The Sims Online: Ideas for the paper Francis Steen 11 February 2004 Introduction When Newsweek prepared a special report on "The New World of Internet Games" on [date], expectations were high. Find quotations to illustrate this Possibly describe the cover As James Paul Gee points out in What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, good computer games are hard to learn, and in the design of a game is an implicit theory of learning. If that theory doesn't match the actual interests and abilities of the player population, the game will fare poorly in the market. Rather than a formal peer review in cognitive journals, games are reviewed and assessed by thousands of players. <elaborate> In the case of The Sims Online, the game designers needed to build something quite complex. Not only did they have to implement a theory, however implicit, of skills and motivations of the individual's psychology required to master the intricacies of interacting with challening computer software, but they needed to construct a set of incentives that would allow players to interact in building a virtual world. The problem of a tension between what people would like to do in a communal setting and what The Sims Online intends them to do (through the way the game is structured). We could make hay of the argument that TSO is so poorly suited to meet people's real needs in a virtual community that massive amounts of information is off-loaded onto the internet -- here it's easy to give examples.