Simulated Attraction

The Sims franchise is one of the most popular and lucrative of the PC games. Over 98 million Sims games have been sold to date and versions of the games are available in 22 different languages.

The series began as an offshoot of Sid Meier’s SimCity. The player controls a simulation of people’s lives in a suburban household in a SimCity neighborhood. This “digital dollhouse” , as designer Will Wright calls it, caught on and spawned seven expansion packs which are still selling today.

The Sims 2 added 3D graphics and new gameplay features to challenge players. Sims now age through 6 stages of life before growing old and dieing. Players must manage not only physical needs but guide their Sims in achieving Life Goals and Aspirations by fulfilling new Wants and Fears. Subsequent expansions added an attraction factor into the equation and another stage of life between teen years and adulthood for college students. To date most of The Sims expansions have been adapted to some degree for The Sims 2 allowing Sims to open businesses, adopt pets, go on vacation and have lucrative hobbies. There have been seven expansions and eight Stuff packs with new clothing, household objects build objects.

Now EA has announced a new revolution in what has been dubbed as strategic life simulation video games, The Sims 3. The details have been covered before and you can check them out out elsewhere on Gaming Today. The recent announcement that The Sims 3 was on its way immediately caused me to groan and gripe. It isn’t bad enough 2/3rd of the women in my house are obsessed with this game, but there is more coming. That led me to analyze why people found the game interesting in the first place.

What I want to know is why so many people are so fascinated with a game where you spend so much time telling simulated people to eat and go to the bathroom?

The answer to The Sims popularity seemingly lies in the types of people it appeals to. People play for many different reasons and if you ask Sims enthusiasts what they like best about the game, you’ll get vastly different answers. There do seem to be a few groups of fans; Skinners, the Rule Breakers, the Collectors, Interior Designers and the Control Freaks.

Skinners are obsessed with changing the objects and options in the game. The Internet is full of people who have designed or skinned for The Sims and The Sims 2. You have everything from build objects like custom floors, wallpapers, doors and windows to name a few. You also have all the furniture and decor for houses that you could hope to choose from. Modding and recoloring new outfits is a very popular pastime, especially for particular periods like Victorian or Medieval clothing or styles such as goth or fantasy. Even the Sims themselves are modded with custom hair, eyes and skin color. Skinners also create makeup and some pretty wild accessories from piercings to elf ears, horns and wings. Actually play testing these creations in the game is secondary to the creative process. There are several huge pay sites for these objects, but some designers offer their creations for free to the public. Mod the Sims 2 is one of the largest of these repositories of creativity.

The Rule Breakers enjoy pushing The Sims’ engines to the limit. They create or collect cheats and global mods making their versions of The Sims games almost unrecognizable from the vanilla version. These gamers manipulate cheat codes to create otherwise impossible buildings like underground garages, swimmable ponds, arched bridges and domed ceilings. I’ve seen my wife spend hours following tutorials on creating traditional pagodas.

Collectors are simple to please. They spend hours searching the web for new and unusual objects and skins to use in game. They also look for objects that have been hacked to do things they normally shouldn’t be able to do. My sister in law spends more hours searching for new “stuff” for the game then she does actually playing it.

The Interior Designer is often also a collector. These players spend more than half their time in game designing homes, families and even neighborhoods that they actually spend very little time playing in comparison to planning. My sister-in-law has a Victorian period correct neighborhood she has spent mind boggling hours on; collecting authentic clothing, furniture, walls and even a horse drawn carriage for. She can easily spend 8 hrs a day on collecting for and then playing The Sims 2.

Control Freaks love the Sims games. It’s not just telling your Sims where and when to go or who to marry. They turn them into exotic creatures like zombies, vampires, werewolves, and plantsims. They use cheats to make their pets, Servos (robots) and Bigfoot controllable so they can tell them what to do as well. And they kill their Sims to create ghosts. It used to be in The Sims, people would block characters into a room where they would eventually starve or have them climb in the pool and delete the ladder so they drowned. The Sims 2 has added even more ways for Sims to meet Death. With the help of the bool_prop cheat and the Rodney’s Death Creator, players can kill their Sims in many creative ways. Sims can die by electrocution, starvation, disease, fly swarms, fire, drowning, being struck by lightning, hit by hail or death by satellite. Each type of death results in a different kind of ghost which scare Sims and may Frighten them to death.

Despite the disparate interests and approaches to playing the Sims games, the wonder of the game is that every aspect is still a valid one. I have a house full of Sims players and while the game itself baffles me in that I prefer shooting my neighbors or torturing them with no bathroom and a walled off area (which I guess makes me a Control Freak) I can’t justify the time people spend playing what is effectively a game where you live the lives of your characters – with many mundane details. However I now think I understand them a little bit better.

via GamingToday ; Mod the Sims 2 ; The Sims 2 ; The Sims 2 – Wikipedia ; vnunet