Wrong Fun With the Sims

Via Sarah’s weblog: The Death of the Sims, where a bored player decides to try some kidnapping and murder to test the game’s limits as a simulation.

Full disclosure: I have never played any iteration of The Sims. I just bought a copy of Sims Online last night, though; after all the Alphaville Herald business, I want to see what the fuss is all about. I imagine that more than a few people who study games might be getting onto TSO for the same reason. It’s amazing that so much fascinating awfulness comes from the genre’s “safe” gameplay being, apparently, very boring.

Sarah’s reading of “Death of the Sims” is positive, though, and convincingly so. This isn’t necessarily a failure of The Sims, but rather a sign of its successful accommodation of player agency. The test scenario seems to push the system past its limits at points, though: “Death” points out several moments where the player’s unusual behavior pretty much fries the social simulation around him.

What may succeed in The Sims, of course, definitely becomes more complicated in The Sims Online, where player agency impacts not only an individual’s gameplay but the game as everyone experiences it.