It’s no secret that electronic games are a big business. Last year $6.35 billion worth of video- and computer games were sold at retail. An additional $196 million came from subscription fees to online games, a number that is expected to grow to $1.4 billion over the next five years, according to Jupiter Research. That’s because for many people it’s more fun to outwit, outplay and outlast a fellow human being than a computer. Since The Sims, which was released in 2000, is already the best-selling PC game ever, many are predicting that The Sims Online will shoot to the top of the online-gaming charts as well. “It’s the metaverse meets chat meets IM, and no one has done that before,” says Electronic Arts president John Riccitiello, who sounds cautiously optimistic one month before the game’s Dec. 17 launch. “A decade from now, tens of millions of people will be subscribing to games like The Sims Online. But right now, that’s premature. We have to be successful with this first.”
If you haven’t heard of The Sims–the twisted-sitcom-as-computer-game from SimCity creator Will Wright–you’re either a recluse or you watch nothing but C-Span. Since its release two years ago, Electronic Arts has racked up worldwide sales of nearly 20 million for The Sims and its expansion packs. You create a simulated person or family and help them get through their daily lives as they try to decorate their homes, hold down jobs, make friends and win the hearts of the other computer-controlled “sims” in the game. Because you control only your sims’ actions and not the outcomes, the whole experience is filtered through Wright’s satiric distillation of human behavior. Try to kiss the neighbor’s husband before you’ve wooed him sufficiently, and you might get cruelly rebuffed–and your kids could be barred from visiting their playmates. Or if you become overly materialistic, your sims may end up in a house filled with broken-down grandfather clocks and combustible stoves as you struggle to keep everything in working order. The game’s simple premise and user-friendly interface have made it a runaway success with all demographics; 45 percent of the players are women, and more than a third are over 24.
With The Sims Online, every one of the hundreds of sims that you encounter is played by a real person, not your PC. (In industry parlance, that’s called a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.) And that has the potential to appeal not only to fans of the offline version of The Sims, but also to people who have no interest in the Dungeons & Dragons-inspired online games like EverQuest and Asheron’s Call, which currently dominate the category. “Until now, if you weren’t into dragons and trolls, you were shut out,” says Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg. And since The Sims Online draws on real life, with houses, streets, nightclubs, game shows, wedding chapels and most other real-life analogues you can think of, there’s no time spent figuring out how to cast spells or cut down orcs. “The key message we have is, ‘Be somebody else’,” says Luc Barthelet, the 40-year-old head of Maxis, the division of EA responsible for the line of Sim products that began in 1989 with SimCity.
To understand why The Sims Online is a step forward for online games, it may help to understand how a popular game like EverQuest is played. Take Bridget Goldstein, a 40-year-old school trustee who lives in Pasadena, Calif. Every night starting about 10, after she’s put her two children to bed, she spends a couple of hours playing EverQuest as Nin Lyrael, a buxom, flirtatious bard who can fly and slay dragons with equal aplomb. “It’s no different from losing yourself in a good book, [but here] you’re the star, and you have slim hips and no stretch marks,” says Goldstein. Even better is the motley crew of wordsmiths that Goldstein hangs out with in the game; when she met them at a gathering of EverQuest fans in Houston, they turned out to be a college professor, an accountant and an aerospace engineer. “They’re people I would select as friends in the outside world because you can easily tell who has the gift of gab and who’s clever,” Goldstein says. But it’s not always about wit and wisecracks. After the September 11 attacks, international players from as far away as Australia expressed their sympathy for the United States, culminating in a virtual torchlight vigil for those who had lost their lives in the real world. “Very few people of my generation understand any of this,” says Goldstein. “They don’t know a thing about parallel lives, or a life lived partially online, which is second nature to anyone under 25.”
In other words, online games are succeeding not just as an outlet for competition but as a forum for social interaction. Even shoot-’em-ups can benefit from adding a social element. The most widely played online action game is the first-person shooter Counter-Strike, in which you play on one of two teams, Terrorists or Counter-Terrorists, in a variety of scenarios like rescuing hostages and planting or defusing bombs. Every night, without fail, there are 100,000 or more people online playing Counter-Strike, like 23-year-old New Jersey commerce student Ron Cheng, who pays $50 a month for his own server to host as many as 12 players. Or six-hour-a-day player Christy Rogge, 23, an unemployed mother of two and leader of an all-female team of Counter-Strike veterans called Girlz Clan. “We’re planning a trip to Great America sometime next year,” says the Knoxville, Tenn., resident, who even met her current boyfriend while playing the game. How’s that for social?
