The Sims Online:
Expectations and early reception
24 April 2004

Contents

• Before the lauch
• Gamers.com preview
• Beta-tester's postings
• Gamespot.com preview
  
• At the launch
  
• Early reception
• Sentiments start to turn
  
• Subscription numbers

• Trouble in Alphaville
• Subscriber numbers
  

Before the lauch

• The Sims Online: Indulging your weirdo. Preview at Gamers.com, by Jeff Green of Computer Gaming World. No date, but the earliest comments date from May 2002.
• A world of possibilities emerges as games go online. Seattlepi.com. By Winda Benedetti, Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter. 8 October 2002.
  
• Newsweek article (15 November 2002, external copy)
• Time magazine also covered it (find date on The Sims news site -- November 2002
  
• "... [A] daring collective social experiment that could tell us some interesting things about who we are as a country. We're about to witness the birth of Simulation Nation."
• The Endless Hours of The Sims Online at Gamespot.com by Geoff Keighley (28 November 2002) (excerpts below -- includes interview with and background on Will Wright)
  
• The Sims news site
  
• Tuesday, December 17, 2002
  EA Ships The Sims Online
  Electronic Arts today announced the release of its highly anticipated PC game, The Sims Online™. The Sims Online is the Internet, multi-player version of the top-selling PC game of all time, The Sims™. The Sims Online is a massive virtual world created and populated by thousands of players from around the world. In this never-ending alternative reality players can be themselves or “Be Somebody. Else™.” Press release (excerpts below)
  
• Tuesday, December 17, 2002
  The Sims Online On 60 Minutes II
  Don’t miss 60 Minutes II this Wednesday, December 18, at 8:00PM, when reporter Bob Simon takes an in-depth look at the video games industry with a spotlight on The Sims Online. The story features interviews with designers Chris Trottier and Will Wright.

Ask the folks at Maxis a question about The Sims Online, and, chances are, no matter what you've asked, you may get back the same answer: "The Sims are real."

The answer is a mantra of sorts. It's a sentence they repeat over and over, as a way of differentiating the game from all previous Sims titles. It's also a message -- almost a warning -- to the millions of gamers who have spent the past two years managing/destroying the lives of the tiny digital people in Will Wright's phenomenally successful human ant farm.

When The Sims Online launches this November, it's going to look much like the game that has dominated the bestseller charts for two years, but in fact it is a completely new, fundamentally different experience.

Gone are Bella and Mortimer Goth, as well as every other AI-controlled Sim in the game. Gone, too, is your ability to control the world. In The Sims Online, you're not God. You're just a Sim. And all those other Sims -- they're real people, too. Now, when you try to shake a Sim's hand, or kiss a Sim, or punch a Sim in the face, that other Sim will be another human, another Sims Online player -- and that player is sitting behind a computer somewhere out there in the real world.

A good idea? A lame one? No one, not Will Wright himself, nor anyone else at Maxis, has any clue how this will play out. Because even Will Wright has no control over the Sims this time -- because we are the Sims. The Sims are real.

That's my italics: the idea is that "you're not God". So the point is that the game hinges on this idea that the sims are real now, that the player is a sim and no longer the God of the Sims. And it turns out that's not really how it works -- this is the single point you should make in the cognitive article.

THE MAN MACHINE
The Sims Online is a huge, ambitious, and risky attempt to translate the gameplay that made The Sims the best-selling PC game of all time (16 million copies have been sold to date, including the expansions) into a language that works in the massively multiplayer arena. Why risky? Because it doesn't fit the profile. There are no monsters to kill, no levels or armor class to attain, no Dwarves to kick. You can't kill other players. It's neither fantasy nor sci-fi based. And The Sims fan base (which is more than 50 percent female, according to Maxis), includes a great many casual gamers, not the kind of hardcore loons who spend their entire waking lives in games like EverQuest. But these differences are obviously what make it such a strong candidate (along with the very different Star Wars Galaxies) for being the breakthrough massively multiplayer game we're all waiting for -- if it works.

Gordon Walton, the game's executive producer (and former producer of Ultima Online at Origin) says there is now "a small army" of nearly 100 people at Maxis trying to ensure that The Sims Online does work, and a public beta should be in progress by the time you read this. Like everyone else involved, Walton realizes that it's the fans who will determine how the game plays out. "The players themselves will create and own the world," he said. "We're giving them the tools and then watching to see what they do with them."

Those tools include many that longtime Sims players are already familiar with. The graphics and interface look nearly identical to the single-player game, and the basic mechanics of building a home, earning skill points, and keeping all your "motives" up -- hunger, comfort, hygiene, bladder, energy, and fun -- are still intact. The Sims Online is thus instantly recognizable and playable to anyone who's ever played The Sims before. But everything works differently now.

This is explicit text about the porting.

Every 24 hours, you'll receive a visitor bonus from Maxis based on how many people have visited your lot and how long they stayed.

