A very strange interview. Well, strange questions. There must be a haze over the cubicles at PC Gamer… or something.
PC Gamer: The Sims: Child Labour?
Ben: The Sims: Sweatshop
PC Gamer: The Sims: Workhouse. Anyway… I understand Rod Humble’s moved on and you now have several studios. How is the Sims franchise managed?
Ben: My job is to look after the Sims 3 line of games. That includes the PC and console games. We report back to Redwood Shores. We moved some folks here from the team there.
PC Gamer: What are your plans with the different studios going forward? Or is that not something you’re talking about?
Ben: We’re only talking about Showtime right now. The team is split up between the two locations, which creates all kinds of challenges and lots of cool opportunities too.
PC Gamer: How do you pick the expansions?
Ben: It’s a pretty organic process. One of the fun things about working on The Sims is that you can reflect on your own life and the ideas you find are totally relevant to the game. Very few people have fortunately been at war, so there aren’t that many human beings who can relate to that experience. Everyone can relate to the idea of wanting to be a star or basically to being a human being with basic human needs, so the first step is we look inward, at ourselves. What kind of things we want to explore.We look for the absolute ideas, the things that encompass human truths within them, like the desire to be recognised is and have your worth reaffirmed, that’s at the core of showtime. Everyone wants to be noticed and be told that the person they are is valuable. That’s why celebrities do what they do. There’s a little bit of our intuition. The fans of the game have the same intuition and they’re pretty involved in the game. It’s pretty easy for us to look at the kinds of things that fans are creating on the web and they’re saying on the forums and the things they say to us directly, and get what they’d be interested in. We also look at pop culture, those human truths; what are the themes that are interesting on a perenial basis, that people really want to explore more of. All of those things inform our priorities for themes. I would say, we’re just scratching the surface of the range of possibilities, I love it.
PC Gamer: Well, it’s not restricted in anyway is it?
Ben: Everything’s on the table. As long as we can make it funny and personal, it’s ours.
MEGA Sauce: SimsVIP
‘Very few people have been at war?’ Really? Just tell that to the guys and gals coming back for the past 9 years from Iraq and Afghanistan. Goes to show how out of touch these guys at the Sims franchise are. Geez louise.
Come on. Just speaking in the American context, less than 1% of the population is enlisted in the active military. If you count the reserves, that number rises to a little over 1%, somewhere in between 1-2%. If you add in veterans the number is still less than 10%, and if you’re talking about combat veterans exclusively that number is even lower: maybe 25% of U.S. military veterans have seen actual combat.
So even if we’re generous and say that 5% of Americans have seen combat, that still more than qualifies as ‘very few people.’
I know EA isn’t the best most player-friendly gaming company around and that many of us have very legitimate complaints against them, but this kind of thing isn’t helpful, deedee. At least look up the numbers before you go off. If anything, it was *your* post that came off as “out of touch,” considering how far off-base your criticism was.
“If you count the reserves, that number rises to a little over 1%, somewhere in between 1-2%.”
Actually, after doing a little more research (I’m having a hard time finding definitive, up to date figures), it looks as though even if you include reserves and active duty personnel, the number is still under 1%.
What do EA staff no about the real world!! They sit in their Ivory Towers all day playing Nerf Dart Tag, and enjoying the finer things in life.
They no nothing of what it’s like in the real world! They earn twice as much as the average person, that’s why they all think we can afford all their store crap.
This interview came over incredibly condescending to us fans!! The now nothing about the real world!! They think nobody goes to war, they think every body wants fame (I don’t) and they think Reality TV Shows are the best thing out there!!!! I mean come on, everybody is getting sick of Reality TV!!
The Sims used to be about SIMulating the real world, but they have lost the plot, completely!
The Sims is a dying franchise…
I seriously wonder who they consider as the voice of their fan base….Most people are losing their jobs, their homes, everything they held dear. They don’t know where their next meal is coming from half the time. And I ain’t talking poor, I’m talking middle class who suddenly aren’t middle class anymore. I dunno how many blue collar working stiffs I’ve seen in the welfare offices right along with the poor. And don’t get me started on our military personal…EA does have their heads up their collective asses or too busy catering to wealthy snot nosed tweens & teens to care about the rest of the age demographic of players. I know I don’t want wealth or fame, and I dunno how many times I’ve heard players, not just here, wish for more low brow/realistic social classing of furniture/objects. Not everyone is money hungry/ or plays to be rich. I still want items enough to build a eco-friendly hippie commune, where spirituality and conservation matter more…doe they do that? no
Dear God, I just had a horrible thought…You know how Late Night felt like it was missing content? Then we see the rest of it in Showtime?….What if they do that with Generations and an upcoming Ep??? Would they, considering the shitstorm showtime caused, and the dismal reviews/jokes of Generations????
