| The Sims Online: Lost in Translation 23 April 2004 Outline
When The Sims Online was launched in mid-December 2002, expectations were sky high. "The Sims games are always the best," a beta-tester wrote in October. "I think this is the best sim game ever made," another chimed in, screaming; "Dude I MEAN WHATS BETTER THAN PLAYING A GAME WERE YOU LIVE AND STUFF ONLINE" (Pizan36 and Snake72, 2002). Journalists also struggled to find the right superlatives. Time called it a "daring collective social experiment that could tell us some interesting things about who we are as a country" and proclaimed, "We're about to witness the birth of Simulation Nation." Newsweek issued a special report on "The next frontiers" with The Sims Online on the cover, writing, "America’s hottest PC game is moving to the Net, where thousands of players will interact and live virtual lives. Is this the future of home entertainment?" In their press release at the launch, Electronic Arts noted that "The Sims is the top-selling PC game of all time," selling more than 20 million units (EA 2002); according to insiders, they initially projected 400,000 subscribers to the online version the first year (Woodcock 2004). Over the Christmas season, subscriptions immediately rocketed to 80,000; in the next couple of months, they inched towards the 100,000 mark, but the press release celebrating this milestone was never issued. [Add: developments in two directions: declining subscription numbers -- the most current estimates are in the 65-80,000 range -- and the development of narrative drama. The latter has taken the form of a Sims mafia. While this is not what EA had anticipated -- in fact they went to great trouble to forestall the possibility of one player harassing another -- it functions to enliven the game. Note that there is a widespread expectation that the game will be terminated within a year.] [Add: we approach the difficulties of the game from a cognitive angle in this paper. Our proposal is that the game failed for two reasons. First, the architecture of the game means that there is only a partial overlap between the agency of the player and the agency of the sim, leading to a weak identification with the fictive sim on the part of the player. Second, the game lacks a sufficient complexity to permit strategic development. Both of these shortcomings can be traced back to the inherently problematic and imperfectly executed transition from The Sims to The Sims Online.] Methods One of us (Greenfield)
had documented the spontaneous rise of a series of collaborative
cultural developments in the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake
that hit Southern California on 17 January 1994. She initiate a
data-collection project on The Sims Online in the hope of catching the
development of a vibrant online community in the making. Of four
initial subjects, only two generated significant amounts of data; x
hours of video was captured over a period of x months. The rest of us
joined the project in early 2004. To our surprise, neither of the
players like the game enough to continue to play, even though their
subscriptions were paid, and they were additionally remunerated for
keeping a diary. Two further subjects were recruited in early 2004 and
contributed material. In addition, we have benefitted from the
extensive documentation of TSO on the Internet, in particular we have
benefitted from the many interviews with advanced players at the
Alphaville Herald, a site maintained by Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy and linguistics at the University of Michigan. We take our subjects to be representative of the majority of TSO subscribers. While they did not persist in playing the game beyond a year, and during no point in the game became deeply absorbed <verify>, they were experienced players of MMORPGs and, judging by the declining numbers, not untypical of TSO subscribers. A Newbie's ProgressBrief and concise, SH's diary reveals a series of psychological stages through which the new player progresses. [Add: background on SH] SH began to play on 22 December 2002, within days of the release of the game. He recorded these early games, but did not start his diary until 19 January 2003. [Add: explain that tens of thousands of alpha and beta testers had already been playing the game for months, building up a large number of properties.] [Add: introduction saying SH begins by creating a sim with an insect head, Fred Mandible. He wanders around Alphaville and is largely ignored by other players.] 2003-01-19: SH writes that Fred Mandible was "a character I developed to understand the game. This character has been retired today. I didn't really develop the character fully because I knew he wasn't going to last."It is unclear what he means by "developing the character fully" -- is this a statement about his own emotional involvement? Or more prosaically, about gaining skill points? At this point in the game, SH may be uncertain and open-ended about what it means to develop a character, but judging from his next remark, his conceptions are extremely rich. 2003-01-19: SH writes of his new character Sammer, "I chose to develop this character because he is the closest thing to my alter ego. I needed an outlet from that ego in order to help myself in real day to day life. I'm hoping that I'll be able to learn from my other self and take those characteristics that I feel I lack and forge them into my real life." (9)This is a remarkable statement, showing that SH expects the game to provide the opportunity for a profound pedagogical experience, in which his virtual life will allow him both to explore and to cultivate modes of being and responding to the world