But how do you get people to visit? Will Wright calls it "an economy of motives." All Sims need to keep their eight motives in the green to function properly -- they need to eat, sleep, have fun, socialize, and so on. So you need to bait people, give them incentives and rewards for visiting and sticking around. A nice restaurant, for example, will increase people's food, comfort, and social motives. A dance hall or club will increase people's fun and social motives. Skill points are another incentive you can exploit. Open a gym with pools and exercise equipment, for example, and players can come in and improve their Body skills. Finally, you can take advantage of others' desire for cash by placing job objects in your house, which let players make objects (such as pizzas or wooden gnomes) that they can then sell for cash themselves. The beauty of the systems is that you, in turn, get a cut of everything sold -- in addition to getting a bonus for drawing them into your house in the first place. The smart players will provide everything a Sim needs -- including beds, bathrooms, and food (all of which you could charge for) -- to keep people around as long as possible.

The catch to all this, however, is that you need to be logged on and at your lot yourself for anyone to visit.

You can have up to eight roommates, who all share the objects in the house and split the daily profits. Only one person needs to be home for people to visit, so obviously the more roommates you have, the easier it is to stay open. Plus with each roommate acquired, your lot size increases, enabling you to make a bigger, cooler, and more impressive home.

For new players, it means they don't have to spend their limited cash on a lot; they can start sharing in the profits of someone else's labor; and they get an instant social group.

Because, as in real life, roommates can quickly turn into nightmares, the original property owner will have ultimate authority over the lot, which comes with certain privileges, such as the ability to build rooms or sell objects, that the other roommates won't have. (So as an owner, you won't log on one day and find your home gutted or sold.) In addition, you'll have access to menu items that let you maintain control, such as an admit/ban list for Sims, as well as the crucial ability to permanently kick out any psychotic roommate.

MONEY FOR NOTHING
Of course, you don't have to participate in the rat race at all if you don't want to. You don't have to work or live anywhere. You can be a roving vagabond, a bum. You could wander from lot to lot, giving back rubs for money, playing the guitar, or begging. You could spend your time being a social butterfly or a nuisance, and although you may not have access to the tons of stuff for sale, you can ably survive in the game if that's how you want to play.

According to Chris Trottier, the lead designer, this has always been one of the team's goals. "Right from the start, this was one of our big design challenges," she said. "We wanted to figure out how to reward people for different kinds of behavior. We didn't want to force you to play the economic game." Thus, Maxis will provide players below a certain economic threshold with a weekly allowance (previously called "welfare" by the team) that will allow you to at least buy enough food to stay alive and keep playing.

Trottier also pointed out that such players may very well succeed on their own in other ways. The Sims Online will have a number of daily Top 100 lists on which players can keep track of not only things like the most popular or lucrative sites, but also the most popular individual Sims, the funniest Sims, or the biggest lotharios.

"There are a number of different paths to success," said Trottier. "Our goal was to find ways to reward people for however they wanted to play."

GOOD GRIEF
Of course, as veterans of online games already know, the way some people want to play is as -- how can we put this delicately? -- total freaking jerks, playing only to make others' lives miserable (see sidebar "On Griefing"). Maxis is well expecting a certain amount of antisocial behavior and, in fact, could be said to be somewhat encouraging it, with some hilarious new animations that will let players act out their darker sides: vomiting, having public meltdowns, pile-driving one another, and, in a particularly inspired piece of cruelty, ripping another player's heart out and then stomping on it (figuratively -- not for real).

But there's always a limit to what's acceptable online, and there are always gamers unwilling or unable to stay within that limit. However, The Sims Online's very structure makes griefing nearly impossible to sustain. There are no common areas or public property where griefers can torment people. Every single lot is owned by a gamer who maintains complete control. If a guy is bothering other players on your lot, you can throw him out, or even ban him permanently: the end. If you're really uptight about keeping the peace, you can even limit access to your lot to only those officially registered as your friends.

By the way, although there's no player-killing in the game, you can indeed die. Starvation will be the most common way, but you can also electrocute or drown yourself, among other tragic means. Once you're dead, you stay dead, wandering the game as a ghost, until you can convince another live player to resurrect you, which will require a special skill or job object. You can die on purpose, if being a ghost appeals to you, as it apparently does to none other than Will Wright himself.

"I like the idea of death parties," he said, "where the first thing you do when you walk in a house is die."

Freed from the burden of the typical treadmill that characterizes most of these games (killing stuff to buy stuff so you can kill bigger stuff), The Sims Online has more of an aura of a free-form, barely-in-control, worldwide house party that you'll want to log into just to see the new, weird stuff people have come up with.

Certain lots are going to be popular not because they help you earn anything, but simply because they're so much fun -- the online equivalent of a popular bar. Groups may organize for events, such as putting on a live play, and Maxis even has plans in the works to be able to broadcast special live events that would be viewable by thousands of players at once. You might be able to log in at a certain time on a certain server, for example, and see the real-life trailer to a new movie or hear a new single, all within the world of the game.

