Keith Stuart 

Sims 4: gaming’s fascinating answer to reality TV

The latest title promises to transform the series by investing the characters with complex emotions. Where will that lead? By Keith Stuart
  
  

Sims 4
In the Sims 4, characters have a range of traits and ambitions that shape the way they interact with others. The results, according to the development team, are unpredictable Photograph: Electronic Arts

Phil is telling what he thinks is an amusing story, but Dianne and Jack aren’t really listening; slumped on the sofa together, they’re too busy trading flirty remarks, while ostensibly watching the evening news. Increasingly agitated, Phil finally storms off and spends the next 10 minutes battering his punchbag. He won’t be be speaking to Jack and Dianne again for a while.

Simmering with unspoken angst, it seems this scene is going to be a typical one for players of The Sims 4, the latest in EA’s multimillion selling series of open-ended life simulations. These fascinating games have always been about creating a little group of characters (known as “sims”), building a house for them, and then subtly controlling their lives. But now those lives are a heck of a lot more interesting. The sims don’t just have basic happy or sad states anymore, they have a range of emotions. And with emotion comes drama.

“The Sims is a social experiment,” says Rachel Franklin, executive vice-president of Maxis, the development studio behind the series. “People are fascinated with human life, we all want to watch each other. You see it with reality TV - what is that person doing? Why are we fascinated with fisherman working off the coast of Alaska? It’s because it’s a life we’re not familiar with - we want to know and understand it.”

Building a person

Through the intuitive and amusing “create a sim” menu, players are able to mould, not just the exact physical appearance of each new character but also a selection of traits and aspirations. Sims may love food, family or mischief; they may be hotheaded bookworms, gloomy loners or goofball romantics; they could be driven by dreamy creativity or pure financial greed.

When you’re ready, you build a house for them, using the hugely improved architectural tools (or selecting one of the ready-made buildings), and watch what happens, interacting as often as you like, to guide your sim into certain actions or relationships. They can chat to other sims, cook, work out, create art, but whatever they do is informed by their underlying traits and emotions. If they’re feeling depressed, they may paint an amazing picture, which then affects all the other sims who see it. If they’re happy, they’ll spread cheer; if they’re angry, directing them to the gym means they’ll exercise more efficiently, boosting their health score. Every state of mind has a value – the player just needs to know to exploit them.

“It’s all about opportunities,” says Franklin. “You’re creating this personality and providing it with long-term goals that will give it impetus throughout its life. Then you’ve got them interacting with their environment, with their need states – what if they’re hungry how does that affect things? Then you have them interacting with other sims, and there’s this exponential explosion of personality possibilities – that’s really exciting.”

Another vital element of the game is that sims can multitask now. In past versions, the player had to cue up activities; characters couldn’t do two things at once, so actions were rigid and unswerveable. Now, they can cook while watching TV, or flirt while dancing.

This has, says Franklin, led to a wider variety of behaviours. “With the multitasking element, we were surprised out how much more the sims were socialising. In previous games, there was a lot more balance and order – now you can have a sim playing a game on a tablet while sitting on the couch, in a conversation with another sim. And because talking with other sims is compatible with many other actions, they’re much more social creatures. A new style of play has emerged from that.

“And also, the neighbourhood sims, the non-controllable sims that inhabit the world with you, are fully functioning AI characters too. Sometimes, you’ll see someone stomping angrily by, perhaps with a little kid jumping happily behind them, and you’ll wonder, what’s the story there? There’s this immediate connection with the sims that I don’t think we ever had before.”

Playing with lives

What Franklin hopes to create is a place where players can experiment with life choices, in the same way they may mess about with architecture in Minecraft, or urban planning in SimCity. Maybe we’ll get characters into weird relationships, into bizarre career paths, into houses filled with sexual tension, just to see what goes off. “Some people recreate their families and try to play out familiar life experiences,” says Franklin. “Other people may think, ‘I have never been in a same-sex relationship - what would that be like? What happens when a woman sim flirts with another woman sim? Let me play that out’. It’s experimenting with life.”

So is there a responsibility here? In the past, sims were sort of like virtual pets; dumb things to feed, take to the toilet and, yes, sometimes abuse. People would place them in rooms with no doors, or drown them in swimming pools. But will that dynamic change, now that they have walking and facial animations that reflect the way they feel? In Sims 4, there is emotional feedback. There is, in some senses, reciprocity.

“Oh we intended all that,” says Franklin. “The litter quiver animation on the lip of a depressed sim - that is added to get you to feel empathy. You want to care for them. But frankly, building The Sims is hard, it takes a lot of conviction – that what we’re doing is the right thing to do. We’re on a tightrope - you don’t want to be too realistic but you want to be relatable and believable. You want to explore the darker things in life – death is a part of life, sadness is a part of life - but we don’t ever want to be morose.”

Later on, Phil comes back downstairs. His housemates Jack and Dianne have had a disagreement over dinner, but somehow, they cheer each other up. Sims speak their own language – simlish – so you don’t know what they’re “saying” but images pop up of the conversational themes. Music is being discussed. The stereo goes on and they start to dance.

It’s fascinating watching and directing these little interactions; hovering the mouse over a house guest to get your sim to talk to them; clicking on the options – selecting to ask about the other character’s day or tell them a rude joke. But you can also build characters with darker traits and let them loose.

According to Franklin, the toughest elements of the Sims development process are at the edges of these new behaviour possibilities.

“I’ll give you an example,” she says. “We have an interaction named ‘yell at’, and it is accompanied by an animation where the sim who’s yelling points their finger at the other sim. In the first iteration, the sim on the receiving end shrank back a little bit, they cowered. It wasn’t much, it was a tiny movement, but it was too far. All of a sudden it became uncomfortable, because it took it from a fun gesture to ‘I am an abuser’. That’s not acceptable.

“The team is so tuned into those moments, we have a kind of spider sense for it. We just know when something doesn’t feel right. So we talk about it. We talk about the responsibility of exploring the darker side of life. They are wonderful conversations.”

 

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