Rural / Small Town / Farming community hood, while Holling is usually my big urban city themed around some of the New York city boroughs. I've been toying with the idea of turning each of the vacation destinations into a real hood, so a Caribbean-themed version of Twiikii as a mainhood, a mainhood and subhoods themed on China, Japan and Korea to make up for the awful culture clashing in Takemizu, and the Mountain themed town based on whatever that destination's called (three peaks? I can't remember). This way the sims from those regions can actually come from somewhere and I get to have a bunch of themed fun LOL.

I'm pretty sure that Harlow (my Belladonna Cove) is loosely based on San Francisco / California (I realised that I was builiding that style of house in my game after I visited and just went with it.)

When I lived in Maastricht, I always wanted to make that kind of old roman city in sims. Sadly I was playing TS3 at the time and there's just no way - you can't build terraces to nearly the degree you'd need to to accurately recreate that kind of architecture. I do have a subhood in my uberhood now which is based on that kind of architecture, but it only has about 4 buildings so far...



At the minute I'm making a very English 'hood. It's so nice! There are things that I hadn't even realised were super jarring about the Americanness of the game until I changed them.

I liked Maastricht, we went (near) there on holiday once when I was living in the Netherlands. I would've liked to go there again, but somehow 9 years of living in in the Netherlands wasn't enough time to go everywhere and do everything I wanted to visit/do! (16 years of living there for my parents, still wasn't enough time, apparently!) :-D


Yes, the game is so American! The mailboxes, the school bus. The fact that gardens for the premade lots rarely have fences around them?.What else?

Do you have pictures of your English 'hood, or your Maastricht-ish subhood?

I can't click agree enough! That's probably why I like Veronaville, actually -- it looks more familiar. I'm also building a hood with lots of English terraces, and a shopping lane that is based on Brick Lane and Camden Town (very loosely). Even with the downsides of row houses, it feels much more like home. I've plopped down a couple of Maxis lots in there, and even with a brick and timber-frame facade, they stick out like a sore thumb with the house in the middle of a lot too big for itself.

The mailboxes with the little flags are very American, indeed. Also, no laundry line as default content? Thankfully Maylin did one, because that was weird, too. (And... "foot"balls... I know, I know, but I'll never get it. If it goes in the hand, it's a handball, you know?)

Something I also find odd (inside the lots) is the number of en-suite bathrooms. Unusual... and annoying, as sims don't care if they have to barge through the neighbour's master bedroom to go to the loo!

I understand the lack of fences, though. It looks jarring, but fences are expensive. I've still managed to fence off the back yard of my terraces, and keep the price under $20,000.

Oh, and Greek houses! I had no clue what those were when I first played Uni. Are they really traditionally split between boys and girls? Seriously? So odd. I've played a Greek house once or twice and then went back to my dorms -- getting stuff for free was fun, but I don't like the concept of having to pledge. It feels segregating, if you see what I mean? Anyway, it made me feel rather uncomfortable.

You don't have to segregate, you're free to have them mixed.

Traffic on the wrong side of the road! Although I found the cheat to make them drive on the left.

What where how what now??!? I need this! Yesterday!!!

ETA: Right that's a super-weird reaction, coming from me. I'm not a Brit; I'm a frog. I should feel happy with sims driving on the right -- after all that's what should feel natural to me! But it doesn't anymore. Acculturation at work, apparently. How peculiar.

I posted it on the what did you learn thread but since it's probably buried by now here it is. boolProp carsOnRight false

Thank you! It's so simple, too!

Okay, time once again to explain Greek houses.

The segregation of the sexes is one of long standing in American society - we assume that if sexually mature boys and girls are housed in the same place, they're going to Have the Sex and that this is Undesirable - as, indeed, it is if simple, effective birth control is not readily available (as it hasn't been through most of American history) and/or a power imbalance exists between the sexes so that one is likely to exploit the other with impunity (as has never not been true, cf any major white-on-white rape case of any period, do not get me started). Where higher education was even made available to women, it was made available in separate institutions, or by allowing individual women to monitor classes on a case-by-case basis, or by building an Annex where a limited range of classes were made available only to female students.

Although most universities went co-ed during the 20th century, the dorms did not - the first university I went to first (1979-81) had separate male and female dorms, with one high-rise dorm that was co-ed on the first couple of floors only. By then we were allowed to have male guests during the day, and of course people snuck their friends in and out and discipline on the subject was relaxed, but the dorms were also constructed with so that each dorm room was double-occupancy and shared a private bath with the room next door. This limited the amount of danger, inconvenience, and embarrassment that having males in the building could cause - there was no place to drill a hole in the mortar to gain a view of the girl's communal shower, and you need never be in the hall in a state vulnerable to the strictures and judgments of the male gaze. Dorms in older, less wealthy institutions were more barracks-like and had common showers and baths, and the imbalance of power between the sexes would have made sharing these spaces with men dangerous for female students(and trans, intersex, and genderqueer ones as well, not that their existence was even recognized back in those days; they still aren't widely acknowledged).

