Sims fans are not what laymen would expect gamers to be. The shouty young men who crack rape jokes in Call of Duty lobbies are nowhere to be found in Pleasantview. The fandom, unusually for gaming, skews about 80% female; the gameplay is less about gunning down insurgents than building homes and families, nurturing relationships and customizing interior decor. The game gives players godlike control over their creations, allowing legions of highly skilled “modders” to tinker with bespoke elements. Its limitless customization has attracted a sizable and vocal LGBT constituency; some exclusively program lesbians; others make almost all their Sims parents polygamous. Physicality and clothing is entirely unisex, fitting neatly into transgender philosophy; same-sex marriage was introduced to the game in 2009, six years before it was legalized in the US where the game was created.

The Sims is a Californian export, a strange flower from the hothouse of Silicon Valley in the Nineties. The game’s conceptual power was that it reflected the radical entrepreneurialism of that time, allowing players to pull up the roots of known institutions — the family, the town, life and death itself — and redesign everything to the whims of the individual. The Sims is one big lab experiment for different social and sexual dynamics, and even in marketing EA was careful to court progressive favor with Pride campaigns and tactical brand partnerships. Although the spectrum of gameplay is as varied as that of players themselves — some choose, as above, to simply rehearse traditional family roles by putting a mother through three hours of tedious housework before sunrise — both the format of the game and its ideological foundations are inherently liberal.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario more heartrending than grubby realpolitik clashing with this sunlit cyberworld. Unfortunately for Sims players, that’s exactly what happened: EA, the game’s Californian publisher, founded in 1982 by a former Apple employee called Trip Hawkins, has been acquired for a cool $55 billion by a consortium including none other than the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (run by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who the US not too long ago determined had personally ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi) and Affinity Partners — the Floridian investment firm founded by Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and an architect of the Gaza peace plan. A Gulf petrostate where homosexuality is punishable with decapitation, and a son of the Trump dynasty; you could not possibly cook up a less desirable cast of buyers for perhaps the most liberal gaming franchise in history.

Predictably, the players are rattled; a boycott is underway. “It’s always disheartening as a queer woman and a disabled person seeing the places [where] I once found comfort and safety online shrink to a significantly smaller degree,” writes one. Many fret that LGBT content will be phased out of the game, distasteful to the Saudi stakeholders or plain old American conservatives in the Trump orbit. “Even if the Sims stays the same, I don’t want my money to go to those people,” writes another. “The series is very much dead to me after this.”

For some players, this is less about the selling-out of a favorite game than the loss of a better world. One put-out Prometheus, watching the gods snatch back fire, writes: “It’s not just a video game to so many of us; I’ve rebuilt Paris, New York, Barcelona… I can’t just abandon ship and start over, [after] 10 years of world building. I can’t support Saudis or Kushner. I guess I bought my last pack.”

It is difficult to think of a cultural product, game or otherwise, which so precisely captures the spirit of Western hyperprogressivism. The naive political philosophy of Millennials is perfectly mirrored in the dynamics of the simulated world: it is an exclusively digital, infinitely customizable reality which comes into being simply because I say it does. The basic facts of life — one’s intelligence, talents, physicality, even biological sex — are all mercifully tweakable within the game’s cyber utopia. Grinding moral forces like shame and disgust are reduced to minuscule “moodlets” which waft away in a few in-game hours. As in the ethos of Millennial liberalism there is no solid credo, just a shifting and conditional system of values geared towards gratification and experiment. Beyond the arbitrary goals of accruing wealth and building impressive houses each player ruthlessly pursues their own idea of satisfaction, sometimes through outrageous acts of sadism: the classic Sims experience is to put a character who displeases you into a swimming pool before deleting the ladder (I may be speaking from experience). Gamers often alternate between creating “good” and “evil” Sims, where the latter are simply agents of chaos sent to torment and exploit the other residents. The moral bent of gameplay tends to be black and white; it’s a world that suits players who see reality as such too.  The system even shields players from mortality itself if they so choose. “When my first cat died, I brought her back to life”, writes one, who has since chosen to turn off the aging feature altogether.

