Welcome to The Sims Online, virtual reality with a white picket fence.
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.
