The Sims FreePlay CSP - Audience and Industries blog tasks
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! Life can be altered for each of your Sims as they progress over time. Choose their paths through love, romance, relationships and marriage. Build up your town with Sim virtual families and watch as they grow and develop from babies to seniors. Create to complete goals, earn Simoleons and pick up rewards. Design fun and fulfilling life paths for your Sims, then watch them thrive!
Create Their Story:
- Customize every aspect of your Sims’ lives
- Choose what careers your Sims will have, and watch as they succeed
- Life simulations from babies to seniors lets you watch every stage of their virtual lives
- Love, romance, relationships and marriage; watch your Sims live through it all!
Real Life Connect:
- Virtual towns meet real-life friends!
- Choose to visit your friends’ Sim Towns and form new relationships
- Compare your design skills with theirs as you check out the homes they’ve personally designed!
3) Read a few of the user reviews. What do they suggest about the audience pleasures of the game?
By reading the audience reviews the audience seem to love the app as its easy to access (through tablets,phones etc) it seems to give the audience diversion. " one of my favourite games that i have on my ipad. I love how it resembles actual life and you can grow the babies" This allows the audience to escape there own life and create a fantasy life that they have dreamed off. Furthermore they may feel a sense of hyper reality
Participatory culture
1) What did The Sims designer Will Wright describe the game as?
That game was The Sims, a so-called sandbox game that allowed players to create and populate their own simulated world in a process that creator Will Wright describes 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’ (Wright 1999).
2) Why was development company Maxis initially not interested in The Sims?
There was, at that time, a culture that gaming was not for girls. When Wright pitched his latest game concept to development company Maxis, using the descriptor of ‘doll house’, he was met with little enthusiasm. The board of directors thought that ‘doll houses were for girls, and girls didn’t play video games’ (Seabrook 2006). Luckily for Wright – and for Maxis in general – publisher Electronic Arts (which had bought Maxis in 1997) saw potential in the idea – something that would appeal to both boys and girls, and men and women alike. They would be proved right – The Sims became the bestselling game of the first half of 2000 (Kline et al. 2003: 270), and the franchise continued its popularity with its various expansion packs, spin-offs and sequels.
3) What is ‘modding’?
a form of participatory culture to grow up around the game, a culture wherein players were able to modify game assets by manipulating the game code (a practice called ‘modding’) with the sanction of the rights owners, and to share their new creations via personal websites and online for a – or even on the official Sims page, where an exchange centre was set up.
4) How does ‘modding’ link to Henry Jenkins’ idea of ‘textual poaching’?
‘Participatory culture’, as first posited in Henry’s Jenkins’ seminal book on fan culture, Textual Poachers (1992 [2013]), describes an aspect of fandom we are all familiar with today – the contribution of consumers and audiences to a product or a franchise, through activities ranging from writing fanfiction to drawing fanart, from cosplaying to even penning simple gaming reviews.
5) Look specifically at p136. Note down key quotes from Jenkins, Pearce and Wright on this page.
As Pearce has noted, ‘The original Sims series has the most vibrant emergent fan culture of a single-player game in history’ (2009: 272).
Jenkins notes, ‘there were already more than fifty fan Web sites dedicated to The Sims. Today, there are thousands’ (2006b: 166).
Participatory culture is inherently social, feeding on the affordances of Web 2.0 and social media, allowing individuals to come together around shifting interests to create digital communities that are ‘held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge’ (Jenkins 2006a: 137).
Jenkins quotes Wright saying: ‘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’ (ibid). Whereas the game itself gave consumers a base neighbourhood, wardrobe and furniture sets to play with, the players themselves turned producers (or produsers, to cite Axel Bruns’ (2006)
6) What examples of 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. Players seemed to display a gleeful desire to recreate the worlds of their favourite fandoms within The Sims. If one wished to recreate the Star ship Enterprise from Star
Trek, all one had to do was search the internet looking for the relevant website.
7) What is ‘transmedia storytelling’ and how does The Sims allow players to create it?
In other words, what The Sims offered was a form of transmedia storytelling, a process wherein the primary text encoded in an official commercial product could be dispersed over multiple media, both digital and analogue in form (Jenkins 2007).
8) How have Sims online communities developed over the last 20 years?
The original Sims game is now hopelessly outdated. Its last expansion pack was released over ten years ago, in 2003. One might well question why anyone would still want to play it at all. But for some fans of the original game, it is still regarded as the purest form of the game, uninhibited by the more goal-orientated gameplay of the later games.
9) Why have conflicts sometimes developed within The Sims online communities?
Fans of The Sims are not homogeneous. Some fans have complained of fellow community members receiving more recognition and power because they can create things that others can’t opportunities for participation do not necessarily imply an attendant equality (Sihvonen 2011: 109). This informal hierarchy, based upon the accumulation of social and cultural capital, belies the concept of a flattened, bottom-up or heterarichal social structure that theories of participatory culture so valorise. At any rate, conflict between fans of The Sims and other gaming communities can occasionally be heated and result in the splintering of a community, or indeed, in certain members leaving a community altogether (Pearce, 2009).
