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Does anyone stillplay the sims? Yes, 10's of thousands of people. many of whom you'll find here: http://thesimsresource.com/ Just becuase the game has moved on doesn't mean people have. Many of the people who play it cannot afford the rather steeo upagrade path required to make Sim2 run smoothly. not to mendtion the fact that you can't take your families with you. I realise you were just being facetious, but in reality, many people play both. I still have both installed on my PC, and still flit from one to the other as is my want. YMMV

• Probably the single biggest drawcard for most people seems to be designing their own furniture and other three dimensional objects for the game.
• Architectural design/interior decoration. The Sims 2 has a fantastic three dimensional house building mode, and unlike the first game you can now go up around 10 storeys or so. Many people absolutely love designing houses or building community centres inspired by real-life international landmarks. It's also possible to do landscape design...and of course, a big draw for many people is submitting their work to sites such as The Sims Resource where other people can then download it for inclusion in their own games.
• Clothing/makeup design.
• 3D humanoid modelling - creating Sims based either on famous people or extraterrestrials.
• Storytelling or amateur computer-generated filmmaking. (machinima) You might have heard of a series of films built with the Sims 2 called The Strangerhood. If not, you might want to check it out to see what the engine is capable of...it's pretty amazing.
• An interactive episodic soap opera/reality TV show where you get to be the director. You might not record all of it as AVI files, as that would get somewhat prohibitive, but each household can have a photo album/journal where you can have snapshots and captions talking about various incidents in their lives. One thing I really liked early on was that although I liked the idea of the show Big Brother, I often didn't like some of the people they had on there...The Sims 2 lets me stage something like that which is completely run by me...I can either direct and control everything that happens, or I can let the Sims loose and watch them interact.

So as you can possibly see, the game doesn't just have one use...there are a lot of different things that can be done with it, depending on the type of creativity that the person in question prefers to engage in.

Yes, this is redundant but found a better pic.

Sims 2 "gardening"

Quick note: glass is not a liquid. Read here http://www.glassnotes.com/WindowPanes.html

Twisted, I never said that all information should necessarily be free. I said all information will be free. Not because I think it it's pretty nifty how I don't pay anything, but because millions and millions of people will think it's pretty nifty how they don't have to pay anything.

Now, just because an artist won't be able to charge for every single time someone listen to his song, doesn't mean he won't be sponsored or making money in any way. Trust me. People will find a way to make money in any way possible.

The Sims Resource is a website with thousands upon thousands of different custom made objects for The Sims and The Sims 2. You can get 99% of all those objects for free on the internet, but instead, thousands(maybe more) of people have subscribed to this system because it's fast, convenient, easy to use, gives them the results they need. So, there will always be people that find niches in the economy and will profit from it. Once the music distro/publishing companies are gone, something else will take up the niche. What? I don't know.

Quake Mods aren't modular, they're monolithic. The level of granularity is so coarse, that designers need to perform a huge amount of tedious work, in order to make a good one. And you can only experience on at a time, so if you have 100 good mods, they don't synergistically add to each other's value.

Sims objects and characters are modular mods, so they plug together into a simulated environment and interact with each other. You can take objects and characters created by many different designers, and compose them together with stuff you created yourself, into your own higher level, monolithic "mod" (a family living in a house).

Sims object and character creators don't have to worry about achieving "balance" -- that's the fun part of the game that the players do for themselves, in Build and Buy mode.

Achieving balance is the hard part of making successful Quake mods. But achieving balance is the fun part of playing The Sims. This approach lifts the burden of achieving balance from the shoulders of mod designers, and repackages it as entertainment for players.

Games that support truly modular mods like Sims objects and characters, enable mod designers to create interesting, expressive, stand-alone objects that players love to plug together (and value enough that they'll pay for downloading), at a more prolific, finer level of granularity than monolithic game mods like Quake.

Modular mods work together at many different levels, and they're open-ended, so there's never any end to what you can do with them.

The Palm House, Kew Gardens is a great example how many different artists, designers, historians and botanists have colaborated together at different levels, to create an accurate representation of the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew.

With the permission of the Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, this theme celebrates the wonders of not only the Palm House, but the Temperate House, Dome and Formal Gardens of Kew in this prestigious time of it gaining World Heritage Status. You can read more about this important event here.

This exemplary historical recreation is not just the end-product of many people's colaboration, but actually a contributing source in a huge distributed feedback loop:

You can download the Royal Botanic Gardens, plug the lot into your game, move your own family in, furnish it however you like, rearrange the landscape and architecture, deconstruct and reassemble it again with your own collection of objects, direct the drama as it unfolds, take pictures with the built-in camera, write stories in your scrapbook, and publish your family and their story on The Sims Exchange, to share with other players, to download and play with all over again.

-Don

Lets try this again, here are some sims 2 screenshots.

Not as visually detailed as I'd hoped.