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Interview with The Sims Creator
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has just posted an interview with Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, in conjunction with the launch of The Sims 2. In it, Wright explains that users will be able to bond better and get more emotionally attached thanks to a new 3D engine. He also makes special mention of the 7 Deadly Sims as one of his favorite user-created sites."
Doesn't matter in the slightest whether or not the Sims appeal to the "leet". The "l33t" are increasingly an utter irrelevance in the world of gaming. Much as a small group of FPS and RPG players might like to see themselves as a genuine elite in the gaming world, ultimate arbiters of what's hot and what's not, the simple fact is that they aren't.
The "leet" scorned Counter-Strike for a long time, claiming that it was inherantly "less skillful" than the truly elite games such as Quake. When the general gaming populace basically proved that it didn't give a damn about this, and made Counter-Strike the most successful online FPS ever, the "leet" first whinged a lot, then mostly adopted the game as their own and pretended they'd never looked down on it. The idea of a relatively small circle of players (who, in my experience, generally conform to the most negative of the gamer stereotypes) with far too much time on their hands being genuine trendsetters for the audience of what is, these days, fast becoming a mainstream entertainment medium is laughable.
I didn't actually like The Sims much myself; I got pretty bored after the first few hours. However, it was probably the most significant development in gaming in recent years, more so than Doom 3, Farcry, Warcraft 3 or any of the other games which the "leet" might reasonably be expected to approve of. Why was it so popular? Largely for all the reasons you claim it was a failure. It didn't need the twitch-skills of a attention-deficient 9 year old Korean school-child to get the most out of it. You didn't need to spend hours memorising the optimal patterns and build-orders. You didn't need a postgraduate degree in economics. Your average consumer, male or female, could pick it up, play it and enjoy it. Dying was almost impossible, there was no retarded saves-policy, so you could stop playing at any point (handy if you hear the baby crying in the next room, or a friend drops by) and start again from exactly where you left off. In short, it combined an experience that was accessible to a person who wouldn't self-define as a gamer, but which had many of the addictive qualities which make RPGs and their ilk so popular, such as genuine character progression and the sense of a persistent world (even if this was only an illusion).
This is the future of "mainstream" gaming. This is the kind of audience that's going to attract the big publishers, due to the immense and as-yet largely untapped profit potential. The "leet" are perfectly welcome to go on bouncing around the same old Quakeworld maps, figuring out that perfect jumping technique for moving 0.000001mph faster (apparently to some warped minds, this counts as "depth"), just don't expect anybody to pay them the slightest bit of attention.