Q: These days, in the post-Wii era, we’ve started to take cross-gender, multiple-demographic gaming for granted, but the way that The Sims pulled in a roughly equal split of males versus females was a huge deal back then.

Rod Humble: You’ve very much put your finger on it, which is that the reason The Sims is so successful in selling copies is that it is half male, half female. It actually starts off a little bit majority male at the launch of Sims 1, Sims 2 and presumably Sims 3, and then over time it gets a little bit majority female as we release the expansion packs.

But the fact that it represents the population is a real sweet spot. It’s a game for all – I know it’s a cliché, but it happens to be true of The Sims because I’ve seen the demographic data – it really is a very broad age range, and balanced between both sexes.

It’s a really hard trick to pull off, but with The Sims I think it’s like a warped mirror on life – any human can look into it… first of all they can put themselves into it, which is a huge draw, because we’re all interested about ourselves. And secondly people are inherently interesting – we like watching human beings, and the one thing we deliberately do is keep the camera angle, and keep the language barrier, and we make those interactions feel a little bit like they’re pet animals, and a little bit like it’s a real life simulator.

Internally, within The Sims group, we referred to the Sims as ‘hamsters with jobs’ for a while, just to really reinforce it to ourselves that we have to keep up this flipping back and forth – you’re looking at the Sims, but you’re role-playing with the Sims. They’re people, but they’re not quite people.

And if you listen to Sims players talk, they’ll change perspective mid-sentence, and it will go something like this: “I got my Sim a job at the library, but he messed up and he got fired.”

It will literally change from first person to third person mid-sentence, and I love that. I think we need to keep that balance that you’re flipping in and out. It’s a really hard trick to pull off, but we do a lot of work internally to make sure that balance is maintained.

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