This is brand-new territory for both Maxis and the gaming community. It has the makings to be either something truly new and exciting in online gaming or a colossal bellyflop.

I don't know. Will Wright doesn't know. No one knows. The Sims are real now. They can't be controlled. The possibilities are endless.

Odds are at this point, Maxis could just make The Sims Online little more than a slightly glorified graphical chat room and still rake in the currency. But instead, the game really seems to give players the opportunity to play in and shape the world as they see fit. Or unfit. There's as much opportunity to do just really strange disturbing things as there is to build a dance hall in your bedroom. The game is so open, so willing to embrace user-made clothes and objects (just like The Sims) that the potential for self-expression is enormous.

SimNutz (12/16/02)
Rating:1

SimNutz
After play testing since the begining I have come to the conclusion that Maxis is not listening to the beta testers plee's, begging, and even threats to make this game more than it is. This is a trite little nothing game with no content, direction, or interest to anyone over the age of 12. It is just a chat room with graphics and even the graphics are lack luster and nothing special to look at. I am very disapointed in this game and the lack of support to the beta testers. They obviouly are only in it for the December sales. They have made that abuntantly clear. Do not waste your money on this game unless you think starting at your computer for 20 hours is fun while watching your sim sit at a computer or read a book there is very little to do and therefor this game will be a huge failer. Beta testers have begged and pleaded for content only to have it fall on deaf ears. Hell they won't even give us the Christmas tree from the original sims game until next Christmas. Yet they advertize that ppl can own a tree lot. Sure you can own anything as long as you pretend that is what it is. You can't realy sell anything. There are no jobs you have to hope another sim will hire you to do what they want. The choices are 1) dance in a cage for money 2) clean the toilets 3) water the plants. That is it. What a waste of computer space. This game is suppose to be realeased Tuesday it is Sunday now and this game still crashes to my desktop, the bugs are too many to list and the lag is awful! I have a gaming system with a pentium 4 and a cable connection much better than a lot of the beta testers and my gaming experience in this game still sucks! Pass on this game till next year, save your self the time and money its a snore!

A Poverty Simulator/Chatroom that favors the top 1% elite
by MonaN (12/7/02)

"As an early thirty-something Sims fan, I playtested this for nearly two months and am very disappointed in this game and my advice to everyone is don't fall for the hype and for the over enthusiastic reviews from younger fans.

This game is nowhere near how it is advertised and you'd think with all the many expansions that have come out with offline game that they'd offer similar features in this game. There are no downtown areas, and you can't even take a walk in the neighborhood. Players teleport from lot to lot and while some are bigger than others, they all look basically the same.

The so-called economy barely exists and what little of it does exist, literally sucks the money and energy out of your Sim. Your Sim can't produce anything to sell and whatever you do make when you work on building your Sim's skills disappears. The only items you can sell are the *Secondhand" objects your lot has and that is just part of the game.

And there is no trading in the game so be wary if you read or hear anything about trading because its simply not there.

One of the primary goals of the game seems to be wandering as that is what the majority of Sim players end up doing. Players just jump from house to house looking to to keep their Sims skills up, earn a few sim-dollars, and occasionally chatting with other players.

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.

And before the fanboys and fangirls start shrewing that this is a beta test, it has been announced that there will be no more wipes. When the game goes live, those big houses will be ruling the game.

This game is very disappointing. It offers little creativity and basically encourages these horrible values

Party -animal/rowdy behavior is rewarded while creativity and and productivity is discouraged.
Ganging up on, to manipulate and take advantage of the young and smaller houses warrants praise, and the only way to be popular is to be rich and not creative or even smart for that matter.

I know some of the pro TOS fans will not like this but it has to be said and maybe they're not happy because alot of people are saying the same thing.

What I know is that I would gladly pay $20.00 a month for a multiplayer version of The Sims that I could play with my friends and family instead of this pathetic joke of a game.

I gave it two stars due to feeling fortunate that I didn't have to spend $50.00 to discover the truth about this game."

marly30 (12/1/02)
Rating:1

This is supposed to revolutionize online gaming?
Can somebody please tell me where the actual game is inside this thing because all I experienced when playing the beta was not much different than some of the Visual 3D Chat/Virtual Worlds that are available online. And some of them are not only cheaper, you can actually create your own world, build businesses and do so much more.
And at least with Everquest and Ultima Online, there a perfect balance between actual gameplay and the social elements.

The Sims Online seems like a hoax, a gimmick to con unsuspecting Sims fans of their money.

If this game is really only supposed to be chat client then it should be marketed that way, and
make it clear to the consumer that it is **NOT** a game.

