[Mud-Dev] Wired Article on The Sims Online

[Rayzam]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.11/simcity.html

[Note that Sims Online and SWG are meant to break games away from
the 'Renaissance Faire set' ;) ]

--<cut>--
The Sims Online
Welcome to The Sims Online, virtual reality with a white picket fence.

By Robert Levine

Will Wright is done playing God - now he wants to be Walt Disney.

Wright has already seen Magic Kingdom-size success. His SimCity
launched the god-game genre a decade ago. And The Sims - including
expansion packs like The Sims House Party, Hot Date, and Unleashed -
has moved 18 million copies, making it the best-selling computer
game in history. A virtual dollhouse that lets players direct the
day-to-day lives of simulated humans, The Sims has attracted women
and nongamers in unprecedented numbers.

With The Sims Online, a massively multiplayer game that goes live in
November, Wright plans to take over the rest of the world. The basic
playability is the same - each Sim pursues primary needs such as
food, sleep, a social life, and the shortest path to the
bathroom. But the online version dispenses with AI. Every Sim will
be controlled by a flesh-and-blood person. Like EverQuest and Ultima
Online, The Sims Online will mix elements of strategy games with an
immersive social experience. And along with the forthcoming Star
Wars Galaxies, it will test whether such games can cross over from
the Renaissance Faire set. "Our game," Wright says, "is potentially
bigger." He aims to have half a million players by the end of the
year.

The small amount of setting The Sims does have is based on this
whimsical parody of idealized Americana. It can get pretty extreme
from there.

Despite a track record of mainstream appeal, the man behind the
curtain is not your typical Madison Avenue crowd pleaser. Wright is
academic, prone to abstraction - a bookish anthropologist among the
frag-happy code grunts who dominate the game industry. He looks at
the world the way an economist might, as a series of costs and
benefits best understood through sophisticated models. Think Federal
Reserve, not National Rifle Association.

Though his first game, Raid on Bungling Bay (1984), was a
conventional helicopter shooter, Wright found he was more interested
in designing the towns that served as chopper bait. He became
fascinated with the urban planning work of MIT's Jay Forrester, the
father of system dynamics and guru of the limits to growth. And so
SimCity was born. Soon SimEarth sprang forth from the Gaia theories
of James Lovelock. E. O. Wilson inspired SimAnt.  "Will's a
perpetual student," says Jeff Braun, who in 1987 cofounded Maxis,
the company that runs the Sim franchise.

We're so intertwined we're almost the same species, and the
difference is getting smaller.

Wright started seeking a way to zoom in on SimCity, and he found it
in the ideas of Christopher Alexander. The UC Berkeley professor saw
architecture as the practice of function, not form - his work
suggested a way to "score" buildings by the satisfaction of the
people who live there. Originally, Wright's Sims were roving
gamebots, autonomous judges of floor plans and
furniture. Eventually, he realized that the living room was its own
complex system, and family life could be expressed as a series of
game-theory trade-offs. It turned out that playing puppetmaster
could also be lots of fun - so many people shared Wright's worldview
that The Sims became the biggest hit ever.

A game like this hasnever been played - the design hinges on a full
society of players. Mechanisms will kick in when you have a
free-market economy.

To Wright, The Sims Online is a chance to analyze that most complex
of systems: us. He expects the back and forth between shopkeepers
and customers to evolve into a marketplace and some basic form of
governance. Of course, if the virtual economy isn't managed
correctly, inflation could spiral out of control, as it did in
Ultima Online. In a nod to his role as controller of the in-game
supply of Simoleans, Wright is playing the beta as a character named
Alan Greenspan.

But don't expect a cyber session with the Senate Finance
Committee. Players will have a choice of cities, each with its own
flavor: a Western town here, sci-fi on the other side of the
hills. If that sounds like a theme park, it's no accident. Wright's
model is Uncle Walt. "Disney was trying to take what he learned in
the parks and apply it. Originally Epcot was going to be a real city
with 30,000 people, using new technology, like the peoplemovers and
the monorail, to see what it felt like in a semi-real setting. His
vision of Epcot wasn't that far off from what we're doing with The
Sims Online."

You can't look at humanity separate from machines.

Since online gamers spend a good deal of time text-messaging anyway,
Wright's real competition isn't a niche product like EverQuest. It's
America Online chat rooms. Like AOL, TSO will take great pains to
ease its users into online life: The setting is suburban, the
socializing typically takes place at home, and the neighbors can
easily stop by on foot.

Ironically, the game could replace the neighborly interaction it so
deliberately emulates. Indeed, The Sims Online promises a
particularly unthreatening version of the virtual world Neal
Stephenson imagined in Snow Crash, a place people do the socializing
they can't or won't in real life.  The Metaverse has finally arrived
- and it looks a lot like Main Street, USA.
--<cut>--




_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev