The Sims - Like Real Life?
“The Sims” is the gold standard whenever you talk about Sims games. Released in North American in February 2000, it has become the best-selling PC game in history. Unlike other Sims games such as “age of Empires”, “The Sims” focuses on the mundane, day-to-day activities of the inhabitants of the suburbs outside of “SimCity”.
Players are put in control of the virtual daily activities of their characters and control their sleeping, eating, bathing, and entertainment activities. Perhaps, it’s this very ordinary aspect to the game that accounts for it’s huge popularity.
“The Sims” is the creation of legendary game designer Will Wright. Wright claims the inspiration for “The Sims” came from his own real life experience when his home was destroyed in the Oakland, CA firestorm of 1991. He was forced to move his family and essentially rebuild everything from nothing.
Wright based “The Sims” on another sim game he wrote called “SimCity” of just “Sims” for short. Wright came up with the idea of a “virtual dollhouse”, which he pitched to Maxis. However, Maxis balked at the initial idea claiming that the computer hardware available at the time was inadequate to support such a simulation.
In 1995 Wright was given the opportunity to develop his game concept by Electronic Arts. Initially dubbed “Project X”, the name was changed to “The Sims” in 1997 two years after its release.
In terms of competition, “The Sims” is about as low key as a computer game can get. The main objective is for the player to help his virtual characters (Sims) achieve their own personal objectives whatever they may turn out to be.
The Sims live in and interact with a virtual environment. There is a set hierarchy in their world consisting of “families”, which are assigned to a “lot” where they live and go about life in their virtual world. Life isn’t easy in this virtual world, at least from the concept of weekends, which doesn’t exist. Adult Sims work 7 days a week and the children must keep up with their studies. The consequences for not doing so is rather severe.
Though adult Sims can’t die from old age, there are several nasty ways that can result in death for a Sim. These range from drowning in a swimming pool after the steps have been deleted or perishing inside a house after all the doors have been deleted. A Sim can even die from contracting a virus from a pet guinea pig whose cage was left uncleaned for too long.
Domestic discord is also a part of life in the word of “The Sims”. Sims can leave their family, never to return and couples can brawl and eventually split up. Not too unlike life outside of the virtual world.
The popularity of “The Sims” is undisputed and has gone down as the most popular PC game of all time. There have been several sequels, expansion packs, spin offs, as well as ports to all the major operating systems and consoles. There is even plans for a film based on “The Sims” to be released sometime in 2009.
Could the wild popularity of “The Sims” have more than a little to do with how the mundane trials and tribulations of the characters are so similar to that of our own lives?
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