The Sims 2 Designer Diary #7

At this point, you probably already know that The Sims is reportedly the most successful PC game ever made. The highly popular people simulator and its multiple expansion packs, which let you control every aspect of your virtual sims' lives, have sold millions of copies and have dominated the sales charts for years. Part of the reason for this is because the games have managed to achieve critical crossover appeal with traditional nongamers, including women and young girls. Now, Maxis is readying the highly anticipated sequel to The Sims, called The Sims 2. The sequel will introduce a beautiful new 3D graphics engine that will let you experience the game's action up close and personal. And, as Maxis Vice President Lucy Bradshaw tells us in this edition of our designer diaries, the new 3D engine will also allow you to indulge your inner movie director.

This is an example movie made using The Sims 2. Double-click on the video window for a full-screen view.

Making Movies

The Sims 2 team is excited about a cool new feature we have added to The Sims 2, called "Sims Movie Making." Basically, while you play The Sims 2, you can direct your own sims' sitcoms, and it's quite easy. But let's start with what inspired this new feature.

Talk to anyone who has played The Sims, and they'll invariably start telling you the story of their sims. The interesting part is how many different stories they tell--all incredibly unique and sometimes really out there. It's clear that The Sims has unleashed the inner storyteller in all of its players.

So how did this happen? Well, it was quite intentional.

When we were making The Sims, we often found ourselves building specific setups and ad-libbing the sims' dialogue during play sessions or demos. Some of these sessions were funny and often became even funnier as 2:00am rolled by during those crunch weeks--when we were working nonstop to finalize the game. I'm sure you can picture us all gathered around a computer at those hours, riffing on what we had going on in the scene. Believe me, much of the ad-libbing was not fit for prime time.

We knew that what the player brought to The Sims experience was an important element of its appeal and eventual success, which, in fact, we wanted to happen. Playing The Sims is a uniquely creative and individual experience, but even more interesting is how easy and fun it is to share this experience.

In the original The Sims, we intentionally put in the album feature, thinking players would want to capture the stories of their sims lives just as we did. We made this a component of the original Sims Exchange, but even we were surprised at how much this feature took off. Quickly we found that we needed to upgrade the album exchange on the Web site to improve access to more than 85,000 imaginative stories that our players were sharing.

Part of what made the album feature take off was the enormous amount of custom content that players were creating. Players were developing their own sims skins that were unique, taking events from the game and editing the sequences into storylines. Even more interesting was how much players were using the game to generate content that they then enhanced or modified to tell their stories. Just check out The Sims Exchange on The Sims Web site, and you can browse players' albums. One of my longtime favorites has been the "Chronicles of Llama Man." Another is one of the earliest, "Grizzly Adams and the Indian." It started to blend elements from the game with ingenuity from the players.

Eventually, experimental filmmakers started to use games or game technology to create films; then they distributed them via the Internet. This was dubbed "Machinima." While this is still an emerging art form that is picking up steam, it truly lowers the bar of entry into the filmmaking space. Check out the Machinima.com site to download some of these films. Another fun site to check is Red vs. Blue, a team that produces weekly serials in the Machinima style. And then we've also seen things like digital shorts offered as downloads on Web sites, like Atomfilms or Ifilm, as well as the introduction of digital camcorders and editing software.