Game Overview

What's this about anyway?

Everyone knows the premise of SimCity - you're the mayor of a growing town, and the decisions you make affect how the town grows and how many people your city can support. Instead of modeling something as abstract as urban growth, the Sims attempts to model something even more complex: human relationships and the family structure. Instead of manipulating buildings, streets, and emergency services, you are directly controlling people and how they interact with one another. Each person has specific personality traits, some of which you know about (and set yourself in the case of the "protagonist") and others which you have to learn about yourself by watching your little person's behavior. These personality traits play a big role in how you interact with others.

A zoomed out view

Cops come to bust up the party

Every Sim lives in their own house, cultivates a career which they use to earn money, and has a social life that includes friends and perhaps family. You use the money you earn to pay your bills, make improvements to your house (this includes adding rooms and buying new stuff like furniture, appliances, toys, and more), maybe even hire some help like a maid or gardener to clean up after you. In your "free time" when you're not resting, you can evolve the relationships that your characters have with one another. Invite a friend over to play pool, throw a party for the neighborhood to celebrate your new barbecue, all of these things are possibilities in The Sims, and all of these kinds of activities end up having deep ramifications for your character and how he or she gets along with other people.

The Meta-Game

One of the repeating themes throughout the demonstration was the overlying structure of The Sims, or "the metagame" as Will termed it. When you load up The Sims, you don't get your usual load/save menu. You are presented with a sizeable plot of land where you can build your houses. This piece of land has a loop of street in it, and the whole scene is meant to convey that you're looking at one small neighborhood, which is your little world. There's space for up to 10 houses, and each house represents one person or family in your little neighborhood.

The Neighborhood

Hire a gardener to take care of things

So what's the deal with that? Will stressed that it was important that people didn't just create and delete games randomly - even when you "load up" a game, or family, the actions you take have consequences on all the rest of the families. How? Even though you only play one game at a time (control one family at a time), the people in each house do interact with the other people in the other houses in the neighborhood every time you load up the game. Friendships and romantic relationships get started between the people in all the houses as you play. So if you decide to "delete" a house or set of characters, all of a sudden you've created a relationship vacuum where the people in the other houses have lost their girlfriends, their boyfriends, or their best friends. You can think of the neighborhood as all the same game, it's just that you have full control only over the residents of the house that you "load up." This interconnection between families forces you to think carefully about all the characters you create.