
The Sims offers up many options for customization, but like so many other video games, the pickings were slim for people who weren’t white and thin. īut as she got deeper into the world of The Sims, playing the second, third, and fourth (and current) generation of the EA game, Virgil began noticing something unsettling: it was damn near impossible to create Sims who looked, well, like her.

Xmiramira wears a Wray NYC top, $65, available at wray.nyc Wray NYC skirt Steve Madden shoes, $99, available at Marshall Columbia bag, $275, available at Ming Yu Wang earrings, $595, available at. It was definitely groundbreaking to me at the time.” “I thought The Sims was amazing when I first got into it,” says Virgil wistfully.

Anything - save for an open world concept - was possible. She could be a bloodthirsty but flirty vampire looking for their soulmate ( The Sims 2: Nightlife) or, more in line with her real-life entrepreneurial leanings, an ambitious upstart selling gelatin at their bakery for a thousand simoleons ( The Sims 2: Open for Business). With each character that she conjured in Create-A-Sim, a new story was born, and Virgil was in charge of every twist and turn that would follow. Though Virgil was originally drawn to the fast-paced nature of SimCity and its sequels, The Sims allowed her to tap into her inner storyteller. By the early 2000s, the gameplay had evolved to be less city planning and more soap opera, focusing on the human aspects of the Game of Life: getting married, climbing the career ladder, and dealing with freak accidents, like drowning in a pool with no ladder to escape - you know, the usual. The earliest iterations of the Electronic Arts game launched in 1989 with SimCity, giving players the chance to build and sustain their own metropolis. And I like things that are not too easy but not too difficult either.” That desire to toe the line between being able to keep her brain on neutral and pushing herself with mind-numbingly stressful gameplay led her to the one game that can really swing either way: The Sims. “I play for fun, to de-stress and unwind. “Some people enjoy the rush of beating something really hard, but I’m not that person,” Virgil assures me. Not that she’s uber-competitive or anything. Virgil quickly burned through what she describes as “kiddie games” like Super Mario and Goof Troop before challenging herself with first-person shooters in Call of Duty and Halo, quickly becoming known as Thee Gamer amongst her friend group. After her mom noticed that her youngest would pass hours of the day watching her older siblings shout and cheer playing video games, she purchased her baby girl her very own console (a classic Super Nintendo), and then, the love affair began. (Sorry, Mom.) But Virgil isn’t just your everyday streamer - she’s actually creating a more equitable, more inclusive gaming space through the creation of custom content.Įven with the very serious childhood career goal of practicing law in mind, Virgil, also known as Xmiramira online, has always been drawn to the world of gaming. Because as it turns out, we had the cheat codes all along, and it is in fact totally possible to play video games all day and all night for a living.
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“I never thought this was a thing.” By “this,” she means a career as a professional gamer and streamer.

“I wanted to be a damn lawyer,” laughs Amira Virgil during a recent Zoom interview.
