My first experience was traumatic!
I'm not much of a gamer. I liked Portal 2 and I have occasionally made it through a point and click adventure game, but otherwise I never really played anything. My husband, who is an avid gamer, kept trying to get me interested in various games, but all of them bored me pretty quickly. My hobbies are art and writing and I dislike anything with rules.
Then one Christmas with family, I saw my cousin get the Sims 3 Supernatural pack and for some reason it intrigued me. I had never even heard of the Sims games before that. My husband (I think he really wanted me to like computer games) promptly bought me the base game and supernatural pack for my birthday a couple months later.
Neither one of us had any idea how to play the game or what to expect. I wanted it to be like a doll house that I could just do make-believe stuff with and create my own stories, and I immediately had an idea for a story about a grumpy old man living alone in a creepy old mansion haunted by a little ghost girl.
I had fun creating the characters in CAS, but then was disappointed in play mode when I discovered that I could not afford a mansion, that my characters (even the ghost!) needed to eat, sleep, shower and pee a lot, that they both were obsessed with watching the TV, and that even my husband couldn't figure out how to get into build mode to edit the boring, modern looking, house they could afford so that it would have two beds. My poor sleep deprived sims kept getting mad and waking each other up, because they refused to share it even though it was a double bed.
Then the old man set fire to the house in a careless mac and cheese accident (classic rookie move!), zombies kept lurching around at night, and making them both freak out, and the little girl ghost aged up suddenly to a teenage ghost (which made me angry because I wanted her to be a little girl). And I quit in frustration. I didn't touch it again for about a year and a half even though I felt guilty about how much money my husband had probably spent on it, and the fact that he seemed disappointed I hadn't liked it, every time I saw the icon on the desktop.
He finally convinced me to try it again (turns out he'd secretly played it during that year and a half and figured some stuff out). I learned about build mode, aging off, cheat codes, and mods. I made myself a rowdy band of rogue computer hacking fairies, and my life has never been the same since.
