Sims Online players are using the game's "family album" picture — intended to store screenshots from important moments in your game avatars' lives — to piece together staged scenes that they piece together into graphic novels. Basically, it's machinima comic-books.
Service, known in the Sims community as nsknight, has created several albums that are highly ranked by her peers. Among them is her six-part Vanderbilt series, which took her months to write and stage and which revolves around the story of three sisters separated by the murder of their mother.
Other users have conjured up such storylines as a young woman's drug addiction and recovery; an African-American girl's adoption by a white family; and, naturally, poor girls falling in love with rich guys. Andrea Davis, known as VioletKitty, uses the albums to build narrative Sims tutorials. "Since my Sims weren't 'acting,'" she explained, "it (is) more like reality TV."