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The Sims is a tabula rasa for building second, third, fourth lives or recreating reality as you believe it should be. Many players recreate family members; some recreate exes and torture them or simply keep them around for company, fabricating a resolved timeline of their own lives devoid of loss or rejection. The Sims is such a compelling and successful game because it fully actualizes the desire to retreat into a dreamworld — but rather than the magical medieval land of Zelda or the pastoral cuteness of Stardew Valley, this dreamworld is of your own, almost limitless, making.

How strange, then, for this symbol of untethered idealism to come into contact with disturbing political realities. It is not just the idealism of fans thrown into disarray; The Sims is being thrown into confusion along with the American progressive optimism which created it as tech philosophy, and the country more broadly, lurches to the Right.

Like other experiments in tech utopianism, The Sims is still reliant on real-world capital and anchored to decidedly un-rad bad actors. I can sympathize with fans’ misery upon being rudely reminded that their paradise was a shadowplay all along; it must be quite a jolt suddenly to see the puppetmaster’s haggard face, his dirty fingernails. In a game centered around ultimate control, wresting power from the gamer god because of something as earthly as a business buyout exposes the illusion. EA has turned the big lights on.

At the opening, Burtonport’s mayor cut the ribbon. The community expressed pride. But the school wasn’t for children: it offered adult women — paying guests — the opportunity to roleplay as schoolgirls for a holiday.

The story of this strange establishment isn’t just about ooh-la-la play-acting. The house was home to the “Silver Sisterhood”: a female separatist subculture so reactionary they wore Victorian clothing, rejected electric lighting, and refused to listen to music except on a wind-up gramophone. And yet, its members were in some ways 50 years ahead of their time: forerunners of reality-warping contemporary phenomena such as BDSM, cosplay, computer gaming — and also the weird online Right.

The roots of this sect reach back to mid-century counterculture Oxford — and, still further, into the febrile occult subcultures of nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe. There, a group of eccentric scholars and antiquarians began positing a syncretic “Perennialist” or “Traditionalist” doctrine of eternal, immutable, spiritual truth, evident throughout all traditional cultures – but that had been in decline since the Renaissance. The principal exponent of this outlook was the French writer René Guénon (1886-1951), whose The Crisis of the Modern World (1946) sets out his doctrine of modernity as decline.

Where Guénon’s work is relatively apolitical, Traditionalism’s other leading light was the aristocratic Italian writer and one-time Dadaist painter Julius Evola (1898-1974), a pagan monarchist and esoteric race theorist so far to the Right that in 1942 his passport was confiscated by the Italian Fascist party for political extremism.

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Traditionalism’s legacy has spread in some strange directions since. Those influenced more by Guénon today include King Charles, for example, and, on the more Evola-flavoured side, Right-wing figures including Trump’s one-time strategist Steve Bannon, and “Putin’s Brain” Aleksandr Dugin.

That legacy also includes the Silver Sisterhood. According to a 2022 BBC interview with one of its founders, who now goes by the name Mary Guillermin, it all began at an Oxford feminist consciousness-raising group in the Seventies, exploring ancient goddess worship. Presumably that was also where Guénon got into the mix; in any case, what emerged was an all-female Perennialist group, keen to put their Goddess-tinged ideas into practice.

This they did this first at Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, where they tried to live as though men and modernity had simply never happened — even coining their own pseudo-ancient dialect, “Rhennish”. This group then found its way to Atlantis House, via a previous social link to the “Screamers”, to pursue spiritual withdrawal from modernity. An American radical women’s magazine recounts the experience of visiting, in early 1984, what sounds like a devout, low-tech pagan feminist sect: “I enjoy praying, wearing skirts among women, living in a structured household with a low technological level, and dissolving somewhat the accumulated patriarchal grime in my brain cells”.

