They really hit on the idea of no limits, do whatever you want. I feel a tension between that and the idea of a simulation which needs constraints so that things matter. I’ve been a little disappointed ever since the Sims 1, because I was hoping it was more like Sim Ant but with humans. Or Dwarf Fortress, as a later example. But you kind of have to to make your contraints in the Sim games.
Though they also emphasize all the NPCs are playing by the same rules. There’s kind of a line between ‘mod it to do whatever you want’ and ‘do whatever in the game sim’ and maybe that’s how they can do both.
I’ve seen plenty of interviews and forum posts and Rod Humble has thought about that tension 10x more than I have, so I have faith he’s gonna pull off something interesting.
“Remember, we’ve just watched these people play the game,” Humble told me, “and I had people come out and lie to us, to the whole group, about what they just did.”
“I remember a bunch of young guys,” said Humble, “and they get into the room, it’s a mixed room, and we’re like, ‘Hey, what did you do?’ and they’re like, ‘Murdered people. Went in and starved people, had sex with everybody in the town.’ But actually, what you did is you redecorated that bathroom, right? Like, that’s actually what you did. There’s this idea that there are some things you should say you’re doing, but actually, no, you’re cooking, you’re making house.”
“If you hear us talk about playing a life sim, we’ll often alternate between first- and third-person,” said Humble. “So we’ll say, ‘I asked Jeffery on a date, we went on our date, and my person messed it up.’ And so they’ll change from ‘me as the player’ versus ‘my agent did something.’ And that tension is where there’s a lot of magic in life simulation. You’re going back and forth between, ‘Am I playing that person, or is that a little creature that I’ve got a distance on?’”
The idea that players may want plausible deniability about what they do in life sims also led Humble to leave something out of Life By You: telemetry, or the collecting of anonymized gameplay data for statistical purposes. It’s how EA knows there were 289 million “WooHoos” across Sims 4 games last year, for example. A lot of games do it, and the responsible ones ask you before transmitting anything, but Humble decided it was better to leave it out entirely.
“It’s very important for this community, in this day and age, to know that this is a private experience,” Humble told me. “There’s no in-game telemetry gathering data that could, for example, go to a hostile government.”
I haven’t read this topic until now, but I hope Rod does well with this. One thing that worries me though is how real life has lots of boring interludes, so if a game mirrors real life, how does it avoid being boring?
For 20 minutes I followed a character who was, by all accounts, pretty irritating. They walked to their job at a local gym, avoided doing their work, and then scolded a co-worker for not doing enough. Before clocking off early, they taught yoga while their colleague tidied up nearby. It was a comical, oddly realistic and, most importantly, an admirably continuous experience. I felt the discomfort of being a voyeur in the minutiae of this selfish person’s day.
This is interesting, but it’s interesting for the first few times. After the tenth time is it still interesting?
I am probably not the target audience for this kind of game since I never really got into The Sims. And The Sims was a huge success. Still, best wishes to Rod and his team.
The fun of these games is in multiple parts, but in one way it was min/maxing a career and family with a sim (and/or others.) Another way is setting your sim (and/or others) into situations and see how they play out. Another way yet again is surrounding your sim (and/or others) with nicely designed homes, decoration, people, pets, cars, vacations, jobs and whatnot to your hearts content.
I keep putting, “and/or others,” in parenthesis because at least for the Sims, you could control any sim located on a lot in the game, so there was a concept of NPCs per-se, but you could simply invite them to live in the home of an existing lot, and away you go. So if you jump around between lots, and between entire maps through the various households and sims, it creates fun and challenges for easier or harder playtime. Famously here we had @roBurky who had a wonderful story he played through about a homeless teen sim that became talked about in media even. And to the style of his play, it was leading the sims to situations and letting them mostly play out based on the sims themselves.
The Sims has always drawn ire from some gamers, and I really couldn’t tell you why. It’s a fun diversion, in the way that SimCity or one of the Tycoon games or Black and White can be. You can create, you can take direct control, or you can let things play out in a way akin to a benevolent or evil god.
I really hope what Rod is creating here brings some of that same fun.
