Sexuality And The Sims

Jim Rossignol writes "An article on a new blog I'm contributing to discusses how The Sims (mostly the original, but also the sequel) gets used for sexual purposes, and also examines how this kind of response is essential to the appeal of the game. Here's an extract: 'On sites like Simulated, Eight Deadly Sims, Pandora's Sims and Strange Sims we see increasingly bizarre uses of the modding tools. While mainstream sites are for all ages, these have reached such a level of risqué or alternative content that the majority hide behind pay-for-access barriers to ensure that the users at least have a credit card (i.e. aren't minors), and to earn a little cash. Of all the mod cultures online — and virtually every PC game has users making their own additional content either in publisher-supported or unofficial ways — it's only The Sims which has such an obvious number of sites which demand money for access. This is particularly unusual: there's a clause in EA's tool license that they can only be used 'on your personal non-commercial website'. That Electronic Arts hasn't gone after such a sizeable community is interesting in and of itself.'" Jim Rossignol is a well-respected games journalist in the industry, and his new blog (Rock, Paper, Shotgun) is well worth checking out.

Comments

Really?

[JamesRose]

It sounds like they expect EA to sue these users using it commercially, frankly, a good company that knows what its doing puts in that clause to cover itself, but wouldn't even consider suing its users. Unfortunately more recently its become the norm to be scared of being sued by the people you buy your software from. EA understands how to build a community, and lets face it, the sms has a pretty obvious appeal as a community game, EA starting to sue the odd site that makes a profit on these things would more damage than good because there's always trouble drawing the line at who you should sue.

Re:Really?

[mqduck]

I think it's more like this: They're not willing to try to ban all sexual mods (in fact, as the article states, they probably want them). But they're not going to sue them for charging money, because that would equal demanding they give them away for free. And that's too risky politically for them.

This is just silly

[TibbonZero]

The Sims is one of the few non-pornographic games that let you have sex and/or relationships of complexity with any other characters. Why? Because it's a life simulation game. If it were missing sex/relationships then it would be missing a huge part of life. That's not to say it's the only 'fun' thing in the game, or that it's even particularly fun in the game.
He takes the fact that you can have sex, to mean, "The purpose of this game is to score by, well scoring". It's not the purpose of the game any more than it is in GTA. At the same time, everyone's got to try it at least once in game right? Who hasn't slept with a hooker in GTA, then ran her over and took the cash? I know several people who have played The Sims just as a home decoration program to make fun looking houses, and forget all about the people.

Re:Riiight...

[Babbster]

I've downloaded a lot of Sims stuff in the past (haven't played in a couple years) for free and there was a LOT more going on than simple "recolors." Everything from elevators to some (turning in a "man card" here) ridiculously nice fashions were available. I remember the original stuff at 7 Deadly Sims and there were some excellent designs with full new furniture sets and the like. It may not have been your cup of tea (and I never paid myself), but people have done a lot more work on those downloads than you're giving them credit for.

EA probably has no interest in making headlines

[vux984]

Right now the Sims is perceived by the public as a great family friendly game. The last thing they want to do is put the Sims in the headlines next to "adult content" or "bizarre sex acts" or anything that is going to cause an outswell of ill-founded but inevitable comparisons to the 'hot coffee' mod and general backlash against their game.

The original author

[Enderandrew]

Jim is a well-respected games journalist who apparently knows little about the games industry. The Sims is one of the best selling PC games of all time, and I wouldn't be shocked if it was the single best selling PC title of all time. What he is discussing is a small series of modders who added adult content to a title extremely popular with adults.

The original game is extremely family-friendly, features no sex and in that regard is somewhat lacking as a life simulator. The game is mundane enough that I don't think it ever really caught on with the kids, and despite having a predominant adult audience, the game is in no way adult in nature. The game doesn't cater to adult mods, nor were there any official mod tools that I know of.

The reason adult mods exist for the Sims, is that any major PC game often receives adult mods. If he had spent 5 minutes of a Google search he would have found several sites (won't Google for them at work personally) that cater to providing adult mods for any game out there. His supposition is completely flawed, disturbingly so for a journalist who supposedly specializes in the games industry.

Re:The original author

[SimHacker]

Just wanted to address a few points in your post:

The Sims surpassed Myst at the top selling game of all time, quite a few years ago, and has continued to sell very well. The franchise has sold about 85 million games to date.