Aerynx (11/25/02)
Rating:1

A Brilliant Idea translated into a badly designed game

<snip>

This game is boring, silly, and lacks everything that made the original Sims great. Players have to work their butts off doing meaningless tasks to get skills that will eventually degrade. You're forced to live with multiple roommates in a Sim-Socialist type co-op because you are penalized as a player if you want to start off alone.

Boredom predicted -- the goals are boring:

redvalerian (11/25/02)
Rating:1

No long term playability
After a few weeks of playing the beta, I achieved the majority of the goals associated with this game, made some friends and eventually got bored.

Considering how much it will cost and taking in account the monthly fee to play, this game should be more open ended and give unlimited playable opportunities and not just look like a giant Sim chat room with a few cheesy mini games thrown in.

Shallow:

Lodie (11/24/02)
Rating:1

Yes we know its a BETA but it still sucks as a game

<snip>

This is a very shallow game with very tedious gameplay that takes the fun out of the game.
I don't think the majority of the buying public will be interested in paying $10,000 for a sofa.
People buy games for escapist fun, they don't want to be bored to death or work hard for very little rewards. Hopefully the general public won't be conned by this sham of a game and it will be forgotten 6 months from now.

Discourages creativity:

melca (11/24/02)
Rating:1

Overrated and Over hyped!
As a playtester all I have to say is SAVE YOUR MONEY! This game is not only boring and tedious to play, it actively discourages creativity.

The took a brilliant concept and took away every element that made the offline Sims the best selling PC game.

And the novelty of chatting with other players wears off pretty quickly.

If you like games that are merely chatrooms disguised to look like games, where you can chat with others and work on mindless games trying to earn $8000 to buy a toilet for your Sim then this
game is for you. If you're looking for something that has depth, fun, and creativity along with the chat aspect then you better look elsewhere because TSO lacks all of that. Anybody who buys this will be wasting their money. Maxis should be ashamed of putting out such a shoddy product.

potential yes, ready to market no
by asdf99 (11/25/02)

<snip>

A lot of people on this board have emphasized how playing God is the most fun aspect of the Sims, and its expeansiosns thus far. 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.

Finally!!
by aquafan1 (9/12/02)

<snip>

"Finally it's here! 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?

Not a Revolution..........by any means
by perenium (8/2/02)

<snip>

Imagine a father boringly clicking around controlling a virtual family, while his own family has problems that need addressed. Or the teenager who boringly sends his sims to work whilst not having any money of his own. Real life can be boring, no need for me to play SIMLIFE after 8+ hours of work, 1+hours of cooking/cleanup and another hour or so of various chores.

<snip>

parents as an online gamer (asherons call, etc) be very wary of this product, especially since it is being admittedly marketed toward young girls. This could become smut mouthed kid and stalkerland.

On December 17, he [Sim designer Will Wright] will launch his most ambitious game ever: The Sims Online, the massively multiplayer follow-up to The Sims, the blockbuster game that has sold more than 8 million copies and is still at the top of the charts. With a team of more than a hundred working on The Sims Online, a budget rumored to be north of $25 million, and more than 3 million lines of code to make it all work, Wright sums up his new game's scope with an apt analogy: "In many ways, building The Sims Online compared to The Sims is like the difference between building the space shuttle and a Chevrolet. It's easily 10 times more complicated than The Sims."

It's also a powerful new type of game for Wright. As EverQuest and Ultima Online have shown, you can become deeply immersed in these virtual worlds and forge real-life bonds with your online comrades. "That's never been an issue in any of my games before. Most of the time I'm dealing with little simulated AI people that pee on the floor all the time," jokes Wright. But beyond the humor, it's clear that Wright is deeply puzzled and worried about his next game. "The idea that every possible personality in the real world could be in this game means that a lot of the same things that happen in reality will be happening in the game--the good and the bad," he says with a hint of bewilderment. So while outsiders see The Sims Online as a surefire blockbuster that will blow the massively multiplayer market wide open--and they're probably right--Wright, the game's creator, feels a deeper sense of obligation and responsibility. So you have to wonder: On balance, is Wright incredibly excited about the game's potential? "I don't know," Wright says as he sits and ponders the question. There's silence for a full five seconds, as if he's unsure of exactly how to express what he's feeling. And then finally, he begins to open up about the journey this game has taken him on over the past three years. "To be honest, I now realize that this game scares me more than anything else I've ever done."

"The idea that every possible personality in the real world could be in this game means that a lot of the same things that happen in reality will be happening in the game--the good and the bad," he says with a hint of bewilderment.

While Wright had many new game ideas after SimCity, he could never get them off the ground--especially his idea for a dollhouse game, which he had originally dubbed "Home Tactics: The Experimental Domestic Simulator."

The idea for the dollhouse game partially stemmed from the Berkeley-Oakland fire of 1991, in which Wright's home was destroyed along with more than 3,800 others. As Wright and his family went about putting back together their life after the fire, he began to observe the way in which he reacquired items for their new home: First came the refrigerator, then the stove, and so on. In the dollhouse game, you'd do something similar: Design a dollhouse and then slowly acquire objects to put inside of it.