But with money constantly an issue, the group’s commitment to formal hierarchy seemed to offer a more lucrative business opportunity than craft shop and tea room — and thus a disciplinarian retro-roleplay establishment was born: St Bride’s School for Girls. With Guillermin (then calling herself Brighe Dachcolwyn) as headmistress, the prospectus promised a “total experience” of vintage-themed, all-female schoolgirl roleplay. Journalists descended, fascinated by the surreal combination of Victorian dress and lifestyle with discipline so strict as to hint at the fetishistic.

Guests, meanwhile, extolled its immersiveness, with one telling the BBC: “It’s an entire world. It envelops you.” This is the consistent theme in the bizarre history that followed. Guillermin, in her 2022 interview, describes their creation as a key spiritual practice for the early community: a practice she calls “living theatre”.

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Along with exploring the mind-altering effects of action roleplay, the group also pursued another emerging form of world-building: text-based adventure gaming. For paradoxically, despite ostensibly rejecting modernity out of hand, the women of Atlantis House also made pioneering contributions to early gaming, developed by the mysterious “Priscilla Langridge”, a founding Silver Sister who often appeared veiled, and refused ever to be photographed by the press. The two most noted of Langridge’s games were “The Secret of St Bride’s”, published 1985, (you can play it online here) and a “Jack the Ripper” game, the first such creation to receive an 18 certificate.

According to some reports, the mysterious Langridge was a Sixties Oxford theology scholar, who played a key role in developing the group’s founding “Aristasian” religious outlook: a blend of Perennialism and Seventies feminism with both esoteric and exoteric components. The esoteric dimension of this worldview was most clearly set out some years later, in The Feminine Universe, where the probably-pseudonymous author “Miss Alice Trent” argues that very earliest instances of Perennial Wisdom were feminine, because “the original Creator is feminine”.

Since then, though, the world has declined from the primordial eternal truth, and expelled the divine feminine principle from mainstream culture. This decline reached its nadir in “the cultural collapse of the 1960s”, which Aristasians call “the Eclipse”. Everything since that time is referred to as “the Pit”: a hellish apotheosis of patriarchy “in which the Masculine Principle has come to dominate the culture absolutely, extirpating femininity even from the heart of woman itself”.

For its original adherents, Aristasianism was a self-contained esoteric outlook, with a practice of “living theatre”, ritual goddess-worship, and technological simplicity. For those who didn’t go home again, the immersiveness could be too much. One woman, “Sophia”, spent nearly a year as a “maid” in the house, where she was frequently beaten; in the end she escaped and later brought criminal charges against Guillermin for assault.

But by then things were already coming apart for the larger experiment. In 1992, not long after “Sophia” departed, so too did the Aristasians. Amid a dispute over property ownership, two of the previous Screamer owners broke into Atlantis House, where they found a dark, musty interior with almost no modern appliances or conveniences — and in a room upstairs, a row of tiny desks and a blackboard, complemented by willow canes leaning against the wall. According to reports at the time, the house was also strewn with antisemitic and sadomasochistic literature, along with correspondence between Guillermin and then-BNP leader, John Tyndall.

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Even after this scandal-ridden dissolution of St Bride’s, though, “Aristasia” lived on: as reactionary as ever in its aesthetic, and increasingly BDSM-flavoured in its income streams. In 1993 Guillermin (now calling herself “Miss Partridge”) and Langridge cropped up again in Oxford, this time supporting an anti-metric campaign, hosting “Romantia” retro soirees, and offering discreet corporal punishment experiences. By this point, the more exoteric Aristasian mythology appears to have solidified: a kind of female-separatist high fantasy, with anti-technology retro styling and a side order of BDSM. In this world, Aristasia-in-Telluria is the corrupt, earthly imitation of the real world: Aristasia Pura, a parallel universe, world, existing on a different planet sometimes called “Herthe”. There are no men, and the two sexes are blondes and brunettes, respectively submissive and dominant.

Around the same period, the group founded Wildfire Publishing, which produced female-centric BDSM literature, including a title called The Female Disciplinary Manual, which is much what you’d expect. According to press reports of its 1995 launch, at that point there were several full-immersion Aristasian houses dotted around England, where members lived out the Aristasian reality including its practice of corporal punishment.

