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I gotta see a man about a horse

Actually, Maxis has built into these activities enforced breaks. Because The Sims Online carries over the same needs from the offline version, you'll occasionally have to unmoor your sim and send him to the bathroom so he doesn't pee all over the floor. Whenever your sim's needs get high enough, you'll have to manually walk him through the steps to his satisfaction: sleep, shower, eat, pee, pinball, or some such similar pattern. The interface isn't very helpful here. For instance, you can't tell your sim to clean up the dishes until after he’s finished eating. There's no way to tell him to sleep until he's fully restored his energy. Instead, you have to manage these mundane necessities before you get back to the important business of playing your guitar or carving a garden gnome out of wood.

The interface is at its worst when it comes to chatting. Chat comments appear as thought bubbles above your sim. When people off screen chat, their thought bubbles appear at the edge of the screen. There's no scrolling back, so if you miss a comment, it's gone forever. You'll probably miss plenty of comments in a crowded room, where the chat is a mad splash of colored text with no indication of who's talking to whom, much of it obscured behind the interface or any private message windows you might try to open.

What you say?

Maxis’ effort to reinvent the chat interface undermines one of The Sims Online's greatest strengths. The criticisms that this is just a graphical front end for chatting aren't necessarily wrong. And they don't necessarily have to be criticisms. The Sims Online can be an interesting way to interact with people in the context of an online society. This is an important part of how the Internet is developing and to write off The Sims Online as a mere chat interface misses the point. A better criticism is that it's not a very good chat interface.

Aside from the places devoted to "greening up" (i.e. improving skills) or earning money, there are places where The Sims Online is being put to some interesting social uses. Players have built some locations around meta-games, like dance contests or gatherings for some of the game's precious few interactive activities. There's a maze game for two players. There's a set of colored balls that behaves according to a very rudimentary physics systems, allowing for 'see who can kick a ball into this room first' challenges. The latest patch just added support for players forming bands, which requires group interaction to play music and earn money. You might stumble across some sort of godawful poetry reading or maybe even someone's online wedding. This sort of content can alternate between embarrassing and interesting, but they're ultimately insights the greater potential of The Sims Online.