By 1993, a prototype of Home Tactics was ready. Wright had the game running on a Macintosh computer and pitched the project to the Maxis executives during a focus group. That day, four different game ideas were on the table. Wright's dollhouse game was the only one that met with universal rejection. Almost overnight, Home Tactics was shifted to the back burner, with one lone programmer working on it in his spare time.

But the tide turned in 1997 when industry stalwart Electronic Arts bought Maxis. To EA, Wright was the creative genius behind SimCity. The executive team knew Wright's ideas were at least worth exploring. (After all, SimCity was a game that most publishers had initially rejected.) "EA basically came to me and said, 'We're going to roll the dice on you and give you all the resources you want for Home Tactics,'" remembers Wright. That was a dice roll that cleaned house. In January 2000, The Sims came out with little advance word or buzz. Since then, the game has broken all sales records because of its approachable subject matter and its ability to unleash a player's creativity.

Within a year, The Sims became Wright's biggest hit. Moreover, the game spawned an entire online community of players who created unique in-game objects and character skins. "It was very inspirational to me to see all the creativity online," says Wright. So when he was considering what to do next, the success of the online fan community gave him an idea: Why not take The Sims online?

 The idea seemed like a good compromise: It would be quick to develop, but it would also give the game online functionality.

A few months later, however, those plans would change. With Ultima Online already raking in tens of millions of dollars a year for EA.com, the executive team at EA and Maxis came up with an idea: Why not charge a subscription fee to play The Sims Online? "If you are going to charge people a subscription, you have to guarantee that your game will be a reliable experience," says Eric Todd, the game's development director. That wasn't going to be possible if players were connecting to another user's computer as opposed to a centrally controlled Maxis server.

This greed destroyed the game -- Maxi would be in charge, and the game would not allow players to continue to build on what they had already accomplished. Getting back up to speed in the online world -- where there were no cheat codes -- would turn out to be a major obstacle. Wright had had a vision much earlier:

Back in 1994, Wright told Wired magazine something that sounds downright prophetic in retrospect: "In 15 years...I can design a house that's so much fun I can charge people to visit it online, and I'll make a living sitting there and elaborating on it every day," he said.

Wright further refined his ideas during a 1995 conversation with author Neal Stephenson, who is credited with creating the idea of the metaverse--a virtual community of avatars not unlike today's massively multiplayer games--in his novel Snowcrash. "In many ways I wanted The Sims Online to be like Snowcrash, where the players would create the world," Wright explains. "In fact, the original Sims was my attempt at creating a set of tools for players so they could eventually create their own world and avatar to take online."

Wright wanted to leverage the creativity of players. "People should be successful because they are making the game interesting to each other," explains Wright. So if a player created an interesting house that attracted hundreds of visitors a day, they would earn money for this popularity, which in turn would allow them to be even more creative.

Here's also the origins of another prominent feature of the game:

In addition, Wright was intrigued by the social angle of online games: He wanted to encourage players to interact with each other. This led to the concept of players being able to co-own a home with up to seven roommates. "In many ways, I wanted to make parts of the game boring so you'd be encouraged to talk with others," says Wright.

"The emotions you can feel in these online games are real," he explains one Wednesday morning in his office, flanked by a rocket launcher, which was a gift from a former employee. "People can be made to care online and even to cry online," he insists. Taking things a step further, Walton believes a game like The Sims Online has the potential to help people develop relationships with others, both online and offline. "Whenever I speak in front of a group, I say to them, 'How many of you can name the people who live on the eight compass points from your house?'" he explains. "The answer is always less than 5 percent." Walton thinks he knows why: "With the coming of the industrial revolution, people all of the sudden needed psychological and physical distance from their neighbors. Today, all of our mass media positions us to believe our neighbors are psychopaths, cheating husbands, and just bad people. And heck, if I watched the nightly news I wouldn't want to be with other people."

But in The Sims Online, Walton claims you're able to "interact with others anonymously, have physical distance, and not be judged on your outward appearance. You interact with people on a pure intellectual and emotional level, devoid of all those filters."

Wow! Talk about utopian vision!

That, in a nutshell, is what makes these online games so powerful--the idea that even if you are under the guise of a virtual character that you create (an avatar), each player in the game represents a real human.

Being the socially responsible game designer that he is, Will Wright has thought long and hard about these issues during the past two years. It's part of what scares him about bringing out a game like The Sims Online. "We're building something that could potentially be a very powerful experience for a lot of people," he says. "So it's an opportunity as well as a danger. Realistically, I think this game is going to be a tremendous help for a lot of people and tremendously bad for a lot of people. I just wonder what the net is going to be."