Certainly, at least one such establishment existed in 1996, when Channel 4 made a documentary about it. Guillermin, now styling herself “Miss Martindale”, features heavily, teaching lessons and disciplining “girls” for minor infractions. At Wildfire Publishing, meanwhile, fantasy, reality, and Perennialist theology found their most effective delivery mechanism yet: not video games, but fetish literature. The 1996 Children of the Void informs readers: “Morally and culturally, civilisation has ended, just as completely as it would physically have ended if it had been obliterated by atomic bombs.” Meanwhile the narrative mixes expositions of Aristasian feminine essentialism and slightly leaden dialogue with a hefty side-order of spanking porn.

It ought to surprise me that mashing up Right-wing reactionary occultism with Seventies radical feminism should produce mystical cosplay seasoned with BDSM. But somehow it doesn’t. Perhaps the extremism scholar Jeffrey Kaplan is right about the “cultic milieu”: that what matters for fringe ideologies isn’t their place on some imaginary political compass, but how far they are from the mainstream. But more than trying to place Aristasia politically, their enduring interest lies in the dedication they showed to testing just how far you can warp reality through force of play-acting.

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“You can call it therapy,” Guillermin said in 2022 of the group’s “living theatre” practice, “or you can call it magic”. Was there really something occult going on? Or were they just kinky weirdos? Guillermin happily acknowledged in 2022 that Jack the Ripper, which despite its 18 certificate focused more on occult and Masonic subplots, was designed for “philosophical education”. And she repeatedly dismissed regular “kink” devotees as “silly monkeys”.

Whatever the original intent, though, the richness of Aristasian experiments in parallel realities collapsed with the ascendancy of the central, technological alternate reality that today structures nearly all of culture: the internet. By the end of the 2000s, Aristasia had largely lost its hold in “Telluria”, becoming an online-only fandom that finally imploded in a dispute over anime. Guillermin now resides in California, where she works as a therapist espousing the same “divine feminine” spirituality as ever.

But perhaps it didn’t fail. For Aristasia’s immersive practices — if not the aesthetic — are now almost as mainstream as the internet. The group was well ahead of the curve in realising the potential of computer gaming for those who dream of other worlds. And multiple reports suggest that Langridge was actually male, implying another type of personal interest in seeking to alter reality through performance.

More generally still, Aristasian “living theatre” anticipated cosplay. Internationally popular today, and usually viewed as a fun, it also attracts a minority who, like Guillermin, treat the hobby as a kind of consciousness-altering magic. Meanwhile, the notion that one can alter the world by “LARPing” — acting as if your version is already true — has become a crucial political concept in a world that appears increasingly unreal.

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Meanwhile, Wildfire Publishing and the broader Aristasian fixation on power, hierarchy and corporal punishment has now become so normalised today that some even claim it’s reasonable to ditch a partner for not being kinky enough. And like cosplay, BDSM also attracts a minority who view it as something altogether more mind-altering.

So Aristasia succeeded beyond measure, in propagating previously mystical practices into mainstream culture. But it failed, just as signally, to have any effect on post-Sixties culture, except in pioneering the virtualisation of reactionary politics. For while the group’s actual links to the Right are ambiguous, the Aristasian route from efforts to do Traditionalism “IRL”, all the way to purely virtual fandom, reflects a broader contemporary tendency among the weird Right. Here, even as the liquefaction of “traditional” social forms seems ever more complete, nostalgic visions of bygone ages flourish: visions that, however, never seem to make it out of the digital realm.

What, then, is the lesson of Aristasia — whether for reactionaries, or anyone else? It is surely an ambivalent one: that the easiest dimension in which to create your own reality is the internet. But this comes at the price of being ever less able to realise your vision in real life. For that, you still need charismatic leadership, quasi-religious doctrine, real-world community, and a willingness to look silly in the eyes of the world. For those who embrace this more difficult path, though, the story of Aristasia offers a backhanded kind of hope: that if you roleplay hard enough, then even in apparent failure you end up shaping the future.