Hi! Sims writer going legit with straight text
I started as a Sims writer five years ago.
I recently completed my Sims magnum opus and, with a devoted readership behind me, am now experimenting with full text.
The Sims story is linked on Web Fiction Guide, but I've been so immersed in the Sims story culture that I sort of forgot how much of Valley's plot depends on the game and assumes that the reader knows the game. So please don't judge me on it. 
You can judge me on the three chapters of 10 I have so far, though. (linked in my sig *crass self-promotion*) And yeah, I'm thinking of getting 10 its own site and making it all pretty and stuff.
I've been reading the forums and following links to blogs and sites, and I think that I may be able to share some useful stuff from my time in the Sims community. Yes, we're based around a game that we all play and that gives us a starting point and also means we'll never be mainstream, but we're also a community of writers and readers of original fiction. Darn good original fiction too, if you know where to look.
So - hi! I'm experiencing a little culture shock here, but looking forward to learning more about this community and participating in it and getting to know you guys.
Oh man, you just opened the floodgates. LOL.
There's a wide variety of stories. There's straight challenge stories, where people take gameplay challenges like the legacy challenge or the who's your daddy challenge or whatever, and write a story based on that. And even in that genre, there's a spectrum ranging from straight observations and basically just blogging your gameplay experience to full on plot-filled family sagas that can take two to three years or more to write and finish. Legacies are about playing a family through ten generations. Plotty legacies could provide enough material for a literary criticism course just on their own - I've seen threads discussing legacy tropes and how self-aware the sims are and a Mary Sue test specifically for legacy heirs, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Then there's non-challenge stories, where people just write straight up original fiction. Valley is pretty game-aware for that sort of story, really. Most of them just use the game for illustration but aren't set in the game's universe.
I run a Sims story forum, and I'm quite proud of it. I invite the best authors I see around the community - people who find it on their own tend to have to be talked into posting and say that they're intimidated by the quality of the stories linked on the forum.
To give you some idea of the diversity - one of the stories on my forum is a series of detective stories focused on a main female character, who has a developing character arc over the series. Another is set in the future and is about a society in which personalities can be transplanted to new bodies when their body dies. One is a series of stories set in a vividly imagined alternate world, with a different social and moral system than ours. It's divided into humans, people who've been experimented on and as a result have special powers and aren't quite human anymore, and people who live in sort of primitive tribes out in the wild.
The game is really a giant sandbox, and the players have added lots more sand with custom content and hacks and tools to help pose the sims. The pictures are what divides Sims stories from straight text. Some people only use a few pictures and, despite choosing the Sims game as a medium apparently of their own free will, strongly believe that you shouldn't have to look at the pictures. Some, like me, use the pictures as an integral part of the story. Most are somewhere in between.
As for the community...it seems much more interactive and supportive of each other than what I've seen so far of the straight text weblit community. Lots of active forums and LiveJournal communities where people discuss writing in general and their own stories and characters and link each other to resources.
But yeah, you have to know where to look. If you go to the Sims 3 story exchange on the official site, you're going to find stories by little kids. With loud backgrounds and midis. It's like Geocities rose from the dead.
If you look around WordPress and Blogger and LJ and the more adult forums, you're going to find stuff that's better than 90% of what I see in corporate bookstores.
And umm, this is turning into a novel so I'll stop now.
Interesting! From what you described, it sounds like the Sims stories range from amost-webcomics to essentially weblit-with-illustrations. I've actually read one Sims story before, I think I found it through WebFictionGuide (was it yours?).
Welcome to the weblit gang! The diversity of writing backgrounds is one of the things that makes this group so interesting =)
How interesting! I actually read a bit of a Sims story once (it was actually a Sims Harry Potter fanfiction...) but I had no idea there was such a big Sims writing community. It sounds like it's not all that different from other webfiction, but you have something other than writing to build a community around. Maybe you'll be able to bring some insights to community-building that those of us who aren't in that community wouldn't have thought of.
Oh, and welcome!
There's something interesting about the interactive element of taking elements from the game and turning them into stories -- and vice versa. I think there was a bit of a similar thing floating around a few years ago for Morrowind -- another game with a huge amount of player-created modifications and content.
