Slashdot Mirror
In-Depth Sims Online Development Story
Nicholas Palmer writes "GameSpot has a really
in-depth feature story on the development process behind The Sims Online.
It gets into things like how the team had to refactor the game's 3 million lines
of code last year. Will Wright mentions his desire to see TSO to grow into
a community similar to
Slashdot's." Great game - although the latest wipe of the game means all Blockstackers' hard work on our house will be gone. Still, the social dynamics, IMHO, are much more interesting in TSO, because it enforces cooperation.
How long before ..TSO has its 1st divorce in game ...is cited in a real divorce case when the TSO players other half, can't play the latest doom/quake/enter generic fps online, because their missus spends all day gossiping on TSO. .. bill gates, global corporations, the illuminanti, aliens, hyperintelligent mice, the masons etc secretly control the lives of your sims online
Amazing article, it goes in real depth into the thinking of both Will Wright - the game's creator - and The Sims Online.
:)
The original point of the game was for popularity - you get money based on how many visitors you get to your house, and to this end can start gameshows and the like. This was reflected in the Top 10 list, basically the "high-scorers". But... people, unsurprisingly, figured out the money-making tactics [read the article], opened the appropriate house, and everyone visited to make money. So they split the list into several top 10s... most popular, most romantic, etc.
This alone provides a never-ending goal to the game, which is what you really need in an online environment. It's like a variant of the Red Queen theory - you're not just up against the game, you're up against everyone else. You have to work to stay at the top... but unlike a levelling game, The Sims Online is far more capricious in that popularity doesn't need a vast amount of experience behind it. Start a fad, and poom - you've got people hearing about it from teir friends, visitng... much like the slashdot effect, but in a game. You're at the top of a list for a week.
In that way it could be far more rewarding than some other online games, and less hard-to-get-into for late starters. Add to that possible features like electing mayors and the like... wow.
I never was that interested in the Sims myself, but this is fascinating to me. Most online games atm survive because of their community... the Sims Online makes the community the goal as well as the tool. It's gonna be big, folks.
As for those calling it sad and to try the real world instead... yeah. That's why you're reading slashdot, right? *ducks*
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" whilst looking for a rock
The article mentions that Will Wright has talked stuff over with Neal Stephenson, and that in some ways TSO will be similar to the "Metaverse", as described in Snow Crash. One thing I'd like to see in TSO is the ability for characters to share non-TSO "objects" with other characters. For example, I'd like my character to hand another character a "file" and have a real file transfered from my hard drive to the other character's drive.
There are a lot of technical issues involved with this sort of stuff -- and some legal ones as well (think MP3s). However, this feature would bring TSO a lot closer to the Metaverse, uh, universe.
stories of the development process. This really gives an in-depth view of the ordeal that the developers go through like the problems they face and the solutions they come up with. Besides being an interesting read, these articles give the players an appreciation of the hard work done by the coders/designers. Geoff has done such Behind The Games articles on other games including Black&White. I was so impressed by efforts of the developers and the main designer Peter Molyneux, that although I had a warez copy of the game, I went ahead and bought the game. Being a developer myself, I really wanted to see these guy's hard work pay off.
Again, thanks to Geoff for bringing these interesting articles to the public without which no one would have had a chance to appreciate the games in a different way.