that he can subsequently incorporate into his own life in a selective manner. "So far "Sammar" has done fairly well in getting to know his way around. He has visited a few different places. He's gotten a roommate, "Kelli M", who also is a beginner. And he's made a few extra bucks making pizza. Not too bad for a first day. His frustrations are asing too with all knew [sic] knowledge and info he gains. His main goal at present is to make enough money to build a party pad by the beach." (9-11)The short-term goal is visualized as building a house in an aesthetically attractive location in order to provide a venue for himself to host parties, or events whose function is to have fun together. "A lot of the people I've visited at their properties have been exceptionally nice. I imagine it has to do with their visitor bonus. The people I met in the pizza place are not nearly as friendly. It's amazing what greed will do." (13)SH is very positive about the quality of his interactions, even though the screen recordings show a very modest level of interactions with others. He is realistic about the motives behind the owner's friendliness. There is a mild irony in the conjunction of his warm appreciation of the owner's friendliness and his dismay at the unfriendly and impatient behavior of the pizza makers, given that he realizes both are caused by the same greed. 2003-01-22: SH writes of Sammer, "this character has made huge strides in his skill levels. Interaction between "Sammar" and the other characters has increased dramatically. His logic skill is up 2 notches and his cooking skill is up a notch and change. His interaction and friendship with people is increasing mostly due to his helpfulness in cleaning and other household duties." (17)SH approaches the game with the clear expectation that he will encounter a fun and collaborative environment. He expects to be liked and appreciated by contributing to a common good. "Sammar is feeling accepted in this community. He is still figuring out the finer details but it's coming along well. He aspires to make his skills at their peak and make as much money as possible."The attribution is striking: "Sammar is feeling accepted." At this point in the game, SH is clearly identifying with the avatar sufficiently to develop an emotional response. This response is largely focused on whether he is accepted into the community -- that is to say, he is operating on the implicit assumption that there is a community in TSO, and that this community either accepts or rejects newcomers. At the same time, he is starting to realize that the game is about gaining skills and making money. 2003-01-23: SH writes of Sammer, "He's figured his way around, and his skill levels are constantly increasing as is his money levels are increasing [sic]. He's building a friendship base that's making him money and skill."The next day, he is already starting to think of friendships in instrumental terms: they are "making him money and skill", and are no longer pursued for their own sake. While his diary has been upbeat and positive, he does not return to the game for more than three weeks. 2003-03-18: SH writes, ""Sammar" has built his skill levels, mostly mechanical & logical, and is making a decent amount of money making gnomes. He has a home now and is in the process of building it up to be a place where other sims can come to relax and make money." (25)In this entry, SH shows less of an emotional involvement in his avatar, whose activities in this session are not directed towards forming relationships, but is focused on building skills and making money. However, he sees this as a temporary means to a more attractive goal, that of building a house. The purpose of this house is still to provide a place for others, but he no longer imagines they will come to party. Instead, they will come to his house to hang out, and to make money. "My character's main goal at present is to be a viable and successful character who can help other sims in their money and skill earning endeavors." (25-27)His motives remain altruistic; he wants to contribute to the success of other sims, but first his sim must become a "viable and successful character". The game does not appear to be intrinsically motivating; rather, it is a means to an end that is projected further into the game. So far, playing is more like work: "The game part of the Sims is somewhat boring because character development is almost in real time unlike other sims games where I can fast forward through time." (29)He is beginning to critique the game: it is not fun, and reaching the part of the game that would be fun takes too long. "I think an offshoot room where people can separate from the game and chat or have some other activity like a sims poker room would make the game far more interesting." (29)The suggestion is telling: rather than playing TSO, he would prefer to "separate from the game" and just play some other game with people online. The game itself is "somewhat boring". Two weeks pass. SH has lost interest in his "alter ego" and his hopes of using TSO to try out and practice new character traits or behaviors in order to integrate them into himself have been disappointed. He begins a new sim: 9 April 2003: "I started Freakstick today to retry the sims.com. Freakstick has a skinless body. He sorta looks like the anatomy figure from highschool biology class. And his head is a mask that's part tribal part the big blue character in Monsters, Inc. played by John (35) Goodman. I chose to develop this character to express my off the wall personality, as opposed to my other character "Sammar" who is whom I'd like to be in real life, an alter ego, if you will. I wasn't sure if