Still, The Sims Online stands out because social interaction is the game’s raison d’etre, not an afterthought. Having more roommates lets you buy a bigger house for your lot, and you can pool your resources to better furnish your place. The “job objects” that you need to earn money, like the pizza oven or the maze, require more than one person to operate. (The game designers were dismayed that players were spending too much time trying to earn money and made some changes.)
And unlike other online games that primarily reward players for becoming more powerful (EverQuest) or for their fast-twitch skills (Counter-Strike), The Sims Online provides multiple ways to “win.” There are numerous lists that people can try to climb: Most Visited, Best Place to Make Money, Wealthiest Sim, Most Liked Sim. “There are two types of people in the beta [testing],” says Will Wright. “The gamers are trying to get to the top of every list, while the role players are socializing and building places with atmosphere.” To appeal to both types, the game cleverly mixes achievement with interaction; you can build your sims’ skills faster by working in pairs or groups. That gives you a reason to find a friend to spot you when you hit the weight room–or to set up a Soul Train line on the dance floor.
So far, Maxis’s hard work seems to be paying off during the beta, where people are playing the game for absurdly long amounts of time. Longtime Sims fan Tamara Bryant, a 30-year-old Bronx, N.Y., bookkeeper, used to watch shows like “ER” and “Will & Grace.” Now she spends five to six hours a night on The Sims Online–more on weekends, “because work gets in the way”–and she’s having a blast. “So far, I’ve built a house with four other roommates and met a lot of cool people,” says Bryant, who’s already got her sister hooked on the game. “I like it a lot better than The Sims because you have real people that you can talk to and joke with. Don’t get me wrong, I still like to play the offline version, but it’s more fun to talk to someone else.”
But early reports from other beta testers we spoke with indicate that achievement- oriented gamers may find The Sims Online less satisfying than role players like Bryant. Take the infamous JB we mentioned earlier, who played the game for 72 hours straight when he first got it. In real life, he’s actually a gracious 20-year-old named Josh Bell from Florence, S.C., and he’s disappointed with the game so far. Why? Because for JB, the appeal of the original version of The Sims was to make money and buy cool things, not to chat and hang out. “Only a select few in real life get to be rich and famous,” says Bell. “In the original Sims you get to simulate that. With The Sims Online, it’s all about networking, as if you were a corporate executive. It almost seems more like an extremely hyped chat room with The Sims as a bonus on the side.” And Bell got frustrated when he bumped up against the current limit of 100 objects per sim. Now he’s trying to make his sim’s home the most visited house in his area. “I could have been there for a week already if I had seven roommates that were on around the clock keeping the place online,” he says. (Which explains why we got booted.)
What bodes well for the game’s success, however, is that the folks at Maxis understand that The Sims Online is a service, not a product, and that it’s their job to listen to their players’ complaints and make changes accordingly. On top of that, they’ve got some wildly ambitious goals for The Sims Online. They’ve already secured in-game sponsorships from Intel and McDonald’s, so you can buy your sim a Pentium 4 PC or earn money by serving up those fattening fries. There are plans to add pets to the game (“Think Tamagotchi,” says executive producer Gordon Walton). And Maxis plans to hand the economy and the governing structure over to the subscribers, so that each city effectively becomes a SimCity controlled by its players. “We can give people the Lego pieces, or we can create the building for them,” says Barthelet, who envisions having players buy and sell real estate, clothing and more within the game. “We’d rather give them the pieces. The point is for them to meet someone interesting.” If Maxis and Electronic Arts can pull this off, their brave new world might just become the Next Big Thing.
Photo: Get a life: In The Sims Online, you meet, greet and interact with characters controlled by other players, not the computer
Photo: Paul Kim, 20: “I would play Warcraft III over watching TV any night,’’ he says of the popular strategy game that came out this summer. “I have about six people in my clan. Some play as humans, some play as elves. But I only play as an orc.’'
Photo: Richard Fame, 35, and Timothy Gossett, 13: In Battlefield 1942, players re-create classic World War II battles, complete with tanks and planes. “If you get a game with 30 people to a side, it’s very intense,’’ says Fame, pictured with his stepson.
Photo: The Snarrs: Michael, 13; Ronald, 38; Richard, 8; Carl, 40: How much do brothers Ronald and Carl Snarr like EverQuest? Enough to bring their sons to the EverQuest Fan Faire that took place in San Francisco in early November.
Graphic: (timeline/photos/graphics/text) Online Multiplayer Games: The virtual world of Internet gaming has been more than 30 years in the making. Here are a few key moments along the way: (graphic omitted)
Graphic: (text/graphics) Games People Play: There are three main categories of online games. Here are some of the most popular:
