Maxis is taking a unique approach to online gaming with The Sims Online, cutting out the combat, leveling, and neutral AI characters that are such entrenched conventions in massively multiplayer role-playing games, which are the most successful type of fee-based online games. The game has that Maxis feel: It's incredibly open-ended, with no score or fixed goals, and it depends heavily on players' own creativity. The Sims Online is as simple a concept as its title suggests, but the gameplay ramifications of making every part of a game depend on interacting with other player characters can be subtle.

The Sims Online puts players in total control of their sim character. Unlike in the single-player game, you can't make other sims be your friend or even do a dance, unless the player on the other end actually participates. When other players' sims do something that requires your attention, there's the option to accept or not, and you click on happy or unhappy faces to signify your reaction to scripted actions, which run the gamut from hugs to "sissy fighting." Some might say the game is poised to be even more of a glorified chat room than online games usually are, but Maxis is very much encouraging player conversations. The sims still speak their characteristic gibberish, but players trade real words in dialogue boxes, and there's an instant messaging system for talking to players who are in other parts of a server or offline. There are lots of animated emotes to let players express themselves visually, and when a sim wants to get down on the dance floor, there are 24 different dance moves to choose from in the menu.

The Sims Online will be a big place. Each "city," or server, will have 10,000 to 50,000 plots of land. Players can buy and sell plots, and they can also share a plot with roommates to save money starting out or, for advanced players, to share efforts and resources between guild members. Players have many options in deciding how to develop a plot, as they can make a standard house, a public meeting place, a business, or some combination thereof. Since there are so many plots, the main map clearly shows you where yours is, and it also provides bookmarks to the most popular places on the server and the places you've been before. Instead of the artificial relationship meters in The Sims, the game has buttons to make other sims your friends or enemies. This mostly seems to serve as a sort of buddy list.

As you might expect, a virtual economy is a central part of the game. Sims don't have jobs they disappear to for a part of the day, so there are other ways of making money. One of the key ways is to have a successful, well-visited plot. For each hour another sim visits your place, you get a certain bonus. Sims can use job items much like in the single-player game, and the skill-based activities associated with the items--like painting, cooking, writing, or solving math problems--earn sims money. While many can be done solo, some jobs items require serious cooperation, such as with a pizza kitchen, which needs four sims to use different skills and interact to make pizzas of varying quality and value. Such activities become sort of a minigame, focusing players on working together. Pizza making, for example, requires combining the right amounts of dough, cheese, and sauce, plus toppings, to made a good pizza, a process one of the game's producers likened to the go fish card game. Finally, those who own a plot where other sims are working get 10 percent as a return on investing in these money-making items. In testing, Maxis has already seen some very creative business models, such as hotels that serve basic needs for sims whose plots don't have facilities, job centers, or even a place called "Free Money Here" that attracted visitors (and racking up a nice visitor bonus) by giving away valuable objects produced by the owner.

Money is just a means to an end, and here that means buying, building, and decorating virtual real estate. Since everything in the game is driven by real players, there's no reason to expect people you don't know to show up on your doorstep if you're sleeping in a hut. Nice-looking places, places that somehow already have attracted people to hang out, and places with useful facilities are going to get the most attention. The mechanics of building a place mimic those of The Sims, and they incorporate every item from The Sims game and its expansion packs, plus a number of new ones. A couple of the new items are fairly customizable: A costume wardrobe lets sims change their look while visiting in a place, and a theater-style backdrop provides a number of dramatic decors to choose from--particularly useful if you happen to develop a plot into, say, a talk show set. While visitors can show up on any doorstep, the owner of a plot can set permissions on any door, with the option to allow in only yourself, those on your friends list, or those who know a code.

Like all online projects, The Sims Online is a major undertaking, and the team at Maxis is made up of about 60 dedicated developers. The game is at the pre-alpha stage, where changes and additions are still coming fast and furious, but the full-scale testing process will soon be underway, first with an internal test, and then with an external beta test that will include tens of thousands of players. Bolstered by The Sims' place at the top of the all-time PC best-seller list, EA has big hopes for the game: the expectation for 1 million players to join The Sims Online within a year. We'll see how it turns out when the game launches this November.