The Sims

The Sims is presented as more than a computer game in Fran Hansen’s account: it is a private laboratory for imagining what vampires might become when their identities are not fixed by violence. Hansen, a hair and makeup artist from Shrewsbury, creates vampire characters who are mostly vegan, morally serious, and committed to living a happy, ordinary life. Her digital world turns the conventional bloodsucker into a subject capable of care, self-definition, and ethical choice.

A Game Used as Personal Practice

The Sims allows Hansen to rehearse social life through simulation. Diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder and open about her continuing mental-health difficulties, she explains that, when younger, she would put her Sims characters through different social situations to observe how they responded and to practice coping with similar situations herself. The game therefore functions as a controlled space between imagination and experience: its characters are fictional, but their dilemmas provide a way to examine recognizable emotional and social problems.

Hansen’s vampire households extend that method. Through the laptop, she can change the figures from murderous monsters into caring and respectable members of an unseen society. One family runs a vegan veterinary surgery, although its vampire owners can operate it only after dark. The joke depends on the clash between supernatural convention and ordinary service work, but the arrangement also gives the vampires an identity organized around responsibility rather than predation.

Rewriting the Vampire Type

The vampire characters deliberately depart from the traditional pattern established by literary and cinematic predecessors. Varney introduced familiar features such as sharpened, fang-like teeth, yet gradually became a sympathetic figure who resisted his instincts and finally killed himself to escape an eternal fate. Carmilla made nocturnal feeding, emotional predation, and elegant selection of victims central to the developing mythology. Count Orlok in Nosferatu restored the vampire’s threatening physicality, while later portrayals increasingly made vampires attractive, erotic, comic, or morally ambiguous.

Against that history, Hansen’s Sims vampires belong to the modern phase in which vampires can be almost anything. They are not required to function as villains, and their difference from humans does not automatically determine their conduct. Their veganism is an especially pointed revision of the genre’s central appetite: the creatures retain the category of vampire while refusing the expected practice of consuming blood. The game thus separates identity from destiny. Being changed into a monster does not, in Hansen’s view, mean that a person has chosen monstrosity or must reproduce it.

Family, Trauma, and Moral Boundaries

The Sims household is not free of conflict. Elven and Strom are sisters modeled on the Grady twins from The Shining, and they carry mother issues after having spent their infancy being hissed at by the person who should have cared for them. Their vampirism is therefore embedded in family history rather than treated as a purely visual or supernatural trait. The characters have inherited wounds, but those wounds do not justify unlimited cruelty.

Hansen refuses to introduce unnecessary violence into their lives. She does not use third-party additions that would fill the digital family’s world with murder and mayhem, because she wants the Sims to have a happy, pleasant existence. This boundary is important: the simulation does not merely reproduce the horror genre’s appetite for suffering. It becomes a deliberately managed ethical environment in which the creator decides what kinds of harm her characters should endure and what kinds of care they deserve.

One vampire even steals a neighbour’s cat because he believes he can look after it better. The action is ethically questionable, but the motive is protective rather than predatory, and the incident confirms that these vampires possess rules they try to follow. Their morals are not decorative traits added to make them likable; they govern behavior, create dilemmas, and distinguish the digital vampires from the humans who might judge them as monsters.

Sympathy, Stigma, and Choice

Hansen’s understanding of her vampires rests on sympathy for beings judged before they are known. She connects them to Frankenstein’s monster, who is pursued despite not having chosen to become what he is. In this formulation, monsters are created, and vampires may be changed against their will. The crucial question is consequently not whether the characters are biologically or supernaturally different, but how others interpret that difference and how the characters respond to it.

The game makes those responses consequential. Hansen emphasizes that The Sims forces players to make moral decisions and then displays the results of those decisions. Vampire identity is consequently presented as an ongoing practice rather than a fixed essence. A character can be dangerous, protective, selfish, loyal, or conflicted; the simulation gives each decision a material effect on the household’s life. Even Hansen’s reluctance to write an affair into one character’s story shows the limits she places around the world she is building. She is not simply maximizing dramatic incident. She is preserving a moral order in which the vampires’ relationships and responsibilities matter.

Significance in the Book’s Vampire History

The Sims episode extends the book’s larger movement from vampire panic to vampire self-fashioning. Historical communities in Exeter, Rhode Island, and Serbia interpreted repeated deaths and unusual corpses through supernatural explanations, turning fear into exhumation, burning, and attempts at communal control. Antoine Augustin Calmet, while writing in a religious age, examined such reports with skepticism and suggested that burial customs and terror could help produce belief in revenants. Those earlier accounts show communities imposing meanings on bodies they could not medically explain.

Hansen’s game reverses that direction of power. Instead of a community labeling an unexplained body a vampire, one creator actively designs vampires and gives them the capacity to resist the label’s moral implications. The figures remain nonhuman, nocturnal, and associated with a tradition of blood and monstrosity, but they also care for animals, manage family trauma, and seek ethical consistency. The result is not a denial of horror so much as a redistribution of sympathy: the vampire becomes a participant in moral life, while the player becomes responsible for deciding what kind of world that life will inhabit.