Learning From The Sims

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 26 Mar 2001 14:00:00 -0800

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."

Back in 1996, only the brave and foolish would have made predictions about how technology would change our lives over the next five years. And only the remarkably prescient would have been right. Still, none of that stops analysts today from making forecasts about how things might look half a decade from now.

Technology and the Internet will become more integral in American life - but by how much? If predictions are accurate, three-fourths of Americans will regularly access the Net - up from slightly less than half today. And almost half of U.S. households will go online using a high-speed connection, making the promise of streaming media more likely to become reality. But access to the Net won't be widespread - barely more than 10 percent of the world's population will use the Internet in the next five years.

At Ovum, bullish analysts forecast that an astounding nine in 10 Americans will use cellular phones or other wireless devices, up from 40 percent today. And they anticipate that half of all Americans will access the Net through these gadgets. All told, 31 percent of the world's population could be using wireless devices in 2005.

How we spend our time will change, too: Americans will clock almost 70 percent more hours on the Net than they do now, says research firm Veronis Suhler. As a result, consumers are expected to make more Web purchases. Annual consumer e-commerce should jump almost 500 percent to $269 billion in 2005, according to Jupiter Research.

Businesses and universities will also strengthen their online presence. Sixty-three million Americans will use the Web at work in 2005 - a 47 percent increase from today. And almost nine out of 10 colleges or universities will offer courses over the Net. However, don't expect a significant number of consumers to change their banking and trading habits. According to IDC, only 11 percent of U.S. Web users will bank online in 2005, up from 8 percent today. And a mere 9 percent will trade stocks on the Net.

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In the case of The Sims, this evolution was engineered into every aspect of the product, from the development model to the marketing strategy. For all its mainstream appeal, The Sims hinges on a sophisticated set of authoring tools that allow people with zero programming skills to do radical plastic surgery on standard-issue Sims and to create custom objects, from lawn ornaments to limousines. Eight months before the game shipped, these tools were released online. By the time The Sims hit the shelves, there were 20 independent tool developers, 50 fan sites, 40 artists hacking up custom content and 50,000 collectors of these user-created objects. When new players arrived, the virtual economy was already feeding itself.

Currently, 200 fan sites in 14 languages furnish 90 percent of the game's content. Mall of the Sims, an independent portal to SimPhenomena of all descriptions, is self-sufficient through advertising revenue. The Web has become a Sim central-casting agency for custom characters, from alien species to celebrity look-alikes. Sims furniture showrooms, sporting-goods outlets and clothing stores are chock-full of downloadable merchandise. Online, you can pour over Sim real estate listings, skim a newsletter devoted exclusively to other Sim fan sites and find out if your Sim is Hot or Not.

If you've got a software problem, a self-organized brigade of volunteer enthusiasts provides free technical support via ICQ. Online political rivalries, traffic-sharing agreements and interdependent social circles have grown up around The Sims that have nothing to do with Maxis.

When a trend gains critical mass in the Sim user community - say, converting one's house into a Hollywood B-movie set or throwing a theme party - Maxis publishes a $29.99 expansion pack that allows players to extend that experience.

The Sims Online, a persistent virtual world scheduled to launch next year, leverages community interaction on an unprecedented level by allowing characters to sell each other SimGoods and SimServices for in-game money. In its early stage of development, the obvious professions seem to be architecture and exotic dancing. Naked skins are freely available on the Web; a jukebox animates them, and a turnstile allows you to charge admission. It's amazing how these simple elements combine.

More subtly, the Sims Online will allow players to bookmark retail objects. For instance, if you see a cool chair at someone's house, you bookmark it. If you buy the chair, a commission flows back to the person from whom you bookmarked it, and the person from whom they bookmarked it, as well as the creator of that object. This motivates people to buy expensive stuff and throw parties. It also makes it economically attractive to buy one of every chair in the Sim universe and open a Chairs "R" Us showroom. Imagine a world where you could earn an Amazon-style affiliate commission for every product on your homepage - it makes retail into a massively multiplayer game.

For the business community, The Sims' lessons are twofold. The first is that interaction design trumps graphics. The Sims is less photorealistic than any computer game on the market, or any broadband site on the Web - it's not even fully 3D. Yet it succeeds tremendously because it allows players with different agendas to interact as consumers, producers, mavens and community leaders and to reap rewards for all of these activities. The richness and complexity of an online experience, like the richness and complexity of a city, is created by the people who live there as they engage with the place and each other.

The second lesson is that online businesses don't just exist, like buildings, in space. They exist, like cities, in human context over time. The best ones are designed to grow more interconnected, not just bigger, as the population evolves. They're always messy. They're never finished. They harbor an almost palpable sense of around-the-clock activity and a sense of place that owes as much to collective experience as to snazzy signage. When you open your window, there's a there there.

J.C. Herz is the founder of Joystick Nation, a consulting firm in New York.

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Learning From The Sims