I think that he used war as just a poor choice of an example of what many people dont relate to. Nothing else. I dont think he meant anything by it.
Can’t say I disagree. I’m not a fan either of the whole fame/American Idol crap with which the Sims 3 team seems to be obsessed. I’m not much of a builder, but I am a down-to-earth, generations type of player. I wish EA would give us more “normal” objects and interactions for our sims to use, rather than focusing so much effort on the bizarre and celebrity-obsessed. The Lazy Game Reviewer’s idea of a “Lower Middle-Class” stuff pack wouldn’t be a bad start.
Yes, true. Not many people have served. I come from military family. Grandfather, uncles, cousins all served in various branches. So it isnt unfamiliar to me, not that I’ve had direct personal expierence. But it is equally presumptuous to say all people can relate to desiring fame and fortune, or being american idol wannabes either. the Sims popularity is due mostly to escapism and lesser to almost a sort of quirky social experimentation simulator, and the current team is getting away from that as they streamline and gear the game to be more of a story telling tool due to the popularity or story making with the sims product. They forget not everyone makes stories, some people use it like an architectual design program, experimenting with home elements and house building in general.
Agreed Fanboy. lower middle class realism would be refreshing and way more relatable
@jesse james
I do pretty much the same as you. Farming, painting, collecting…jogging in Egypt.
My favorite TS3 household (before my game decided to corrupt the save file) featured twin elderly brothers who pitched their tent wherever they liked, showered at the gym, picked apples for breakfast, and ate fish for every dinner. They hunted gemstones for spare income. Their money (since they owned the tiniest/emptiest lot available) went mostly to books. One brother was the master of all things concerning logic, while the other was such an efficient chef that he could prepare ambrosia for the pair to feast upon. Ah, good times.
In the Sims 2, I would normally have an Alien-Seeking household. Watching sims use the telescope repeatedly may seem dull to some, but for one particular household, it was absolute heaven.
It started out as a family of three. A husband (with his randomly generated Goopy-look-alike mother), and his wife. His heart’s desire was to meet aliens—again, and again, and again. (I should add that this was before TS2 had any expansions.) His mother was a bitter and Goopy-looking thing, so I drowned her. (My first TS2 kill! She was a fighter, though. Took three days for her to kick the bucket.)
Ahem, what was I saying? Oh, yes. His wife was very supportive of his aspiration, being a Knowledge sim herself. So every night, his wife would follow him to the rooftop and read while he gazed longingly at the stars. And every night, his mother would decide to haunt the lot. She scared him to death about thirty times during his lifetime, and each time (even if she was being accosted by ferocious morning sickness), his wife would save him from the Grim Reaper.
They ended up becoming respected members of the science and medical communities, but the husband never met aliens, I regret to say. The ironic thing was, one of his two daughters married Johnny Smith and had a half-alien child with him (green skin, but with her father’s eyes). It was rather touching.
Oh, TS3, I have all your EPs, but you fail in so many ways. Sometimes less is more.
example: the dive bar & sports bar are way more realistic/relatable then high end lounges and night clubs. Most players don’t live anywhere near a night club, look at all the exciment a farming ep caused? Players seem to want simple down to earth objects/items/gameplay. You know what I do with my game most the time? Build houses/community lots, garden, collect, try to build a generations family till my game glitches after a vacation, wiping out my family tree & household family ties & relationships. oh and painting, but I get alot of the same paintings over & over. Gardening & nectar making are the most time consuming but rewarding skills in the game from my p.o.v., collecting frustrates me because you can’t do anything cool with your collections after catching/mounting/cutting/smelting them. I’d hoped AMB would have added a sort of item crafting skill that let you use collectables to make things, but no…so yeah. what do other players do with their game?
Awesome story, youngoldprude! I agree about less is more, for instance, I used to create basements constantly in TS2, loved the challenge of it and pushing my mind and creativity. Now, in TS3, we have a basement tool….I hate basements in this game for some reason… The easier things are made, the less fun there is to it.
Try building a basement under a already built house with a foundation. That’ll get the old mind going. 😉
In case it isn’t obvious, I still have not yet figure out how to do this. But then, as I said, I’m not much of a builder.
@ LotRFanboy: lol, you dig the tunnel to where there is no foundation and make an entrance there, or clear a spot in a roon, delete the foundation, drop in stairs, 2 sets, one reaching the basement, the other connecting the foundation &other set of stairs, there you put the rest of the missing foundation back, replace the removed flooring & furniture. and voila. truely a magnificent pain in the a$$, lol. and even better challenge is stairs from basement, thru foundation, multiple floors with freizes and trying to incorperate secrect passages through out said house…I still cant get that right, anybody got a suggestion?