Anticipations of size:

If The Sims Online can attract only 10 percent of players who have played The Sims, it will be double the size of EverQuest.

Therefore, it's likely The Sims Online will go down in history as the test of whether society perceives massively multiplayer games as a good thing or a bad thing.

Maxis classified Sims players into four distinct psychological groups. At the company's Walnut Creek offices, large poster boards depict each group of players. First, there are the people-suck players--those who like to torture their sims. This category is represented by a picture of the MTV character Daria. Then there are the reality-TV watchers who like the voyeurism aspect of the game. The trophy-seekers are a group who just want to get as much money as possible. And finally, the dollhouse players just want to build something. For the design team on The Sims Online, the challenge was to build a game that would attract the subset of all these groups interested in socializing online.

There will be little tolerance for troublemakers or "griefers." In fact, the team has made sure to plug up ways griefers might exploit the game. For instance, in order to prevent a griefer from standing in a doorway to block a sim from leaving a house, the characters in the game are able to walk through each other.

the design progressed faster than usual because the online game took the core technology used in The Sims and added online functionality to it."At first, we really just took the original Sims code and connected it where necessary to let Will and Chris test out their design ideas," explains development director Eric Todd.

The advantage to this methodology was a chance for the team to see the game up and running at an early date. But there was also a disadvantage: The engineering team was modifying the code in an ad hoc fashion. "We were working off game technology that had been written over five to seven years ago for the original Sims," says Todd. "It was never designed to be used online." And now, the team was beginning to pay the price.

"There were a lot of engineers walking around the building last fall with no sense of ownership," explains Luc Barthelet, the laconic French programmer and executive who serves as the general manager of Maxis. "When I'd ask them why a certain part of the game wasn't working, they'd say to me, 'But Luc, the old Sims 1.0 code made me do it!'"

As he discusses the decision to reengineer the game, Barthelet admits that what happened with the project was, at least in some ways, inevitable. "Usually the code base prevents you from doing the stuff you want to do in a game, so at the beginning you should ignore it," he theorizes.

In the case of The Sims Online, that meant taking the old Sims code and adding functionality to it in a piecemeal fashion as it was needed for Wright and Trottier's design. Eventually, once the design is set in stone, you should go back and "adapt the technology so it would best service what the game needed to be," says Barthelet.

To further explain this, he offers an analogy. "It's sort of like building a sculpture," he says. "One way to do it is to start with a material that is easy to sculpt as a prototype. Then once you have the prototype, you can find the right materials you need to really build it." That's the preferred way. "But alternatively, you could make a statue out of bronze from the start," he explains. "But if you do that from the get-go, it prevents you from doing a lot of things with the final product, such as making it transparent." The point is that by allowing the game design to evolve without technical limitations, you get the best final product--even if it means sometimes painfully reengineering a game during the final stretch of development. Still, by the fall of 2001 the experimentation was over; the game needed to be finished in the very near future.

"It's true that the progress was painfully slow from my perspective," Wright remembers. "Features weren't getting implemented, and it was sometimes three or four months between each play test, when in reality we were hoping to have those play tests much more frequently."

what mattered most to the team was the metagame, namely the social interactions and how players were spending their time in the world. While The Sims Online is an open-ended experience (there's no linear "end" to the game), the team wanted to make sure the trophy-seeking players didn't overpower those more-creative types who were just looking to chat and build.

During the early days, Wright remembers that he was impressed that players couldn't buy off other players with money. "There was this one guy walking around offering people $300 to put him on their friends list so he could become more popular," explains Wright. "But what this guy didn't realize was that as soon as he gave someone the $300, the other player could easily just delete him from their friends list and walk away." In other words, players were making friends only with those they trusted. That part of the game seemed to be working.

Curiously, if you are a player of the offline Sims, you will find that the friendship system in TSO is very different from the system in the offline Sims. In the offline Sims you acquire friendships by positively affecting the mood of other Sims over time, gradually building positive points by talking, giving gifts, and the like, possibly eventually having the Sims fall in love and room with each other.
Pets, in TSO, do react something like this, with pluses and minuses for reactions, and at least two levels of friendship, but Sims do not.

In TSO, you make a friend (or enemy) by clicking on the Sim in question, and selecting Transactions with that Sim. The options, which are somewhat opposite, of Make Friend and Make Enemy will appear.

Clicking Make Friend causes an animation in which your Sim gives a balloon to the other Sim.

There are several things about balloons you should know.

• A balloon is a one-way link.
  Because you give a balloon to someone, does not mean you are mutual friends. To establish mutual friendship and gain interactions, you must also get balloons, not just give them.
• There is a maximum limit of ten balloons, which you can give out.
  That's all folks. Once you have expended ten balloons, you can't give out any more. Yes, yes, you see people with a hundred balloons, and even, at one point in the game, up to five hundred balloons. That's another story.
• There is a maximum limit of three balloons, which you get for free.
  This situation confuses many people no end. Simply put, in the beginning you have three freebie friendship links, which can be used to Make Friend or Make Enemy. Once you have used all three, and if you have not established three friends who gave you balloons, you will receive the dreaded "Sorry, you have used up all your friendship links," message.

