In the first flush of Internet excitement, companies spent a lot of money on "information architecture." Architecture, after all, was a great metaphor, full of modernist language about structure and engineering, clarity and navigation, form and function - and it allowed executives to play out their Fountainhead fantasies with bits instead of bulldozers. Sites went up, as indistinguishable from each other as Bauhaus buildings. Spurred by advertising, visitors showed up, dabbled, perhaps staying long enough to spend a few bucks. But most didn't put down roots.
This was not an architectural problem. This was an urban planning problem. How do you convince people to move somewhere, commit time, energy and money, and cluster their activities around property you control? Once you've convinced them to move there, how do you keep the population spending freely without going bankrupt yourself? These are urban planning issues.
Not surprisingly, some of the best online urban designers work for Maxis (dossier), the company whose SimCity franchise transformed the death and life of virtual cities into a model-railroad hobby for millions of people. Its most recent product, The Sims, is an object lesson in the hustle and bustle of networked experience.
Unlike SimCity and its sequels, The Sims takes place on a human scale. The player creates a household of virtual characters with predefined personality traits (neat, outgoing, active, playful, nice) who have straightforward and measurable needs (hunger, comfort, hygiene, bladder, energy, fun, social and room).
The Sims live in a perfect consumer society where more expensive stuff makes their lives more fulfilled. You spend the game pushing your virtual characters up the corporate and social ladders so that they can earn more money, so they can buy bigger houses filled with designer furniture, so they can be happier. Along the way you nudge them into fights, romances and family melodramas.
It doesn't sound like much, but The Sims has become a popular phenomenon, selling more than 3 million copies (at $40 bucks a pop) since its release and spawning two expansion packs, Livin' Large (a departure from The Sims' white-bread Americana, featuring five less-reputable occupations - slacker, hacker, paranormalist, musician and journalist - as well as home decor options from High Goth to High Vegas), and the recently released House Party (a hundred objects to facilitate your Sims' social life, including togas, dance cages and mechanical bulls).
But aside from its twisted humor and its ability to turn virtual dollhouses into a mass-market cash cow, The Sims is a remarkable example of how a company and its customers can help a product evolve to the point where customers not only do a large portion of the innovation and marketing but also produce as much intellectual capital as they consume.
"A lot of the same dynamics that happen at the urban level are replicated in user communities," says Will Wright, Maxis' chief visionary and the Jane Jacobs of all things Sim. "One of the most basic ideas from urban planning is the relationship between basic and nonbasic production."
Most American cities began life around some basic means of production, like mining or manufacturing. "People come in to work at the factory," Wright says, "and the goods from that factory are sent out to other cities or across the region. But over time, smaller services start building up within the city, like little grocery stores or gas stations, that are servicing needs within the community. The internal infrastructure gets larger and larger, and over time it becomes the biggest part of the city - the city producing goods and services for itself."