10) What does the writer suggest The Sims will be remembered for?
But what it will be remembered for, I think, is 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.
Read this Henry Jenkins interview with James Paul Gee, writer of Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010).
1) How is ‘modding’ used in The Sims?
modding is the force that sustains a passionate affinity space that builds artistic, technical, social, and emotional skills. We wrote the book because these woman and girls rock, not because they are women and girls.
2) Why does James Paul Gee see The Sims as an important game?
Betty helped me see that The Sims is a real game and a very important one because it is a game that is meant to take people beyond gaming. She helped me see that how women play and design is not "mainstream" (see comments above) but cutting edge, the edge of the future. If it were leprechauns that were the cutting edge of the future I would have written about them.
3) What does the designer of The Sims, Will Wright, want players to do with the game?
Will Wright is doing in an extreme way what lots of game designers want to do: empower people to think like designers, to organize themselves around the game to become learn new skills that extend beyond the game, and to express their own creativity.
4) Do you agree with the view that The Sims is not a game – but something else entirely?
I think it belongs to a different genre because not many games are as engaging and addictive as this one, to the point where players develop a gaming habit. Because of its 'art imitates life imitates art' gaming style, this kind of participatory culture is uncommon.
5) How do you see the future of gaming? Do you agree with James Paul Gee that all games in the future will have the flexibility and interactivity of The Sims?
I disagree because there are certain game companies—such as those that continue to actively try to sell ideologies to audiences—that would rather not let the player decide how the game affects them. On the other hand, people who choose to emulate The Sims may permit participatory culture from the start in order to possibly target a similar audience that they are aware will accept consumption.
Industries
Regulation – PEGI
Research the following using the VSC website PEGI page - look at the videos and Q&A section.
1) How does the VSC and PEGI ratings system work and how does it link to UK law?
The PEGI age rating system is administered by the VSC. This relates to UK law because games classified as PEGI 12, 16, and 18 are legally enforceable in the country, which means that no one under the game's age restriction may purchase them.
2) Click on the PEGI Rating tab in the top menu. What are the age ratings and what content guidance do they include?
Age ratings help parents or carers decide whether a particular game is suitable for their children. The ratings do this by indicating the minimum age at which we think a child should be allowed to play a game. The age ratings for games are 3, 7, 12, 16 and 18
3) What is the PEGI process for rating a game?
Age ratings do not indicate whether a child will enjoy a particular game and they don't indicate how difficult a game is to play. Instead, they let you know whether a game contains certain elements, such as violence, sex, drugs or bad language, that might be harmful, upsetting, disturbing or just unsuitable for children below that age. It's worth noting that, even if a game is rated at the lowest classification of 3, it may still not appeal to young children and/or may be very challenging and complicated to play. It simply won't contain any content that is harmful to, or unsuitable for, young children. When buying a game for anybody under 18, always look at the age rating on our website or the PEGI app to make sure the game is suitable for them.
The ‘Freemium’ gaming model
Read this Lifewire feature on freemium gaming and answer the following questions:
1) How does the freemium model work?
A freemium app, otherwise known as free-to-play, is an app that you can download for free but that includes in-app purchases to produce revenue. You don't have to purchase anything, but the items for sale are often features or extras that make the app more functional or enjoyable.
2) Why do some gamers believe freemium is ruining games?
There are plenty of examples of the freemium model executed poorly. Some games enable players to "pay to win," meaning pay money to quickly become much more powerful than other players. Others use a "pay to play" model in which players encounter a time limit unless they pay to extend their time. Unfortunately, many games use these methods
3) What are the positives of the freemium model for gaming?
Free-to-play is a successful revenue model for app developers. Typically, the developers give away an app's core functionality for free and offer upgrades to add certain features. For example, the app may contain ads, and you can pay to disable them. Or, a game app might allow you to purchase additional game currency to advance more easily through the game.
Now read this Business Insider feature on freemium gaming and multiplayer games. Answer the following questions:
1) Note the key statistics in the first paragraph.
The “Freemium” model dominates mobile games. From Candy Crush Saga to Clash of Clans, “freemium” games and their in-app purchases account for about 70-80% of the $10 billion or more in iOS revenue each year.
2) Why does the freemium model incentivise game developers to create better and longer games?
In multiplayer games, the goal is to create a game that brings players back for hundreds of hours of gameplay, says Plott. If developers don't have a strong monetary incentive, it's difficult for them to constantly improve the game experience. With freemium games, players are continuously spending money on the game, as opposed to paying once and forgetting about it. Developers are then incentivized to put that stream of revenue directly back into the game to improve it.
3) What does the article suggest regarding the possibilities and risks to the freemium model in future?
The “freemium” model has proven itself to be incredibly profitable. The question now is how game developers use it to grow without alienating a large share of the gaming community.
Read this New York Times feature on freemium gaming and answer the following questions:
1) Why did Temple Run use the freemium model?
In September, the couple began offering Temple Run free and promoted it through Free App a Day, a Web site that features free games. The game immediately had a spike in downloads and quickly soared in popularity. To date it has topped 40 million downloads, and about 13 million people play it at least once a day, Ms. Luckyanova said.