Freakstick would be accepted or understood, but surprisingly people are eager to talk to him and make friends. His friendship circle is plus 2. His mechanical skill is up to 3." (35-37).The player's goal has now been reformulated: to "express my off the wall personality" (37) rather than to "learn from my other self and take those characteristics that I feel I lack and forge them into my real life" (9). The goal is still social -- a kind of exhibitionism, perhaps aiming to try whether this "off-the-wall personality" will be accepted, as a test bed for whether it might also be accepted in "my real day to day life" (9). "Now that I've learned the main tricks and tips in succeeding in the Sims, I have a new way of going about things. I plan on amassing large amounts of mechanical and logical skill. Those skills have the greatest amount of financial profitability with the least (39) amount of constant attention." (37-39)Over the last three and a half months, SH has played a total of five hours <verify>. He now feels confident he has "learned the main tricks" and simply needs to carry them out. The strategic learning is modest; he is focusing on mechanical and logical skills rather than the dozen or so alternatives, not because these are particularly enjoyable, but simply to maximize his wages. This brief formulation of strategy appears to be close to what the game supports in that department, short of mob-related extortion and prostitution. He is now clearly not enjoying the game for its own sake but is focused on getting past the stage he is at. "The game would be more conducive to chatting if email were accessible while playing to swap pics and personal info. A real possibility of meeting these people off line would get the place buzzing." (39)The subtext here is that the sims that you encounter in the game don't really feel like real encounters. They are not emotionally satisfying or engaging, and thus do not draw people in. For some reason he tries to understand, players have very little to say to each other. Nevertheless, SH remains positive and appreciative: "The characters at night are really cool too. Very generous, and accomodating." (39)In spite of the single-minded focus on building skills and making money, it's clear that these activities fail to get SH very involved in the game. He spent more than two months developing the skills of his alter ego character Sammar, even purchasing a lot and starting to build a house, only to start from scratch with Freakstick. In this round, he choses the recommended strategy of being a roommate: "So I'm developing Freakstick logic skills. He's become roommate with two girls from NY. People really seem to like Freak's look which surprises me." (41)The avatar's roommates don't seem to interest him much. Other players respond positively to his avatar's looks; there is a hint of an identification, but his energy is focused elsewhere: "My goal right now is to make as much money as possible and to build my friendship web. I want to own a house soon and make it into "The Place" to see and become a Sims lord." (41)This is the first time SH speaks of a social hierarchy -- an upper class who owns houses and have social status. He continues to think of his future house as a place that will be socially popular, that will tap into a social dynamic that aggregates regard into fame and status. For the first time, he owns this vision himself, proclaiming "I ... want to become a Sims lord". This contrasts with the current state of the game, where Freakstick is spoken of in the third person. "I've also started (43) learning of all the different things I can do to make money and skill points. The start of the game is still really slow. The building of skill takes forever. I wish there were a way to gain skills faster. I foresee myself having enough money to start a profitable house within the next 10 game periods." (41-43)This may seem a realistic scenario, but SH already owned a house when he was developing Sammar. He is so far failing to break into the Sim aristocracy, and feels it acutely. To persist, he gives himself a budget of ten more boring game periods before he can move on to the second stage of the game. At the same time,he really wants to just meet with people: "In a perfect world a separate area just for chatting would be great. A setup with regional room choice would be optimal." (43)Far from experiencing a desire to live in a virtual world, SH is looking for people he can meet in real life to motivate him to play on. SH still wants to exit the game to chat, get away from the skilling and working -- in spite of the fact that the game has excellent built-in chat features. Two and a half months go by. In practice, the promise of future fun is not enough to motivate him to persist. On 27 July 2003 he goes on for a brief session to build skills but there were few people online so the effort didn't pay off as much as he had hoped. "Maybe there will be more people the next time I log on." (45). He is now speaking of people as purely instrumental in speeding up the gaining of skill points; he is no longer interested in socializing or meeting friends. 