The Power of Persistence

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Separated at birth? Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and The Sims Online executive producer Gordon Walton.
If anyone knows about the true power of online games, Gordon Walton is that man. The straight-talking Midwesterner, who used to run the swords-and-sorcery game Ultima Online, looks a bit like a humanized form of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew from the Muppets. Last spring, Walton left Ultima-creator Origin in Austin, Texas, and moved to Maxis in Northern California. He made the move because he was excited about working on a game that could appeal to millions of players. He'd seen the way Ultima affected a hard-core audience. Could the same thing happen on a larger scale with The Sims Online?

 
 Is Gordon Walton right? Can you name the people that live on the eight compass points from your house?

Yes, I most certainly can!
Not all of them, but more than half
A few of them, but less than half
No, I don't really know anyone who lives next to me
I have no neighbors

 
"The emotions you can feel in these online games are real," he explains one Wednesday morning in his office, flanked by a rocket launcher, which was a gift from a former employee. "People can be made to care online and even to cry online," he insists. Taking things a step further, Walton believes a game like The Sims Online has the potential to help people develop relationships with others, both online and offline. "Whenever I speak in front of a group, I say to them, 'How many of you can name the people who live on the eight compass points from your house?'" he explains. "The answer is always less than 5 percent." Walton thinks he knows why: "With the coming of the industrial revolution, people all of the sudden needed psychological and physical distance from their neighbors. Today, all of our mass media positions us to believe our neighbors are psychopaths, cheating husbands, and just bad people. And heck, if I watched the nightly news I wouldn't want to be with other people."

But in The Sims Online, Walton claims you're able to "interact with others anonymously, have physical distance, and not be judged on your outward appearance. You interact with people on a pure intellectual and emotional level, devoid of all those filters." That, in a nutshell, is what makes these online games so powerful--the idea that even if you are under the guise of a virtual character that you create (an avatar), each player in the game represents a real human.

The fact that these online games connect individuals may be part of their appeal, but it also can be a risk. In games like EverQuest, the most popular massively multiplayer game, players spend an average of 22 hours a week playing it. That's time clearly taken away from other leisure activities, some of them likely socially oriented. So the question has fairly been asked as to whether the social relationships built in these games are appropriate to replace (or diminish) real-world relationships. Search the Internet and you can quickly come across sites for groups like the EverQuest-Widows club, a gathering of wives who have practically lost their husbands to the game.

 
"We are building something that could potentially be a very powerful experience for a lot of people."
-Will Wright
Being the socially responsible game designer that he is, Will Wright has thought long and hard about these issues during the past two years. It's part of what scares him about bringing out a game like The Sims Online. "We're building something that could potentially be a very powerful experience for a lot of people," he says. "So it's an opportunity as well as a danger. Realistically, I think this game is going to be a tremendous help for a lot of people and tremendously bad for a lot of people. I just wonder what the net is going to be."

Given the runaway success of the Sims franchise, Wright knew that the online version would only further amplify the concerns that had been raised over games like Ultima Online and EverQuest. (If The Sims Online can attract only 10 percent of players who have played The Sims, it will be double the size of EverQuest.) Therefore, it's likely The Sims Online will go down in history as the test of whether society perceives massively multiplayer games as a good thing or a bad thing.

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