THE SIMS FREEPLAY CSP: AUDIENCE AND INDUSTRY

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Audience


1) What game information is provided on this page? Pick out three elements you think are important in 
terms of making the game appeal to an audience.

- "Play in real time and control your virtual world!"
- "Choose every aspect of your Sims lives"
- "start creating your dream life today! "

2) How does the game information on this page reflect the strong element of participatory culture in The Sims?

- Customisation is emphasised in the app store description

3) Read a few of the user reviews. What do they suggest about the audience pleasures of the game? 

- Majority of the reviews have high ratings showing that there is audience satisfaction and that they are happy with the game.



Participatory culture

1) What did The Sims designer Will Wright describe the game as?

- Will Wright describes it as akin to ‘a train set or a doll’s house where each person comes to it with their own interest and picks their own goals.

2) Why was development company Maxis initially not interested in The Sims?

- The board of directors thought that ‘doll houses were for girls, and girls didn’t play video games.

3) What is ‘modding’? How does ‘modding’ link to Henry Jenkins’ idea of ‘textual poaching’?

- A culture wherein players were able to modify game assets by manipulating the game code with the sanction of the rights owners, and to share their new creations via personal websites and online.

4) Look specifically at p136. Note down key quotes from Jenkins, Pearce and Wright on this page.

-‘The original Sims series has the most vibrant emergent fan culture of single-player game in history’.
- ‘We were probably responsible for the first million or so units sold but it was the community which really brought it to the next level’.

5) What examples of intertextuality are discussed in relation to The Sims? (Look for “replicating works from popular culture”)

- From the early days of the game’s release, skins depicting characters from cult media such as Star Trek, Star Wars, The X-Files and Japanese anime and manga were extremely popular.

6) What is ‘transmedia storytelling’ and how does The Sims allow players to create it?

- Storytelling, a process where in the primary text encoded in an official commercial product could be dispersed over multiple media. The Sims space provided a playground for cult media fans, a stage for enacting fannish stories which could later be shared (via the game’s in-built camera and photo album) with other game players who had similar interests.

7) How have Sims online communities developed over the last 20 years?

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8) What does the writer suggest The Sims will be remembered for?

- For the cult following that it engendered well beyond the usual lifespan of a popular computer game; and also for the culture of digital production it helped to pioneer, one that remains such a staple of fan and game modding communities today.

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