The Popularity of The Sims
The people in your simulated neighbourhood: Role-playing on the Internet
gets friendly
Calgary Herald
Saturday, February 1, 2003
Page: ES04
Section: Arts & Style
Byline: Nick Lewis
Source: Calgary Herald
The best-selling computer game of all time doesn't
require you to kill people, rob
them or defeat them in any way. It requires you to
treat them nicely.
More than that, it requires you to micro-manage their
lives down to the finest
minutiae -- toilet training, cooking lessons, dressing
the kids for school and
selecting the right coffee table.
Since its release in December, The Sims Online, an
online role-playing game,
has been attracting millions of citizens to its cyber
cities, allowing players to
interact with their virtual personas, called avatars
in the lingo of computer
gaming.
It is one of many titles in a new genre the computer
world is calling Massive
Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs).
Shooting games such as
Unreal Tournament and Quake III have supported online
play and instant text
messaging for years. But MMORPGs are novel because for
the first time,
thousands of human players from across the world are
playing with, not against,
one another on one giant board that continues to
evolve -- all via the Internet.
Half a million Sims kissed one another online on New
Year's Eve 2002 at more than 5,000 online house
parties, just weeks after the game's release.
And the number of cyber citizens swells by the day.
Research company DFC Intelligence predicts that by 2006,
114 million people worldwide will be playing games
over the Internet.
In the never-ending virtual experience of The Sims
Online, players create and control the actions of a Sim,
short for a simulated character. You help your Sim get
through daily life, make friends with other Sims, hold
down a job, decorate the house and explore the
neighbourhood.
Sims flirt, fight or simply start a conversation with
other Sims through messages that appear as speech
bubbles over their heads. You keep your Sim happy by
exploring friendships and romances; failure to do so
results in depression, anger and frustration.
The main goal of the characters in The Sims Online is
just to be liked. Some Sims seek favour by inviting one
another to house parties, hot tub nights and
barbecues. Others are so popular they enter virtual marriages
(not legally binding) with other Sims with whom they
have romantic encounters.
Victor Lucas is the co-host and executive producer of
Electric Playground, a video game review TV show on
A-Channel. He's also a big Sims Online fan. He says
more people will jump on board MMORPGs if they
continue to explore the non-fantastical elements of
life.
Decorating a house or selecting the right hat --
that's the appeal: a virtual space can be idealized and
personalized in a way the real world can't.
Jeff Green is the editor-in-chief of Computer Gaming
World magazine.
He says the Sims Online is the first massive
multi-player game "that isn't focused around standard fantasy
and sci-fi monster killing. It has the potential to
appeal to people who have never played any kind of computer
game before."
And it does, too.
The Sims Online, the latest development of the Sims
computer games, is fast becoming the world's most
popular MMORPG.
Translated into 16 different languages, more than 20
million copies of The Sims and its expansion packs
have been sold thus far. And, in an industry that
caters overwhelmingly to young males, The Sims has an
almost unheard of distinction: nearly half its players
are women.
Lucas has an idea why this might be. He thinks women
and non-gamers are attracted to The Sims Online
because it's about communicating and interacting with
real life humans in an artificial world.
"What I think is really a revelation to me when
playing Sims Online is that it's really just a massive chatroom
with a graphically enhanced version of what people are
doing with MSN Messenger and AOL Instant
Messenger," he says.
Gordon Walton is a video game developer who used to
work on Ultima Online, a MMORPG with 225,000
monthly subscribers.
He told GameSpot Magazine last year that he believed
games such as Sims Online could help players
develop relationships because they communicate so
much.
"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 five per cent.
"With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, people
all of a sudden needed psychological and physical
distance from their neighbours.
Today, all of our mass media positions us to believe
our neighbours 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."
However, in The Sims Online, Walton said, 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."
There's a certain irony in the connectedness people
feel in these virtual worlds. Isolation borne out of
technology is now being nurtured by a revolution
caused by the very same technology. It isn't so strange then
to read online chats among Sim players who mostly keep
to themselves and log out of their real lives to log
into a virtual one.
"My family has been having a lot of problems lately,"
one teenager wrote. "My sisters . . . have been fighting
nonstop, which puts my mother in a bad mood, so she
nags everyone, which puts me in a bad mood, and
then my dad comes home drunk every night, which puts
everyone in a worse mood. . . . I'll do anything to get
away from home."
Gamers playing MMORPGs average 2.5 hours a day, 27
times a month. The kingpin of this phenomenon is
EverQuest, which its 430,000 subscribers have dubbed
"Evercrack."
They've also dubbed MMORPGs as "heroinware,"
acknowledging their addictiveness.
After 21-year-old Shawn Woolley, a 12-hour-a-day
EverQuest player, committed suicide in March 2002 just
minutes after playing the game, users are becoming
more wary of the lure of the online life.
"It's like any other addiction," Shawn's mother
Elizabeth Woolley said to the Milwaukee Sentinal Journal last
year. "Either you die, go insane or you quit. My son
died."
Jay Parker is the co-founder of Internet/Computer
Addiction Services in Washington.
In the same article, he told the Sentinal Journal that
people who are isolated, prone to boredom, lonely or
sexually anorexic are much more susceptible to
becoming addicted to online games. Having low self esteem
is also an important factor.
"The social component is big because it gives players
a false sense of relationships and identity," Parker
said. "(Players) say they have friends, but they don't
know their names."
As a result, sometimes real-life relationships suffer.
Tired of speaking to the back of their spouse's heads
are the 3,110 registered users in the EverQuest Widows
Club (groups.yahoo.com/group/EverQuest-Widows).
Role-playing games all have roots in Dungeons &
Dragons, the fantasy game created in 1974 by TSR Games
in Lake Geneva. But D & D wasn't as immersive as the
new fantasy worlds.
Sims creator Will Wright says he realizes the social
significance of his virtual world and hopes people play it in
moderation.
"We're building something that could potentially be a
very powerful experience for a lot of people," he told
Wired Magazine late last year.
"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."
Lucas, the co-host of Electric Playground, says he'd
like to play MMORPGs a lot more than he has time for. He
sees these games as a precursor to the interaction of
human beings and technology (remember the
"replicants" in films like Blade Runner?)
"All the gadgets you can add to your inventory to add
to your existence online are really cool," Lucas says. "I
think that's what attracts people. Even though the
content and the actual direction is different from title to title, I
think the uniform agenda with MMORPGs is the emphasis
on collecting things to show people how cool you
are."
He says the draw is building up a character with maxed
out abilities or skills or items, or to try to catch up to
somebody who already has.
"It's the basic North American consumerism syndrome --
somebody has something cool, and you do your
best to get the same thing," he says. "It's like
show-and-tell at a virtual level."
