Maxis, developers of SimCity, SimAnt, SimEarth, SimLife, Marty and the Trouble with Cheese, etc. were bought by EA in the course of The Sims’s protracted development. People who worked on the game have talked about expecting it to be cancelled. In the end, its interactive simulation of domestic life, an expansion of a planned virtual dollhouse, did a lot more than just make it to release.
Still, it makes a difference that it wasn’t initially expected to be such a success that expansion packs for it would end up topping the charts. There is very much a sense that the lack of expectation played into Maxis’s ability to make a game with its own freedom far more wide-ranging than even that of SimCity. It certainly seems to have played into one gay dev being able to unknowingly overturn a previous decision not to include same-sex relationships. (The first time I ever saw a same-sex kiss in a video game, it was on The Sims, playing with downloaded pre-built custom characters, and was between Aeris and Yuffie from Final Fantasy VII).
That lack of expectation no longer applied when it came to making a PS2 version of the game a couple of years later. This was an established phenomenon coming to a console whose own success in the UK was unprecedented, and its six weeks at the top of the charts can’t have been a massive surprise given the size of potential audience. There was a different pressure to get things right. Some of that meant putting the effort into making a more advanced 3D view, which works rather well and with a bit of smart imprecision built in means that it doesn’t miss the PC version’s mouse controls too badly. The simplicity of the cancellable queue of actions works particularly well, too. The other thing that the changes meant, though, was somewhat of an existential crisis regarding the nature of games.
A review by David Wildgoose in Australia’s PSW magazine illustrates the likely reasoning. He spends a long time listing all of the features of the game. And then he asks of the standard version of The Sims: “so why would you want to do any of this? Well, to be honest […] there is no reason to do it. No levels, no missions, no end-of-level bosses, nor indeed any of the elements we typically associate with videogame structure.” Despite the game’s vast success having already demonstrated there was no problem there, the PS2 version doesn’t trust in that. And so, at just the same time as games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City were being celebrated for their sandbox elements, for rewarding doing whatever you liked and seeing what happened, the truer sandbox of The Sims headed in the opposite direction for its big console debut.
You can select Play The Sims from the menu and do pretty much all of the same things as on the PC version (although no downloading JRPG characters), but the game pushes you first into choosing the Get a Life mode, which remedies all of the apparently lacking motivation for its players. No longer do you have to decide for yourself whether to focus on developing your Sims’ relationships, designing their beautiful house, optimising their careers, or killing them in inventive ways. No longer must this piece of interactive entertainment linger in the limbo of non-games and undirected fun. Instead, it presents life as a series of missions to be overcome.
It starts with a daydream, where your character gets a mansion, a hot-tub and a compulsory hetero relationship (“Wow! RANDY! What are YOU doing here?”), which rather sets the tone for the marriage and babies ahead as goals. First, after being awoken from the dream, you get a Steptoe and Son scenario, trapped in uncomfortable confines with your character’s mum, trying to get enough money and a job to escape.
The Sims and its presentation of life as a series of competing needs to be fulfilled can already feel like pushing a rock uphill against the cruel passage of time, but the scenario adds a suffocating extra layer to that. Mum refuses to do any cleaning, snaps at your Sim, blasts loud music when they try to sleep, and generally behaves in no way resembling a healthy relationship. It’s a rather odd direction to take a game whose best power was often in its ability for meaningful relationships to develop organically, in the game itself and assisted by the imagination of the player. When you escape that hellhole, it’s to a wreck of a house that needs you to spend much of your precious time cleaning. It’s a bit of a slight return of the disaster scenarios in SimCity, but crueler in seeing the effects on an individual, personal level. Anyway, those disaster scenarios were an unnecessary publisher imposition too.
Back when I first played The Sims, I never got into it enough to spend ages with it. Yet the Get a Life version of the game still feels like a betrayal, taking something which saw life and play as more than a set checklist, and imposing ill-chosen constraints. It now says this is what a life is. This is what a game is, even for something that showed it didn’t have to be. The feeling is rather similar to that of TOCA Race Driver and its introduction of a particular type of story to a series which had none. The goal-based homogenisation hits in retrospect like a particularly dire warning, for games and beyond.
The Sims spent six successive weeks at the top of the charts. Details of what else was topping the charts during that time are on the next page.
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