The Sims is not just a game, it’s a tool for creativity, self expression, and personal development. Players have their own personal experience, each taking something different from the game. Whether it’s satisfying your need for control, bringing your architectural visions to a new level, or removing the pool ladders just to see what would happen, everyone expresses themselves differently. It’s proved to be a healthy expression too, where children learn that leaving the baby to cry = the baby gets taken away. Exploration of these behaviours seems to have a positive effect towards helping children grow up and understand the responsibility of looking after something, and the consequences you face when you fail.
Being a very personal experience, these evolutions from one game to another do come at a cost. Those who play the game in a specific way can find themselves no longer interested in what The Sims has to offer, and either continue on the older version or stop playing all together.
It’s one of the few games that’s audience is dominated by women, but is equally as appealing to men, and is played across a variety of ages and in multiple countries. The large fan base helps to keep the game from loosing it’s appeal, with a huge percentage of them either downloading custom or maxis made content, and even uploading their own to create a constantly evolving environment. The lack of restrictions towards creating custom content means that you can really create whatever fantasy world you envision, without finding your content being removed for copyright infringement.
Companies are even utilising The Sims, using it as a way to advertise their products. Most of the time these products are free to download, like the Toyota Pirus, which you can buy in the game and let your Sims drive around in and park in your drive. It’s not just companies marketing their products, musicians are getting in on the action. Singers such as Katy Perry and Lily Allen have released their songs in the Sim language Simlish, and some even have music videos that use the Sims movie making technology. For the benefit of EA, fans of the singers may see the music video and be influenced to buy it. If some of their favourite singers like The Sims, then they might think they’ll enjoy it too.
Advertising The Sims has come a long way since the original trailer featured on the SimCity disk. With the rise of social networking EA has dived straight into the deep end, utilising Twitter and Facebook. They also created downloadable characters to interact with your browser, that behaved differently depending on their personality traits. They are thriving off internet advertising, and rightly so. With the knowledge that a vast majority of their users spend their time browsing the web and downloading content, it would be the best way to pin down those potential players who spend their time on the internet too.
I chose to study The Sims because I was interested to see why I no longer had the urge to play the games, debating whether it was the changes between The Sims 2 and 3 that no longer interested me, or whether I’d simply grown out of it. I believe I now know that it’s my own personal issues that have prevented me from enjoying The Sims. The lack of a computer that will run the game fast, with high graphics and a large screen, and not having my sister to sit with me and play, like we used to when we were younger. These are not the fault of EA, or the designers for The Sims. They are issues I have developed as I grow out of the game, and into a world where I can be my own Sim.
To begin my research, I joined The Sims on Twitter and group on Facebook. I hoped these would be a good resource of information regarding the projects that were underway, and mostly, how they communicate with their fans. I found that the majority of the updates required you to be an active player of The Sims games. Competitions were held, they asked for your stories, movies and screenshots. I had none of these to offer, my measly houses with replicas of me and my friends acting out the basic Sim day to day lives were nothing I’d boast about over the internet, nor share with other fans. I felt like I’d have to treat the game like a project to join in, to use it as a creative medium to which I’d make stories with characters and create videos from it. So this method was useful in that it allowed me to see that I was no longer an avid fan of The Sims, and that I now just appreciate The Sims as a good game, but no longer play it myself. I could also see from the responses that people were still very keen on the game, and that being able to communicate via the social network sites gave them the opportunity to share what they do with someone that’s part of the company, and get a response from them.
Newspapers were a great way of finding Sims-related articles. All I had to do was type ‘The Sims’ into the search box and it would bring every article regarding The Sims to me. I could then browse through the list and choose the ones I thought were relevant, and some even gave me ideas for other topics of discussion. Finding these by using Google was a lot harder because of the massive amount of related content, like the custom content sites, sites selling The Sims etc. These newspaper articles then allowed me to be more specific in my searches on google and lead me to the information I could use.
Playing The Sims was not a useful way to try and discover all the different ways it can be played and whether they were enjoyable or if I learnt from them. Because of the nature of the game I may find some things interesting while be bored by others. In order to do this I had to find other people that played The Sims and ask what their individual experiences were and what they’d learned from them, allowing me to further understand the effects it has on different people.
