FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

THE SUCCESS OF THE SIMS

The Sims likely owes its huge success to two things: the unprecedented scope for creativity it offers and its emphasis on interpersonal relationships.

First, it enables the player to exercise his creativity in a familiar sphere: the ordi­nary suburban home. In addition to building and furnishing a house, players can design their own skins for the sims, creating people who look like themselves (or anyone else). The game actually offers more creative play than SimCity or SimTower, for example, because The Sims offers many different kinds of things to do. Players can also take photographs of their sims' houses and store them in albums, along with written commentary that the player supplies, effectively creating illustrated stories. And they can share all of these things over the Internet. The game offers more scope for personal creativity on the part of the player than just about any other video game or software toy on the market.

The second reason for the success of The Sims is its focus on human relationships. The player's immediate objective in playing The Sims is to make sure his sims' phys­ical needs are met; but his secondary, longer-term objective is to meet the sims' mental or emotional needs: fun, social interaction, and quality living space. The sims' need for social interaction is considerably more complex because it involves building relationships with other sims rather than simply interacting with objects, and those social interactions produce emergent behaviors that affect their relation­ships. Players enjoy watching and influencing these interactions. In fact, the player's imagination plays a very large role in the game, just as it does in playing with dolls. The sims are not terribly complex simulations, but players give them names and personalities and ascribe many more characteristics to them than they actually possess. The fact that the game is about human relationships rather than abstract challenges contributes strongly to its success, especially among female players.