Reporter Sacha Segan of ABCNEWS.com states "Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are becoming addicted to making another person pee regularly, eat healthily and get to work on time. No, this isn’t marriage. It’s the nation’s hottest video game, The Sims ..."
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A World of Their Own
Online Game Lets You Play God
"The Sims" computer video game is the number one title on PC Data's best-selling list, relegating "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" to the number two spot.
By Sascha Segan
March 22 — Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are becoming addicted to making another person pee regularly, eat healthily and get to work on time.
No, this isn't marriage. It's the nation's hottest video game, The Sims — a dramatization of mundane domestic life.
There's no violence and no competition. Instead, players direct tiny simulated people to build houses, advance in careers, and fall in love.
"I think it will transform computer game makers' ideas of what a successful game can be," says Ted Friedman, an expert in video game theory.
Attracting Users Without Violence
It has certainly transformed computer stores' revenues. The game has been at No. 1 ever since its Feb. 4 debut, according to PC Data, a company that tracks video game sales. More than 225,000 copies of the game have been sold in the United States alone, according to the NPD Group, a research firm.
The Sims is the latest in a series of successful simulation games from Maxis, which exploded onto the computer-gaming scene in 1989 with SimCity, a city-planning simulation that is one of the best-selling games ever.
The Maxis games are mavericks in an industry currently dominated by "first-person shooters" such as Doom and Quake, Friedman says. Research figures show that while most video games are bought by adolescent boys and young men, The Sims has a totally different demographic. It attracts older gamers, teenage girls and many women, says Patrick Buechner, marketing manager for Maxis.
"It's an astounding accomplishment to successfully do that. Competition and violence are the easiest ways to hook an audience," says Friedman.
Love, Sim-Style
New players are presented with a Sim person (or a family), an empty house, and some money. Their first task is to furnish the house, located in a pleasant suburb that you populate with other Sim families. A few families are included with the game, but players are supposed to create their own. Live players can't interact, but they can trade copies of Sim families over a Web site to build up their neighborhoods. Thousands of families are available on the site.
Players must keep their Sims' eight "motives" satisfied: Bladder, Fun, Hunger, Hygiene, Social, Comfort, Energy and Room. Sims can starve to death, collapse from exhaustion or wet themselves if their needs aren't met.
As for Fun, their different "personalities" affect what Sims like to do. A serious Sim might find reading a book enjoyable, while a "playful" Sim would prefer a video game.
By talking to each other and giving compliments and back rubs, Sims increase their "relationship" scores with their simulated neighbors, sometimes leading to love, marriage and even SimBabies.
They can't have sex onscreen, though, and when they take their clothes off their bodies are covered by a mosaic pattern. Babies, when Sims choose to have them, appear mysteriously — perhaps brought by the SimStork.
Every Sim Has a Story
Some players go for fantasy; others prefer more realistic challenges. As there's no way to "win" the game, players define their own goals for their Sims: wealth, social success, or just stepping into someone else's shoes.
"My roommate's spent a lot of the last two weeks recreating her friend in New York who has five daughters and a son. Her goal is to birth to all the children, maintain their good grades in school, and design a successful house for everyone without ever promoting the parents past middle income," says Richard Guilford, a 21-year-old student in West Hartford, Conn.
Players use built-in tools to take snapshots of family life and write backstories and narratives for their Sims, eventually publishing "family albums" to the game's Web site for other players to read and download.
"There are certain folks who find the game less than exciting, and they are the folks who don't read into the game, who don't tell their own story while they're playing the game," Buechner says.
'Instant Gratification'
So why do gamers sit at their computers hour after hour, keeping their Sims happy?
"The Sims presents a world of instant gratification and unlimited potential," Guilford says.
With The Sims, you can have the hot tub you always wanted, try out an extramarital affair, or build the house of your dreams.
"Maybe it's because I can be successful in several Sim career tracks when I never even finished my own B.A.," says Cheryl Peterson, who in real life describes herself as a housewife from Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.
There are even Sim sadists. The most popular download on The Sims' Web site (which lets gamers download families and houses created by other players) is something called Mr. Sadistic, a household where Sims are tortured until they die from starvation or misery.
"Different people play the game differently," says Buechner. "There are people who try to put their Sims in the most awkward and demented situations that they can possibly think of … [then] they explore making their Sims happy, which is the ultimate goal of the game."
Sim Society
But don't think Sims can have everything you want. There are rules. Same-sex relationships are possible for Sims, but same-sex marriages are not. Same-sex couples are allowed to adopt children. There's no day care for kids, and the manual encourages one Sim parent to stay home.
Buechner denies any political angle to Maxis' choices of permissible relationships.
"We're not trying not to make any political statements," he says. "Our overriding decisions are based on, Will this be a fun game for our particular audience?"
But academics say every game has a built-in social philosophy.
"When my fiancée was playing, she found that the only way she could make one character get ahead at work was to make the other character stay at home all the time and be in charge of relationships," says Friedman.
In early levels of the game, Buechner says, there is an emphasis on buying objects to increase Sims' happiness. As the game goes on, players need to make virtual friends to advance. There are few successful Sim-hermits.
"In this game, to be successful, one must socialize," says player Jason DaSilva, an IT manager from Toronto.
And Sims society has some very definite rules: There are no Sim-divorces, no Sim-stepparents, though oddly, there is a sort of polygamy (Sims can remarry without divorcing). All the Sims, even the poorest, live in a pleasant suburb with well-kept streets and good public schools.
That's a little too tame for some players, who have bombarded the Web site's bulletin boards with requests for a less G-rated game, one with SimSex.
The Sim-ple Life
Other say that G-rated world is a big factor in the game's success. By simplifying a complex real world into a "microworld," the game leads players to examine their own lives, says Henry Jenkins, a media studies professor at MIT.
Friedman agrees. "There's a kind of fascination of just seeing ourselves represented on another level, almost like a voodoo doll or not that different from playing with Barbie dolls, of just being able to see your life reflected on a level of abstraction," he says. "I think the abstraction is part of it … an attempt to devise what's structurally important about our lives."
"It makes you think a lot about your day, and planning your time, and what do to when you're feeling tired," says Sarah Leyland, 16, of Nottingham, England. "The answer isn't to watch telly! Or to stay up all night playing The Sims!"