I think you'll find there are a lot of creative people that work through creativity in many different games. I met a few that played on persistent world servers in Neverwinter Nights (the Bioware game), and have met many more that create superhero genre stories with their characters in City of Heroes and even Champions Online. I used to play City of Heroes, so a lot of ideas came from that. And it's not surprising to hear someone using elements from the Sims to do that as well. Sims is such a wonderfully creative game.
Sorry - been focused on writing 10.04.
Oh yeah, I used to play Morrowind! I had a ton of mods. And I know of at least two blogs where people took pics and wrote the stories of their characters, and I think there were more people doing that on the official forums. Which were way cooler than the Sims official forums, although sometimes the sexism would get to me.
Also, I'm a huge fan of World of Warcraft machinima. And there's some great Sims machinima out there too.
Capriox bovidae - it was either mine or Alice & Kev - they're the only two Sims stories I've seen on Web Fiction Guide. Alice & Kev is more observational and sort of based on the poverty challenge. It went viral and got around the whole internet. I think because it was written when the game was new and the author took time to explain the game. So it was friendly to people who weren't familiar with Sims 3.
Yay I like community building! And I love online fiction - the idea of it, the freedom of it, the community and the friendship and the love and the support.
I'm doing okay with full text - I honestly don't miss waiting on GIMP to load all the pics in the screenshot folder. And 10 is getting less traffic than Valley, but that's understandable. People come to the Sims story community to read Sims stories, not full text.
Also, without pictures, it's a lot easier to go back and edit. Finished editing the first three chapters of 10 earlier this week and snuck in a new plot point. No retaking pics or working around the pics I have.
One thing I'm looking forward to learning - how to create suspense with words. Like at the end of Valley, I used pics to switch between the main character in the house and the villain walking closer to her and it ended in a glorious pic of Seth framed in the doorway with the moon above him. How do I do that with pure text?
Yeah - it was time to move on. I feel like Valley was my Sims magnum opus, you know. It accomplished what I'd been trying to do with the medium for five years. I didn't have anywhere else to go.
Anyway - back to work on the next chapter of 10. Gotta have it out by Saturday night - signed up for WeSeWriMo with a goal of one chapter a week.
Hey, this is shameless self-promotion as well as the intro forum, right? So here you go - what I have so far of the 10.04 draft. Things you need to know - Seth, the 15 year old main character, is the villain of Valley (and the guy in my avatar). In Valley he killed people and used them for plants that kept him alive. So...yeah, with the herb garden. 
Oh, and in the previous chapter of 10 he lost it and beat up a bully in a public open space and got suspended from school.
His mother had left for work hours ago. He had promised her that he wouldn't mope, that he wouldn't stay in bed, that he would get outside and get some sun.
So here he was. Outside and in the sun.
He had started the herb garden last year. Something to keep him busy, keep him out of trouble. That was what his mother said. She watched him sometimes, from the kitchen window.
He put his shears and the basket she had given him on the ground and surveyed his kingdom. Pennyroyal, lemon balm, rue. He wore his rue with a difference.
He knelt in front of the lemon balm. Melissa officinalis. The flowers stood white and open. He reached out, touched one. His fingers closed and there was a slight pop. He drew his hand back.
The flower was soft and cool on his fingertips. He held it up, turned it back and forth, saw the tiny lines in the petals and felt them separate against his skin. He opened his fingers wide and the two petals drifted down to earth.
Slowly, carefully, he picked up the shears and cut the stems.
I'm not sure about the rue bit - I paraphrased Hamlet in two chapters of Valley and I want to paraphrase it here, but well - I tried rosemary and how it was for remembrance, but while that would be brilliant for 90 year old Seth it doesn't work for 15 year old Seth. He doesn't have that much to remember yet. However, he is different. I don't know - it'll come to me by Saturday.
Hey there! I was wondering if you could describe a little what the sims writing community style is like, to get an idea of what you're transitioning from. What's a sims writer? Is it just a story based on the sims, or is there a specific format?
Guts and Sass: An Anti-Epic
Guts and Sass is the story of when semi-suicidal vet Hannah Roverton gets transported to a magical land, thus abandoning her cat, her sister, and her therapist. Except actually, it’s not. Welcome to a land embroiled in war and invasion with a pinch of magic, meet pirates, shapeshifters, and chicks with swords. Now throw your expectations out the window. Got no heroes, no glory, and it ain’t no lie.