4 August 2003: SH writes of Freakstick, "I'm continuing this character because I have invested time to build his skills up and his money a little bit." (47)SH's relation to his avatar has become increasingly detached -- he is no longer interested in trying out new traits or even showing off. The logic of the game appears to grind sociality out of him. His goal is subtly reconceptualized: "My ultimate goal, still, is to gain enough skill and money to build (49) the ultimate house where I won't have to work at making money. Rather I earn money by collecting the revenues given to me by the sims for visitors coming to my house. Also I will get residuals for every dollar that my guests make."SH is now fully converted to the logic of the game: it is not about human relationship at all, and there is no room for charity (as in his earlier desire to help others). The logic of TSO is to live off the labor of others, reducing the primary significance of human relationship to one of instrumentality. On 26 August 2003, SH reaffirms his goal: "My goals for Freakstick remain the same, to build skill and eventually make more money."The formulation suggests that the player sets the goal, but the goal must be displaced onto the avatar. The player's motivation is flagging, but he continues to hold out the promise of a brighter future: "The time it takes to build skill is a little overwhelming, not mention boring. But I feel it will pay off soon and my house will be my reward." (51)On 1 September 2003, he writes, "The goals remain the same. People are a little more chatty tonight so the game isn't nearly as mundane but because it's a nationwide assembly of people it's difficult to transcend the smalltalk and delve into more meaningful conversation. I think if it were more regional people would be more willing to meet offline." (53)SH continues to desire a real-world anchor for the virtual community. In its absense, conversations remain superficial and unsatisfying. As for the game itself, there is nothing new to report -- not only does he have nothing to talk about with his fellow players; he has nothing to tell us in his diary. 28 September 2003: "Tonight was a little more interesting than previous play experiences. I made a tidy sum of money and got involved in many activities thrown by different home owners. I think I finally have a basis on which I can design my future home. I think by year's end I will have my house and the dynamic of the game will change completely."This is the last entry. The argument is hopeful, but a bit strained. SH appears to have failed to convince himself that "the dynamics of the game will change completely" and never played again <verify -- I don't know if I have the complete diary>. Lost in Translation Like our subjects, we found the world of TSO baffling. As their avatars walk gingerly through opulent virtual resorts, where scattered citisims labor in silence, we found ourselves wondering about the origins of what appeared to be a concatenation of demoniacal design decisions. Instead of a flowering and chatty online community, busy developing cultural norms and grand collaborative projects at the click of a mouse and within convenient reach of online researchers, we found a scattered assembly of upscale sweatshops where intermittently attended robots plied their senseless trade. Welcome to the brave new world of digital dystopia. The basic code for TSO has been ported from The Sims. [Add: history of The Sims, story of the transition to TSO.] [Here is some material on the characteristics of The Sims, far more than we can use but not necessarily what we need. The section needs a complete rewrite.] User control In common with most other single-player games, The Sims provides a number of mechanisms
for allowing the player to regulate the degree of difficulty of the game. The game
leaves it up to the player to set pace. <Give some examples.> This makes the game
relaxing, as the player finds that at every turn, he is at liberty to progress at his
own pace. This allows the user to create what is at any time the optimal level of
challenge. In the Sims, the player has access to a large array of building
materials to construct and decorate houses. This functionality is in
fact at the core of the Sims, and is the game started, <details>
and it's very attractive. Some of our subjects indicate they spend a
large proportion of their time on the Sims decorating and building. Motivation In the single-player game, the user is presented with a world he knows at the outset to
be mechanical and finite. What makes such a world interesting is in part its
combinatorial possibilities, in part the associations it elicits. The combinatorial
possibilities in The Sims develop along two lines: a simulated environment and
simulated agents. The various building materials can be combined in a very large
number of ways. There are few rules of combination. This generates a
vast permutational freedom.You can build castles in the air -- literally. On numerous web sites
devoted to the Sims, you will find the strategic suggestion to build
your house on a forest of columns, and when you are done, you can
remove all the columns and leave your house floating in the air. Just
make sure to build a stairway first. The environment The basic environment is an invariant scene <describe the details>, a suburban subdivision on which the game invites the player to build one or several houses, and to move ready-made families into them. The houses and the landscaping around them is assembled by the player out of pictorial shopping windows and assembled at the click of a mouse. Thus, the task of construction is rendered simple, leaving only the task of making the fantasy house. There are x types of flowers, y decorative trees, n chairs and m sidings and wallpapers. The combinatorial possibilities are finite but astronomical. The builder constructs an aesthetically pleasing order out of scattered elements, tears it down, and rebuilds. In this process the user acquires a strategic familiarity with the main lines of the entirety of this vast possibility space, and a degree of comfort with the task of assembing a house. This task is well defined and predictable. Each instance of a given type of entity used for