SimTreadmill

Henry Jenkins III and Kurt Squire

That The Sims Online appeared on the cover of Newsweek before even shipping points to not just the record-setting appeal of The Sims, but also how online games might be the test bed for some of the most interesting issues of the next decade. Who owns creative property owned within a virtual world? What locality determines how transactions within virtual communities are regulated (and taxed): consumers' location, the servers' location, the corporation's location, or some combination of all three? If you doubt the economic or political importance of online gaming, in his study of Everquest's economics, Edward Castronova found that the GDP of Everquest is roughly akin to that of Bulgaria.

TSO, backed by the brand recognition of The Sims, the marketing of EA, and the genius of designer Will Wright, could bring these issues to Main Street. The Sims franchise already turned non-gamers into digital authors, thousands of whom created character skins, wallpapers, texture art, or storybooks with the game. Now, TSO promises to have Massively Multiplayer newbies buying and selling virtual goods with real money, participating in guilds or other virtual communities, and of course, having Net Sex.

So far, however, the dramatic potential of TSO is mostly just hype. Initial sales (estimated at about 100,000 as of this writing) are strong for an MMO game, but by far the weakest of any of The Sims properties to date. The game play has also disappointed many. The skill-development and money-earning mechanics are surprisingly non-interactive; players simply click on objects (such as a chess board) and watch their avatars play chess to enhance skills. Play TSO for any amount of time, and you will find row after row of people seated at skill-enhancing objects. In fact, chances are that only half are at their keyboard at any given time, gone off to do more interesting things as they max out their characters' skills. Most of the houses in TSO reflect this skill-enhancing focus, consisting of row after row of skill-enhancing objects. Sadly, TSO avatars depict a very narrow range of body types resulting in limited expressive potential for players.

Of course, Maxis and TSO designers had hope for much more than this. The big idea behind TSO is that players would use the games' objects and environments as virtual theme parks, stages for acting out interactive dramas and exploring virtual identities. TSO designers hoped that players would make worlds more creative and inventive than any single design team could muster. However, with game mechanics that privilege skill development over interactive storytelling and a game system nearly devoid of conflict, perhaps it is no surprise that there TSO looks more like SimTreadmill than SimTheatre.

TSO also reminds us the persistent world games are really services, where the players themselves become part of the content. Certainly good role players and storytellers are out there, but developing a good role-playing and storytelling community is difficult. TSO as collaborative filtering tools designed to help players find others with similar tastes, but TSO's current player-base comes mostly from other MMO games, which are often about level advancement or achievement. Log on to TSO and watch to players talking about "greening up" (a term for regenerating health which came from Dark Ages of Camelot) power-leveling and one gets the sense that this is not the player-base TSO was designed for or the culture TSO designers imagined. Of course, one could point to other problems behind TSO, which encourage this behavior (could any game which can essentially be played while away from keyboard be successful as a game?), but the critical role that initial users played in creating the initial culture of TSO should not be overlooked.

Whether TSO, or any game manages to fulfill the hopes of online community stalwarts remains to be seen. Attracting a diverse player base to such an expensive, time-intensive entertainment medium is just one of the many issues confronting next-generation MMO designers. Online games evolve over their lifespan, and hopefully TSO will grow into the dynamic, creative community that Maxis envisioned. If not, no doubt Star Wars Galaxies and others will be right behind them trying.

Originally printed in Computer Games Magazine, June 2003