The success of The Sims is largely due to the fact that players can add their own content to the game. Conversely, The Sims Online was a flop because it didn't allow players to add their own content, even though that feature was initially promised, to the delight of the fans, then later forgotten, do the fan's dismay.

Yes there are official and semi-official mod tools. I wrote the character animation system in The Sims, and several tools for creating custom content. Before we release The Sims in March 2000, instead of releasing a demo, I developed a tool called "SimShow" that displayed the animated characters, and enabled players to create their own Sims. After we release The Sims, Will Wright hired me to use The Sims source code to develop The Sims Transmogrifier, a tool for cloning objects, exporting and importing theie graphics and properties, so players can modify them and create their own objects. I've created other easier to use "drag-and-drop" tools like Show-N-Tell for displaying Sims objects in a web browser, and Rug-O-Matic for creating picture story rugs. (You can enter text that's displayed in the catalog and in an in-game pop-up window, that tells a story about the picture on the rug.)

One important way that The Sims is family friendly, is that it does not discriminate against families with gay people, nor does it perpetuate the hypocritical anti-gay homophobic agenda of the Republican party (like some other games from Texas and Senators from Idaho whose names I won't mention). Any of The Sims characters can participate in gay or straight relationships with each other, without any negative consequences or stereotypes. Anything less would be hostile to many families and gay people. Anyone who would argue that it's family friendly to discriminate against gays is homophobic, and needs to have their head examined, and work through their self-loathing personal issues with a mental health professional, just like Republican Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho, or Republican Senator James Foley of Florida, or Republican Evangelical Crystal Meth and Gay Sex Addicted Reverend Ted Haggard. (Oops, sorry -- I just couldn't resist naming some names.)

-Don

Sorta

[Moraelin]

Jim is a well-respected games journalist who apparently knows little about the games industry.

You're sorta right that he doesn't seem to "get" what made The Sims popular, but I wouldn't necessarily say you have to know little about the game industry to be stumped there.

The fact is, a lot of _members_ of the industry are just as stumped trying to understand it. I can think of at least three games which tried to bolt-on some kind of "at home" mode to their game, apparently for no other reason than to try to get a bit of that market too, and got it _all_ wrong. Not just a little wrong, but they "streamlined" out everything that was fun to anyone, and left only the mundane parts in... and even managed to get those wrong. Considering that Will Wright gave interviews and speeches all over the place as to what worked and why, just makes it even more surprising to see someone "streamline" out exactly those.

As a short detour, that seems to be a more general illness of the industry. Someone who doesn't even understand or like a genre, sets out to make a clone of last year's bestseller... and gets it all wrong. Whether it's The Sims, or RPGs, or car racing games or whatever.

Thing is, it's hard to explain _why_ people like The Sims, to someone who doesn't. Explanations like "because it's simulated life" or "because you can watch someone do chores around the house" are too superficial and somewhat mis-leading. Listening to Will Wright talk about fluid dynamics and such in an interview is actually a lot closer to describing it, but conversely leaves most people wondering something like "so WTF does that have to do with games?" or "so how the heck would one make a game like The Sims based on that?"

So a lot come out with half-baked, and occasionally pejorative, explanations like "maybe it's for the sex" or "maybe it's to pretend they live someone else's life".

People like The Sims for a variety of disconnected reasons, like using it to experiment with home layouts, or as props to film a story, or actually playing with the constraints and interdependencies to some goal they set for themselves. For some that goal will be creating love triangles and dodecahedrons, for some it will be something else.

And some will just get bored and start doing stuff like downloading stuff that turns it into a porn game or killing sims left and right, because that's the kind of event that's more like what they want to play.

The problem, and source of such articles, IMHO is that surprisingly few people seem to realize that there's more than one personality and more than one gamer type. Almost everyone seems to assume that he's the yardstick of gamer tastes, everyone else should like exactly the same things, and if they don't, there must be something hideously wrong with them. It's the stuff that fanboy flamewars are made of, and, sadly, more than one serious article.

The Sims is one of the best selling PC games of all time, and I wouldn't be shocked if it was the single best selling PC title of all time.

It is. It outsold all Quake games _combined_, for example.