"A few weeks ago, we thought we'd have Disney World. But right now, everyone is just making pizza," laments Chris Trottier. It's late October [2002], and while the play test has ballooned to 23,000 players, it seems the majority of the Sim citizens are spending every waking minute using the game's pizza machine. The main reason is that by making pizzas, players can quickly earn money to help build up their homes. But for the design team, the overabundance of pizza machines is problematic. After all, The Sims Online was never supposed to be about power gamers gunning to become billionaires in the world. Instead, the game was designed as a creative playground. "Too many people are chasing money in the game. I'm a bit worried we might start to lose the creative players," Wright says.

The new idea was to change the "most popular" map to have 10 different categories of lots, such as the most romantic or the most offbeat. "Instead of valuing money, the 'most romantic' lot might be judged based on the houses that have the most dancing or the most kissing on the lot," says Trottier. By making that change, the team hopes that the pizza machines will stop being the centerpiece of the game.

As Wright walks the halls, you get the sense that he is just beginning to realize that The Sims Online is a project that may never be done. Ask him whether the official release of the game is just the starting point, and he smiles. "Yep, that's right," he says. "Welcome to my hell. I'll be observing and working on this game for the rest of my life."

the huge potential of The Sims Online to grow into a fascinating sociological experiment. "Will's a sandbox kind of guy, and we're giving him the biggest sandbox he's ever seen," explains Gordon Walton.

Wright admits he is tremendously excited by what The Sims Online could eventually grow into. "I'm really looking forward to the SimCity side of things--like letting players build the roads between communities and seeing how political structures evolve out of the cities," he says. "We have a club structure coming later, and we're hoping that can evolve into a government for each city." One day, Wright predicts that there may be an elected set of representatives in the game who could tune the economy themselves and police the world.

"What if your Sim character could get thrown in jail? What if we had a full legal system in the game?" wonders Trottier. In many ways, the first iteration of The Sims Online is the starting point that will be expanded on for years to come.

Wright, however, cautions that he wants to let players decide how to evolve the world. "All of this political stuff has to come from the bottom up," he posits. "We can't do it from the top down and dictate structure." Instead, players need to build covenants with each other and establish the conventions of the world over time. "Totally planned cities don't work," Wright explains. "It's sort of like the Utopian society movement, where there were these guys who went off and started building planned cities. For the most part the cities were total failures."

• the player's agency overlaps insufficiently (or in the wrong manner?) with that of the sim -- that's the answer for the cognitive paper
  
• the game doesn't allow a player/sim to become uniquely valuable to others -- and conversely, a player/sim has no basis on which to value others individually
• the game is not structured to permit strategies to develop
  

These points are related, and the result is devastating: you don't get identification and thus emotional involvement, you reduce human relationships to instrumental relations of exploitation, you don't have anything to talk about and thus don't make meaningful contact with others. The result is a profoundly dystopic society -- in the words of the designer, "Welcome to my hell". It's an advance on Sartre's "L'enfer, c'est les autres" -- in TSO, hell is simply you and everything you do.

Now, it's a lot easier to say these things than to fix them. The designers of TSO attempted to make a benign and cooperative world where creative players have as much fun as competitive gamers. The world will evolve like Slashdot, by the contributions of its players:

Ultimately, The Sims Online could turn into a similar self-governing world, and Wright and his team could sit back and watch it evolve over time. "I can't wait to be surprised by what people do in the game," says Trottier.

He wants positive stories to come from The Sims Online, but he's not sure what he can do to guarantee that. "I never want to orphan this game," he insists. "And I'm always going to feel an obligation to try and mitigate its potential negative aspects."

In the end, you can't help but think that if any designer should be at the helm of the most powerful virtual world out there, it should be a guy like this. So when the virtual election in Alphaville takes place, don't be surprised if the president-elect ends up being a guy named Will Wright.

Tuesday, December 17th, 2002 EA Ships The Sims Online
The #1 PC Game of All Time Goes Online  

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., December 17, 2002 - Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: ERTS) today announced the release of its highly anticipated PC game, The Sims Online™. The Sims Online is the Internet, multi-player version of the top-selling PC game of all time, The Sims™. The Sims Online is a massive virtual world created and populated by thousands of players from around the world. In this never-ending alternative reality players can be themselves or “Be Somebody. Else™.”

"This is one of the most entertaining, engaging and flat out fun games that EA has ever produced," said, Don Mattrick, president worldwide studios for Electronic Arts. "I predict that a lot of people are going to skip work to play The Sims Online."