construction has characteristics that is entirely predictable; there are no flaws in the workmanship, there is a perfect match between the real and the ideal. In this sense, the activity is akin to a combinatorial game with cards, where each card has an invariant function within the game. All individual variance has been removed, the "inherent cussedness of things" is gone. The skills acquired are not engineering skills; according to J.E. Gordon's Structures (1978), "A deep, intuitive appreciation for the inherent cussedness of materials and structures is one of the most valuable accomplishments" of an engineer (p. 63). Instead, these skills are attractive simply because they allow you to create -- to build houses, to decorate, to create new combinations of patterns and structures. There is very little strategy learning simply because there is no particular goal. Strategies arise only to organize the basic repertoire of action into sequences that increase your chances of achieving a particular goal. In The Sims, it is possible to remove this goal altogether, and simply focus on the aesthetics of the combinatorial space. This aesthetics is, however, explicitly a consumer ethos. For every component you pay a certain amount, drawing down on your finite resources. This translates your aesthetic enjoyment of decorating a house into a desire for components for this decoration. In this way, a scarcity is created. Overcoming this scarcity provides the game with a moving target. In a simulated world, all scarcity is manufactured, a feature deliberately built into the system. Within The Sims, one of the focal points of the game becomes to acquire the components that make decorating houses possible. These components are without exception manufactured consumer goods, and they are acquired by an act of instant electronic shopping, where selection coincides with ordering and delivery. Supplies are perfect and inexhaustible. This situation is a readily intelligible simplification of a mature industrial consumer-oriented economy. Standing in for the real world For the act of building, no simulated agents are required. The player herself selects and places the items. In this aspect of the game, the player stands in a relation to the simulated world that closely resembles the relation of a player to a doll house, or a Lego set. The simulated world is essentially a pretend world, one that stands in as a substitute object for the real world. Where the real world presents obstacles to building, where materials are heavy, dangerous, and expensive, the simulated world removes the cost and danger. What is left is a cognitive task: the task of building the higher level cognitive frames within which such real projects can take place. In this perspective, the structure of the game is pedagogically important. By designing a game in which the focus of life is to purchase items to decorate your house, we create the conditions where the overall cognitive frames for fitting into such a society are cultivated. This consumerist emphasis is consistently applied: in the game there are no public spaces, no schools or libraries, no commons. In addition, society is present only as a potential source of the money that is required to pay for purchases. The purchases themselves take place within the interface between the player and the simulated world, belonging properly to neither. Complementing its aesthetic dimension, the challenge of building and decorating a succession of houses has an implicit lifetime narrative: as you grow older, you will be able to move from house to house, from small house to large house, from constrained budget to an expansive budget, and in this manner ascend in social status. The implicit lesson is powerful in part because it is so self-evidently uncontroversial, so clearly not trying to make a political statement. The world of The Sims is an act of playful pretense, where certain elements of the real world have been incorporated into the structure of the game in a simplified manner. The elements of society that have been abstracted out are those of consumer society from a purely domestic point of view. In sociological terms, the game serves the pedagogical purpose of providing young girls with the opportunity of constructing and reinforcing the socially dominant models of the famale as domestic consumer-decorator. So mainstream are these models in the US that the game's structure appears trivial; the designers have simply chosen to select elements of a core female social role. On the level of the individual's motivation, the focus of the game is to construct and to decorate. These are activities enjoyable in themselves, and pedagogical in the sense that they allow the player to explore and become familiar with a vast combinatorial space. Such well-defined problem spaces are generally characteristic of board games: simplified substitute agents with a limited repertoire of possible behaviors leave control in the hand of the player and allow him or her to explore the entire problem space. The overall framing of this problem space -- the social myth that surrounds it -- simplifies and reinforces a mainstream vision of consumerist lives that people are already massively exposed to. The make-believe world the game provides the user with a set of sims, or simulated humans. While this may sound exotic, it is not very different from playing with "action figures" or "dolls". <describe the nature of this control in some detail, or fold this point into the previous discussion>. For an example of how The Sims can be used to create complex narrative scenarios, see the Sims journal of the San Francisco writer Monique (last name?) at http://www.mopie.com. She keeps a journal, and one of her creative outlets is to populate her offline Sims with a vast cast of characters, who busily date their neighbors, marry, arrange parties, make movies, start cults, and build a homo disco and karaoke bar. She chronicles these stories with screenshots (http://www.mopie.com/sims/simdex.html).