The girl in the booth has a remarkable talent. She’s Nikki Rapp, one of the starts of The Sims 2 and, now, The Sims 3. She can talk in Simlish, the strange fictional language of the Sims. She’s here to record the latest dialogue for the child characters. On screen, a bald six-year-old of indeterminate gender is pissing itself, while Robert Kauker, Audio Director of the Sims games, offers direction.
“I need you to do more horror. More embarrassment.”
“Icka-booga-daka-why.”
“More emphasis.”
“Icka Booga. Daka. WHY.”
“Hmm. It’s not working. Try sadness, then real shame.”
The animation continues to play, the poor little character on-screen in a loop of perpetual urination.
“Oehhh. Err. Ewwwww.”
“That’s it. Brilliant. Now let’s move on to file 2311: motive underscore distress one.”
A slightly different-shaped puddle appears underneath the Sim. He or she has had another accident.
Who knew that tormenting little AI people, watching them wee all over the floor, go out, make friends, have babies, and buy bigger better flatscreen TVs would result in such massive success? In two games, and fourteen expansion packs, The Sims has created an empire for Electronic Arts. 98 million copies of Sims games have been sold worldwide (it’s probably passed 100 million by the time you read this). It has cultural relevance way beyond most games (EA count over 100,000 machinima movies on YouTube released by Sims players), and an appeal that extends way beyond the traditional gamer market. EA estimate that around 60% of their playerbase is female (by contrast PC gamer has an almost exclusively male readership), and around 20% are under 17. Your sister, your girlfriend, and your mum: they all love it.
The gibberish whining from the booth is a sign that full production is beginning on The Sims 3, the first really new, full-price game the studio has produced since The Sims 2, four years ago. Nikki faces hundreds of hours in the studio, making up words, pretending to be a six-year-old of indeterminate gender but high emotion. She’s not alone. Ten other voice actors have signed on to speak gibberish, alongside legions of animators and artists. They have a huge task: they want to draw and simulate every human emotion, and every human motion. If you can think to do it, it has to be in the game. The scale of production is extraordinary. Talking to the team, you can see that they’re proud of their success. But when you talk games to the engineers and the programmers and designers who develop the game, they talk of the same titles we play. Oblivion. Half-Life. World of Warcraft. Even, wonderfully, Dwarf Fortress. They use expressions like ‘re-roll’, love text adventures, and obsess over RPGs. It seems they’ve made a conscious decision to bring gamers like us back to the game.
Rod Humble is the creative director of the Sims ‘label’. He’s smart, funny, rake thin, and what we’d call a hardcore gamer. Originally from Birmingham, he moved to America to be part of the original EverQuest team.
Two years ago, the Sims team was spun out of Electronic Arts and given a kind of creative autonomy. That autonomy, under Rod’s creative leadership, has paid dividends. Unlike the typical view of this publisher, where we cynics bemoan recycled updates of the same old games such as FIFA 2008 or NHL 2010, the Sims games have been quietly innovating.
Rod explains that the Sims team has a single goal: creativity. “Our mission is to create new original games that innovate and take creative risks on established franchises. The one thing that we don’t do is make the same game every year. Some people hate some of the things we do, but at least we don’t do the same thing every year. We really try to take risks.”
The funny thing is: the Sims team has been taking risks. We just didn’t notice. Sims games cover everything: from the best business game available—the Open for Business expansion—to console versions like MySims, in which you can build houses and cookers and sofas and cars out of electronic Lego, to insane web-platforms like The Sims On-Stage, where users can upload videos of themselves performing poetry, or singing karaoke (Rod boasts that The Sims On-Stage is, hilariously, the most popular poetry site on the web). Soon there will be a whole Sims web-game portal. And a Sim Animals game. And more expansion packs. And The Sims 3.
“When we started work on The Sims 3,” says Rod as he shows us an early prototype, “I had two directives for the Sims team. One: it’s not going to work unless you can cross the street and see your neighbor’s kids playing. And two: no more hamster cages.”
The hamster cage refers to the typical gamer complaint about The Sims: that it’s sometimes nothing more than directing your chosen character from the bath, to the fridge, to the toilet. For many, The Sims 2 is less about character development as it is about time-management. You’re not guiding semi-autonomous beings, but playing nurse-maid to incontinent babies. Goal One is to make the interesting part of the game—the guiding of a character’s life, from cradle to grave—more apparent. It’s about turning a toilet sim into a modern roleplaying game; where you’re constantly faced with interesting choices, and the opportunity to play what-if with near-perfect people.
And the neighbors’ kids? Rod wants to break down the barriers, let Sims wander freely through a town, take in signs , not be constrained by the prison-like ‘lots’ of old games. He wants to turn the game into an open world, where Sims can stroll, meet their friends, go to work, interact with each other. And piss themselves in the gym. It’s GTA: Pleasantville.
In the demo we’re shown, the camera is centered on a single character. And then the view zooms out. Eventually we can see an entire neighborhood, a perfect slice of American Mid-West life, all picket fences, rolling hills, and redbrick town halls. Sims walk along the pavement, greeting each other, stopping to chat. Cars whizz past. We zoom back tin for a voyeur’s perspective, peeking through the windows, spotting Sims as they cook, and chat, and paint their pretty pictures. It feels like a living, open town, a place where stuff happens, where the day-to-day lives of interesting people intersect in infinite ways.
Now we zoom back in, on a single character. Let’s see how this all fits together. Let’s meet SimMatt.
Matt is a chef. He lives in a lovely detached house on the top of the hill of a SimPleasantville town. He is young-ish, has a hot wife and flatscreen TV. But today his wife is in a bad mood, and Matt is desperate for a promotion.
First problem: it is morning and time for work. In the old Sims games, this early morning work run would be a nightmare of task juggling: a terrifying assault course of late alarm clocks, standing breakfasts, hurried defecation and swift showers, all while a workmate hovers outside in a car, beeping his horn, impatiently waiting for you to get ready.
In The Sims 3, a bubble appears in the bottom left. “Matt is hungry. Click here to feed him.” One click, and his needs for the morning are taken care of.
Second problem: work. In The Sims 2, unless you bought the Open for Business expansion, work happened off-screen, the clock whizzing by while your house was left empty. In The Sims 3, work is part of the routine. Matt has bought some home with him: the dishwasher at work broke down, so he’s offered to clean some dishes for his boss. Completing the task will put him a little closer to a promotion. It is, in effect, a quest, experience and reward system. Matt washes dishes, and then leaves. He opens the door and begins running. And running. And running. He is Forrest Gump in a chef’s hat.
Rod explains that, for the moment, they’ve disabled the car code because it was suffering from bugs. But the point is, your job exists in the neighborhood. Matt would normally drive to it. There, he’d do the cooking. Or the growing. Or the fishing.