In The Sims Online, players create and control the actions of a character known as a Sim. Players enter the world with a small amount of money to spend as they wish. They can purchase their own piece of land to do with as they please or they can join with other players to create shared homes and businesses or host wild events.

Players can explore the neighborhoods around them and meet scores of other Sims along the way. Players get to know other Sims through live text chat and secret instant messages. As players type, their messages appear in speech bubbles above their Sims’ heads. Sims can also express themselves through hundreds of animations. A polka, pile drive, or a passionate kiss are just a few of the gestures available for Sims to use to convey exactly what’s on their mind.

“It’s very inspirational for me to see how the original game has evolved into a vibrant online community where players can create their own world,” says Will Wright, creator of The Sims. “The Sims Online gives players tremendous possibilities to construct, customize and personalize a world with their imagination as their only limit.”

The Sims Online carries a monthly subscription fee of $9.99 with the first month being free. A credit card is required to register and play. An Internet connection is also required. The Sims Online carries an ESRB rating of “T” for teen. It is available in stores now for a suggested retail price of US $49.99 or by direct order from the EA StoreSM at http://www.ea.com or by calling 877-EA GAMES (1- 877- 324-2637).

Important information on The Sims Online including terms of service and game availability can be found at http://www.thesimsonline.com.

The Sims skyrocketed to the top of the charts when it began shipping to stores in February 2000 and quickly became a universal gaming and cultural phenomenon. The Sims was the best selling PC game of both 2000 and 2001 and is now the best selling PC game of all time. Translated into 16 different languages, The Sims has inspired five expansion packs; The Sims Livin’ Large, The Sims House Party, The Sims Hot Date, The Sims Vacation and The Sims Unleashed. Combined sales for the franchise have topped 20 million units life-to-date. For more information on The Sims franchise titles, visit http://www.thesims.com.

An example of rave reviews, this one from gamepro:

Review by: Dan Elektro Posted: 01/14/03

Computer gaming’s most celebrated costume party is finally underway! The Sims Online builds on the familiar elements of the single-player PC megahit but mixes them up for a unique, intensely social experience.

A Sense of Self
Like the stand-alone game, The Sims Online preserves and promotes the one thing that games often promise but rarely deliver: total freedom. The character you create is entirely your decision—from its gender, head, body, and outfit on through its personal skills and strengths. Always wanted to be a rock star? Grab a guitar and start practicing. Like to fix things? Study DIY books and build your mechanical prowess. Master chef, nightclub owner, DJ, game show host, novelist, hotel concierge, slacker—if you can dream it, you can build it and be it. And of course, everybody else you meet is also being controlled by a live person—there’s no A.I. here. The world is literally what you make it.

Make Friends and Influence People
In building that world, you’ll find a teeming social community that motivates all aspects of gameplay. All the best stuff in The Sims Online requires multiple people, from forming study groups to making pizza to just having (rated and regimented) fun. The mandate is essentially “interact or die.” You can expect to see your fellow Sims bond as friends, fall in love, form sports teams, and whatever else the human mind can dream up. Plus, to get ahead, you’ll need to establish your niche and lure others into enjoying it. If you want to run a homeless shelter, you’ll be judged on a different scale than those setting up pizza parlors; that way, everybody can succeed on their own terms.

The Shy Need Not Apply
There’s just one problem with The Sims Online: It’s almost not a game. The slow-paced activities rely so heavily on social interaction that in some ways it feels like a glorified chat room. Then again, social interaction is always what the Internet has done best, so as long as Maxis can continue to add interesting job objects and other structural milestones to the mix, the open-ended novelty needn’t wear off. If you’re looking for a low-ping party with no boundaries, you won’t do better than The Sims Online.

Sentiments turn fast. On February 7, 2003, Business 2.0 wrote,

Burning Down the Sims

Naysayers are slamming The Sims Online. They're dead wrong.

By Jimmy Guterman, February 07, 2003

Barely a month ago, The Sims Online was going to change the world, or at least the world of online games. Now conventional wisdom maintains that The Sims Online is a dud.

<snip>

Because the program didn't meet all the expectations and live up to all the hype immediately upon arrival, it was deemed an instant failure.

This is stupid. Anyone who's thought about online communities for more than five minutes knows that the most successful and lasting ones are those that develop over time, sometimes without the operators having anything to do with that development. Social games are built on familiarity and trust. Last time I checked, in both the real and virtual worlds, familiarity and trust can't exist until time has passed.

Best of all, Electronic Arts is adding more and more new features to keep players hooked: sneaking in unexpected contests, tools to help set up real-life meetings (The Sims Online may become the definitive online-dating application), directories and guides, and much more.

The Sims Online is likely to succeed: Its foundation is strong, and thousands of players are committed to getting the most out of the game by "building" properties and the like.

<snip -- some lame suggestions, none of which address the design problems>

But all of these suggestions are based on the fact that the communities on The Sims Online are thriving. Anyone who argues with that isn't spending much time there.