[The following section presents a theoretical model and is in better shape.] Playing God In a simplified model of virtual agency, we propose that players track information relevant to each agent in an agent register. The agent register contains information about the agent's current capabilities, his goals, obstacles that keep him from his goal, and his degree of progress. The player maintains a live agent register that is hooked into his emotional systems; he is also capable of updating passive agent registers used to model the intentions and likely actions of others. Games vary in their ability to convince the player to identify, or to go live with a fictional agent register. Unless the player goes live, the experience will be relatively emotionally detached, lessening the potential for a significant learning experience. When SH designs Sammar, he clearly intends to identify with this character so profoundly that he will be able to learn from the character's virtual experiences and feed the results back into his real-life psychology -- "to learn from my other self and take those characteristics that I feel I lack and forge them into my real life." (9) The alternative extreme is to play God. The Sims, which originated in a doll-house game, provides the player with a god-like control of the Sims. "Finally it's here!" aquafan1 writes on the beta tester board 12 September 2002. "An online game where you don't just kill things. The Sims series has to be the best set of games known to man. I mean what can be better than playing God? And now you can play with people all over the world! What more can you ask for?" "A lot of people on this board have emphasized how playing God is the most fun aspect of the Sims," asdf99 writes on 25 November 2002. "I would agree, but I would also say that in the case of Sims Online, the emphasis is now on social interaction, and less on playing God with communities and families. It's between players now, not between the player and the environment his character is in." What the testers don't yet fully realize is that playing God is entirely incompatible with identifying with a particular avatar within the game, the critical design change in TSO. Playing God means that you are not one of the creatures; you stand above them, directing their lives with superior power and knowledge. Your agent register as God looks completely different from the agent register of an avatar: by definition, God has control of the whole game, while the avatar only controls himself. Will Wright, the lead designer of The Sims and of TSO, was acutely aware of the potentially problematic tension between these two types of agents. In multiplayer games, you can become deeply immersed in your virtual character and forge strong emotional bonds with other avatars. "That's never been an issue in any of my games before," Wright says. "Most of the time I'm dealing with little simulated AI people that pee on the floor all the time" (Keighley 2002). Yet in The Sims Online, these two modes are mixed together in a profoundly unsatisfactory manner. On the one hand, some of the god-like capabilities of The Sims are retained: the player can build and decorate houses, for instance, something the avatar cannot accomplish. Melding with the sim would be pointless: the sim simply cannot play the game. Conversely, some of the artificial intelligence behaviors of the robotic sim of The Sims have been retained in TSO. The player does not directly control the avatar; instead, the player can tell the avator what to do. By clicking on an object, the player discovers the cloud of affordances that are available to the avatar, and by selecting among them tells the avatar what to do. The activity itself is robotic: the player does not walk, or practice skilling, or produce mathematical formulas, but merely initiates these behaviors in the avatar. These design features are the primary cause of the excruciating boredom that characterizes The Sims Online. Because the avatar's skills are artificial-intelligence imitations of real skills, it is hard to see these skills as belonging to the player; they are symbolically tagged to the avatar, remnants of a doll-like game controlled by a god-like player. Will Wright, the lead designer of The Sims and of TSO, was acutely aware of the potentially problematic tension between these two types of agents. In multiplayer games, you can become deeply immersed in your virtual character and forge strong emotional bonds with other avatars. "That's never been an issue in any of my games before," Wright says. "Most of the time I'm dealing with little simulated AI people that pee on the floor all the time" (Keighley 2002). Now it had become an issue, yet the solution was elusive. While the robotic behaviors of avatars force a disjunction between the agent register of the player and those of the avatar, the player is not compensated by a corresponding increase in his god-like powers. In The Sims, time can be speeded up, and readily available cheat codes provide you with infinite resources. In TSO, you become a prisoner to the highly constrained productive capacity of a stupid robot that lacks any initiative or creativity. The player's own creativity has been effectively blocked. Wright's initial idea was to extend the single-player game by allowing each player's computer to act as a server, so that the houses each