The Sims and the multiplayer dilemma

The Sims is now 8 years old and the New York Times has an interesting review of the series. There was a time when no serious newspaper would write about videogames. Now the New York Times reviews The Sims as a major milestone in recent pop culture. Among the most interesting observation from the article is that players see their play sessions as something very personal and private. This is very interesting, even though it may not be true. It may be just a lame excuse to justify the disaster that was The Sims Online, arguing that The Sims just does not work in multiplayer mode. But again, it may be also true (similar to the experience that players had with the Eliza chatbot during the sixties). I'm not sure about it. What I'm 100% sure about is that The Sims Online failed because the designers shifted from third person to first person. The Sims are not and should never be avatars, as they were in the online game. The Sims were born to be surrogate slaves to our dreams and fantasies.

Comments

[DDams]

Right, I also do think a major failure of "The Sims Online" was to be very limited for someone seeking for a "life simulator" experience.

Basically, in a multiplayer game, you can't force all the others player to play the role you want them to play, but you can easily do that with bots.

However, focusing on a single character can be an as powerful way as managing a broad range of characters. But to do that you need to design an AI that can fit to "our dream and fantasies", exactly what the "single character" spin-off of the Sims, namely "The Sims Life Stories", failed to achieve...

Personnaly, I think I would enjoy more a first person "Sims", as long as the computer-controlled characters can react in a interesting way...

Oh, and the for the Sims to be "a private" experience, I think we can easily relate that to the loads of website (or real life conversations) in which people just tell us how their Sims "live", so basically tell us our play experiences.

While I do agree on the "personal" side of playing the Sims, I strongly disagree with the "private" one.

[mosberg]

There's plenty of evidence to sugget that playing the Sims games for many players is like "playing together alone". The modding and storyteller communities plays a large role for (presumably most?) players. Players share mods, new designs, buildings, sims and stories about played games. They comment on each others' creations. Playing, modding the games as well as creating stories based on game sessions is seen as self expression; as acts of creativity. Also, there’re plenty of very active web fora dedicated to various aspects of sim playing. So I have to agree with the previous commentor that playing the sims is a highly personal but not private activity for the majority of sim players. There may well be private aspects of players’ use of the game, things that aren’t shared with others or only with a select few. But a lot of the play activity is recontextualised, reprocessed, recounted and passed around in the community(ies) afterwards.

[darkfall gold]

There's plenty of evidence to sugget that playing the Sims games for many players is like "playing together alone". The modding and storyteller communities plays a large role for (presumably most?) players.

[aion kinah]

I think we can easily relate that to the loads of website (or real life conversations) in which people just tell us how their Sims "live", so basically tell us our play experiences.

[buy fallen earth chips]

Also, there’re plenty of very active web fora dedicated to various aspects of sim playing. So I have to agree with the previous commentor that playing the sims is a highly personal but not private activity for the majority of sim players.

[ivan]

insightful - but maybe sims creators were not very skilled at the 1st person game?

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http://www.bloglines.com/blog/bsalts

[Acai Berry]

I totally agree with Ivan... Maybe the creators were not skilled enough in a first person game... Nice article!