They were also drafty, noisy, not at all private, not universal (my second university had no dorms) and not free. The Greek system began as an alternative to dorms and off-campus student lodgings, and was modeled on the American tradition of fraternal organizations. They were founded by groups of friends who chipped in together to rent or buy a house near campus, and expanded by invitation only. These naturally developed into cliques, and adopted a number of rituals (modeled on the secret rites of fraternal organizations) designed to build bonds between members and exclude non-members, exciting their curiosity and envy. The Greek letters are part of that cliquish tradition, since Classical educations were more prestigious than practical ones, but fraternity connections proved to be useful in business as certain houses grew and expanded across multiple campuses - if you wore a Phi Beta Kappa pin, and saw a stranger wearing a Phi Beta Kappa pin, suddenly he wasn't a stranger but a Brother!

Segregation by sex is normal for these organizations, as they were universally founded on campuses that only admitted one gender. In practice, fraternities (for guys) and sororities (for girls) often have close ties to one another, as brothers and sisters were consistently the only opposite-sex visitors most campuses allowed in their residence halls, so a brother with a sister in a sorority was a valuable acquisition and vice versa, and traditions of membership within families soon established traditions of specific sororities and fraternities being partnered. Single-sex residence in sorority houses not only protects female students from sexual exploitation, voyeurism, and assault, it introduces them to well-connected potential romantic partners, and allows them access to the kinds of informal power networks that have traditionally been available to men but not to women.

At least, that's the ideal. You can see how it's supposed to work in the movie Legally Blonde, in which Reese Witherspoon's character receives support from her sisters in her romantic difficulties, and comes to a sister's rescue in her legal difficulties. You can also see how the cliquishness works and is perceived by those of us who don't join them in movies like Animal House (the origin of the toga party) and in the episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which Greeks function as sinister secret societies. (Which are also a real feature of real colleges, created apparently when the Greeks became too public and cozy for the true powerbrokering snobs.)

By focusing on the segregation of the sexes, y'all are focusing on the wrong problem. The sexual exclusivity of the Greeks is a feature, not a bug, and is especially important for the kinds of rich twits who are most likely to join them, for whom college is much more of maturation curve than it is for us peons. That first college I went to was full of rich people who wouldn't admit they were rich, and you never met a bigger bunch of babies, more ignorant of how real life works. Especially the guys! Believe me, sorority girls have no desire to live with their opposite numbers in the frats in a group situation! They'd wind up being housekeepers, cooks, and maids subjected to continual sexual harassment. Rich white boys are the most entitled people on earth and locking them up in a frat house to knock up against each other is the only way to teach them (since their parents haven't bothered) that socks don't pick themselves up off the floor and that they have responsibilities to other people.

No, the big segregation problems with real Greeks are racial and class divisions. Theoretically anyone can pledge a Greek. In practice, people of the "wrong" ethnicity, economic background, sexual orientation, health status, etc., will be filtered out by the process. Someone will almost always blackball the black girl and as long as this is an unwritten rule and the house's charter is written with inclusive language that the members don't feel obliged to regard during the membership process, the benefits of Greek houses will remain concentrated among wealthy whites.

It's possible to found new ones, of course, but since a major benefit is the creation of powerful connections, new houses will always be playing catch-up - no existing CEOs will be spying the names of new houses in resumes and crying "my brother!"

None of this is a consideration in the game unless the player wants it to be. The Greeks are there to provide a few structured scenarios, some goal-based gameplay, create connections among playables, and an easy way to turn favorite dormies playable. The Greek houses in the SSU attached to Drama Acres have been racially and economically integrated ever since Eppie Curian and Greg Aerious first pledged them and they have given a real leg-up to some simmigrants who started play in dire poverty. Tri-Fruhm in the LFT attached to my Strangetown has accepted a gay male member so he could fill his want to join a Greek without crowding his twin brother who wanted the frat to himself. Greek members will roll wants to invite their boy- or girlfriends to pledge and this creates no problems unless the player decides to simulate real-world imbalances of power.

Erm, that's pretty much true for the rest of the world. In Australia there are still dorms that aren't co-ed. That was one of the reasons I didn't go up to Townsville to study, the other reason being that it is Townsville and that place might as well be called Nowhere's Ville.

I thought so, but I'm not qualified to speak for the rest of the world and non-American people here do seem to be weirded out by the separation of the Greeks in the game by sex.

LGU, by the way, is not inspired by a specific real place, but I was taking care to evoke a particular sort of specifically American place. As I explained to 95MMAA when he kindly agreed to make the map for me, it needed to look like Iowa.

I'm making it. The map of it is all over the internet, and I adore the look. I'm deffinitely replicating this, especialy now that I finally got "visit other sims" and "community lots on apartments" mods. That pedestrian zone looks especially inviting!