player had already constructed could become available to others in a peer-to-peer network. While this would fully preserve the highly attractive characteristics of The Sims, this solution would also run afoul of the profounder problem: to be an avatar you have to renounce your god-like powers. If a peer-to-peer network of Sims were to function as a virtual world where players visited each other, they could not all come as gods. There is, however, an overlapping middle in TSO, an intersection of agent registers, where a degree of identification can happen. Both the avatar and the player can own a house, take pride in the number of skill points achieved, and look forward to a future of wealth, popularity, and high status. The difficulty is that this middle space does not contain behaviors. In adopting the agent register of the avatar, there is nothing the player can actually do -- any behavior belongs either to the player alone, or to the avatar alone. Only the player can take the initiative and decide which action to perform next; only the avatar can actually perform that action. The disjunction is nearly complete. Cut off from effective emotional involvement, dependent on a mindless robot to achieve your goals, and unable to act out modes of being that might meaningfully translate into an increased behavioral repertoire in real life, boredom is mindnumbing certainty. The Absence of Strategic Shortcuts What could have filled this middle space with fascination and meaning is strategic development. In the space of strategy, the avatar could become an acceptable tool for a complex and effective narrative. Games consist of rules that link agents to objects, such as the repertoires of sim behaviors implicit in the affordances of objects with The Sims and TSO alike. Strategies are meta-rules, or rules about when to engage in which behavior. The simplest level of strategic behavior is the cyclical, the repetition at some regular interval of a certain behavior. TSO has built in a series of elementary cyclical imperatives in the so-called "Needs" -- a series of green bars that slowly turn red and mark your avatar's levels of hunger, comfort, hygiene, bladder, energy, fun, social and room. While these constraints make sense for a dollhouse game, they add little of interest to an avatar game. Conceptually, they provide nothing to chew on, and thus are of no help in filling out the empty middle space of intersecting agent registers. Gods operate in vast permutational spaces where strategies can be freely formulated and enacted: to build a palace in the air, to enact the story of a film shoot at a gay karaoke bar. The space is so large that infinite strategies are possible. Effectively to meld Gods and sims, players into avatars, the game must allow the formulation of complex sequences of strategic moves, to give the player something to engage with while the avatar performs his bidding. Yet little or no thought has been given to creating a space for longer-range directional strategies. As SH discovers, there are no effective shortcuts, no extremely smart and elegant ways to achieve your long-term goals. Part of the reason for this is that TSO is committed to sustain an artificial scarcity to motivate the players to depend on each other and thus force them to interact, as if they would all be solitary if given the freedom. In a catch-22, you block out shortcuts to force people to interact, thereby reducing their significance to each other to a purely instrumental level, the level at which they meet their basic needs. The most shocking feature of The Sims Online is the silence: the avatars have nothing to talk about. While they have a practical significance to each other, since you earn points faster when skilling or working in the proximity of others, they have nothing of value to offer beyond their sheer presence. They cannot become uniquely valuable to each other. Above all, they have no information to share, because their world is structured in such a manner that information is not a critical constraint on effective action. In order to function as a world, TSO must create a situation where there is a constant scarsity of information, where what you know makes a major difference for how well you succeed. Since there are no strategic shortcuts, first movers by default have a huge and palpably unfair advantage. Once you have established a house, others have little choice but to come to you and make you wealthier. One of the beta testers, MonaN, pessimistically complained the week before the release date that she is already too late to the game. TSO is a "poverty simulator / chatroom that favors the top 1% ... The developers of the game reward gangster/mafia behavior by rewarding the top 1% with visitor bonuses. The competition to get riches and become the most popular finishes after a week of play. The big houses get bigger while the rest of the players get left out." While this assessment is exaggerated, the effect is very real. It is remarkable that the designers of The Sims Online failed to realize the urgency of the requirement of a strategic space to fuel the social interactions. Wright had no experience in online games; the porting of the code from the single-player Sims produced a mad scramble lasting several months leading up to the final release. New ideas could not be implemented as the code base was being refactored to clear out the spagetti tangle of emerging relations. To get ready for the Christmas market, corners were savaged. [Add: the Sims Mafia found a way to develop strategic action in spite of EA constraints, an event that at once revitalized the game and may have scared segments of the players away.] Summary / conclusion |