Although The Sims 4 isn't perfect, the biggest problem about the game right now is how toxic the Twitter community is.
Twitter can be a pretty awful website, but this is a strange premise. It is a singleplayer game. Even if it was multiplayer, how could the biggest problem possibly be how people engage with each other on twitter? I guarantee you the majority of people who play the game don't even have a twitter account.
While well-known faces like Dave Miotke, aka SimGuruNinja Spark'd Judge, remain in the public eye, many others have gone quiet in recent months. This could be due to the chaotic state of the world right now but it wouldn't be surprising if it was in response to increasing toxicity online.
This "toxicity" has been a part of the sims 4 community and part of online communities in general since the beginning of the game and long before. It's weird to look at the very real material conditions of the world and how so many people are dealing with extra stress and sometimes extremely disruptive and destructive material conditions, and then say the problem is actually not that, but a small number of twitter users.
So next time you feel like kicking off on Twitter, please keep your cool and remember that on the other side of that monitor are real people who are all dealing with varying levels of chaos and upset right now. Don't be the asshole that makes it worse. Keep your criticism in check and together we can make Sims Twitter as wholesome as a toddler in a snowsuit.
No one is going to make twitter wholesome, sorry. It's a website that pits people against each other based on clout and takedowns, and when it's not doing that, most of it is shallow viral marketing. I've been on smaller parts of twitter that actively try to be supportive and some people really do their best to make the most of it, but it's a website that inherently, through the infinite wisdom of mediocre algorithms, gives some voices more power than others for inscrutable reasons and a lot of those voices use them irresponsibly, on top of lots of voices with little power taking their anger out on complete strangers, possibly in part because they have no voice for no apparent reason.
People like the article writer are probably expected to be on twitter as part of their job, which makes them more likely to have an audience and more unlikely to be able to escape to worst parts of twitter, which is probably where this is coming from. I've yet to hear from someone who has a sizable platform on twitter who actually enjoys how the website works.
That said, it's just hard to read an article like this, making it sound like some people on twitter is the biggest problem with a singleplayer video game, knowing what people are going through in RL. On top of that, knowing that the sims 4 is probably one of the least toxic communities there is in video games and if that surprises you, you don't want to know how awful some of the worst of people can be in some game communities. And on top of that, knowing that blaming video game communities for being big mad is a common deflection used in video game media when a game is suffering from bad PR.
Nobody has an answer for how to resolve this stuff beyond encouraging other people to "be nice" because: 1) to some extent, the answer is for this paid product to be better quality and nothing else will soothe people who are in a certain kind of place of discontent with it, short of leaving the community entirely and 2) these platforms we call "communities" are built primarily for marketing and discussion, in that order. They are not built with human connection in mind and there is generally nothing connecting people other than how much love they have for a product in a given moment. If you want a community that won't be "toxic," you're gonna have to make one and figure out how to connect people on a level deeper than their current level of enjoyment of a product.