2) The bigger gaming studios like Electronic Arts used to avoid the freemium model. Why are they now embracing it?
Nick Earl, a senior vice president at Electronic Arts, one of the largest American game publishers, said a vast majority of its games coming this year for iPhones and Android smartphones would be free, with the option to buy extras. He said the company had made the decision based on the success of Sims FreePlay, a freemium game, during the holiday season. “Generally speaking, there’s been a critical mass of quality products at freemium,” he said. “The audience has responded in a way which has become incredibly obvious to game makers like Electronic Arts.”
3) Why does Peter Farago suggest independent game makers benefit more from the freemium model than the major publishers like EA?
When creating a free game with an online store associated with it, Mr. Farago added, game companies must devote staff and resources to maintaining it because it is a live service. Smaller companies are in a better position than the major ones to start from zero and focus on releasing and maintaining freemium products, he said. “Freemium is a weapon against the establishment,” he said, “and the establishment has a hard time even wanting to pick up that weapon.”
Electronic Arts
1) How has The Sims FreePlay evolved since launch?
We started out with a game where you could control 16 Sims, have a pet dog and a career and that was most of the game. We hadn’t yet introduced getting married, much less having children, and now it’s this rich world which covers every aspect of the Sims’ lives. Pets range from puppies and kittens to dragons and fairies and the world is full of interesting places for Sims to go, mountains of fashion and near infinite ways to design and decorate homes. When we started out, we never thought we could achieve so much, and that hundreds of millions of people would have played and continue to play five years later.
2) Why does Amanda Schofield suggest ‘games aren’t products any more’?
Games aren’t products anymore, they’re services built in a partnership with our players. This means that functions like customer support and community management are a critical part of the game development process and must be embedded with our game teams so we not only know what our players are saying about the newest update, but we also can quickly respond to any problems that arise.
3) What does she say about The Sims gaming community?
"One of the most rewarding parts of working on this game is that our community is very active and always hungry to see more features and content in the game. We’ve not had to do much more than listen and build to keep the players engaged."
4) How has EA kept the game fresh and maintained the active player base?
We’re constantly in a state of learning and responding here, so it’s difficult to narrow in on one thing, but if I look at the whole five years the game has been running, the main lesson for me is to never think of the game as “done”. It’s easy to focus on the now and the needs of the game today, but taking the time to evolve the team’s process and tools as well as the game would have saved us a lot of difficult updates in the early years and we would have provided even more for our players in the long-term.
5) How many times has the game been installed and how much game time in years have players spent playing the game? These could be great introductory statistics in an exam essay on this topic.
The first is that we’ve seen well over 200 million installs of The Sims FreePlay to date which shows the extent of the popularity of not just this incredible franchise, but also the game itself. The number that I personally find incredibly inspiring is 78,000, which is the amount of game time in years our players have spent in the game!
In particular, “The Sims 4,” the newest installment to Electronic Arts’ (EA’s) beloved life simulation franchise, has stirred up a rollercoaster of emotions among members of its fan base. Lately, players have begun debating the fate of the game series, feeling as if EA is steering it toward failure. But is the fate of “The Sims” really as hopeless as social media suggests?“The Sims” games center on the players’ ability to create “Sims” — virtual humans with personalities and ambitions — and take complete control of their lives. Players can also use the game to experiment with architecture, decoration and landscaping.
2) What examples of downloadable content are presented?
As the lifespan of the game progresses, various “expansion packs” are sold to add new gameplay features, while “stuff packs” add items, such as new clothing or furniture options, without expanding on the game mechanics. These all fall under the umbrella term “downloadable content.”
3) How did Electronic Arts enrage The Sims online communities with expansion packs and DLC?
Whether you play “The Sims” or not, you’ve probably heard of downloadable content, also known as “DLC.” A magnet for controversy in the past several years, DLC is simply new content for a game that is purchased or downloaded for free as a separate add-on. To many irate gamers, a more suitable definition would be “things that should’ve been in the game in the first place.” EA is no stranger to being on the receiving end of public backlash. Late last year, the now-infamous developers came under fire for locking several iconic characters and powerful multiplayer abilities behind DLC in “Star Wars Battlefront II.”
4) What innovations have appeared in various versions of The Sims over the years?
Every addition to the series has been innovative. The original carved out the niche for “life simulation” gaming. In the next cycle, “The Sims 2” refined the virtual families, allowing players to create multi-generational legacies. Following this feat, the developers gave players full access to every inch of a hyper-realistic world in “The Sims 3.”
5) In your opinion, do expansion packs like these exploit a loyal audience or is it simply EA responding to customer demand?
I do believe that it is too exploit the loyal audience as EA know that the audience will spend more on the packs as the come out as they would want the full experiance of the game. The social media uproar has done a number on the morale of players, but it’s important to remember that a significant portion of players are still invested in the game, happy with the content and ready to purchase upcoming releases. As long as they keep it up, the franchise isn’t going anywhere — regardless of what a vocal minority continues to amplify.
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