You know you have hit a real low when you’re goal at E3 is to try and play/find all of the ‘sexy’ games on the show floor. This person was bummed when he found out The Sims Social wasn’t available to play.
In my first free moment of the show I rushed to EA’s booth to see if I could get one of my own Facebook friends into the shower, but heartbreakingly there was no demo on the show floor. I could shoot stuff in Battlefield 3 and Mass Effect 3, drive a car really fast in Need for Speed: The Run, or grapple with muscular men on Madden NFL 11’s stadium grass, but flirting with friends was a no-go. An EA rep instead directed me to the game’s Facebook page, which I visited as soon as I got back to my laptop. I was sad to discover it’s a placeholder with no options other than a “like” opt-in that will put me on the game’s mailing list.
It’s not a coincidence that EA chose sex to promote The Sims Social and its experimentation with the details of an ordinary life lived in suburbia. The Sims games rarely get full credit for their creative ambition, but they acknowledged the silly pleasures of making WooHoo almost from the beginning. Adding a layer of social media integration to populate date nights and bathroom rendezvous ‘s with real world people seems as important an evolution to the life sim genre as motion sensing has been to exercise and dance games.