![]() Even still, players’ dissatisfaction with early versions of Sim pregnancy led some to create pregnancy mods to lengthen your pregnancy timeline, adjust how excited your Sim is about their pregnancy, have quadruplets, and even miscarry. The Sims is one of the handful of virtual role-playing spaces where you’re able to get your avatar knocked up. Where are the preggos in virtual reality?Īnyone familiar with the dulcet gibberish of Simlish knows a hot tub WooHoo session can lead your Sim to have morning sickness, a growing belly, and a birth in three days’ time. To me, that is far more compelling than simulating a mushroom trip. It’s an opportunity to improve how pregnancy is perceived in our imperfect real world. But I’d suggest that allowing pregnant bodies to freely populate the metaverse not only works to be inclusive of an innately human condition, but could also divorce our imaginations from the anxieties surrounding them. We can fly, experiment with drugs, and cheat on our partners.” I suppose it makes sense that in a virtual world that will indulge all fantasies from guiltless murder to adultery, being pregnant isn’t prioritized. “We can be risqué and push cultural and societal norms beyond traditional boundaries, cloaked by anonymity and invincibility in the metaverse. The promise of the metaverse is comically enormous: “We can destroy things and kill people without fear of punishment or retribution,” boasted the execs of immersive media company Everyrealm last year. But opportunities to practice those psychological stretch marks could be, excuse me, stretched much wider: Popping bellies pop up in maternity-specific VR contexts like birthing prep programs, but their presence remains an anomaly in the nascent metaverse. Seeing a virtual depiction of oneself pregnant, Athan speculates, could be “a way of practicing our stretch marks” to help anticipate this incoming identity-or in my case, to try a pregnancy mindset on. She says there is a “psychological stretch-the internal stretch marks that we have in our mind about our changing body” that occurs as someone grows a fetus inside of them, or as non-birthing expectant parents prepare for a child. Aurélie Athan, a clinical psychologist and professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, studies “matrescence,” the interwoven bio-psycho-social-political-spiritual process that leads to becoming a mother (she likens it to adolescence). Pregnancy in IMVU, as shared by YouTuber Jenise Love. Dipping in and out of alternative realities? My curiosity seemed perfectly suited to the metaverse I’d been hearing so much about. I just wanted to be pregnant for the afternoon-to try it on for size, if you will. Which is why I found myself wondering how I could experience pregnancy, without, you know, making a life-altering decision. More than I am baby crazy, I’m perhaps a little bit pregnancy crazy. I feel the urge to adapt my obsession into a children’s book: Everyone Seems Pregnant. Riding the B train, at my office, in line at the bodega… Who of the people around me are pregnant? Who just had a baby and is grateful to no longer be wearing mesh diapers? Who desperately wants to be pregnant and can’t be? Every single person I talk to, roll my eyes at, or have a crush on came from a pregnant person. My Instagram feed is half ads for something called a “Snoo,” half photos of baby shoes, not yet worn, beside a panting labradoodle, captioned, “Milo is going to be a big sister.” I’m thinking about pregnancy a lot these days, to the point it’s fundamentally shifted my worldview. See, I am 33 years old, an age I am coming to understand is defined by every person I have ever met being pregnant. A range of avatar options are available in Horizon Worlds-but no pregnant bellies.
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