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Business lessons learned from 'The Sims'

From...


In SimCity 3000 hundreds of new buildings can be found among the new Asian and European building sets

By J.C. Herz

(IDG) -- In the first flush of Internet excitement, companies spent a lot of money on "information architecture." Architecture, after all, was a great metaphor, full of modernist language about structure and engineering, clarity and navigation, form and function -- and it allowed executives to play out their Fountainhead fantasies with bits instead of bulldozers. Sites went up, as indistinguishable from each other as Bauhaus buildings. Spurred by advertising, visitors showed up, dabbled, perhaps staying long enough to spend a few bucks. But most didn't put down roots.

This was not an architectural problem. This was an urban planning problem. How do you convince people to move somewhere, commit time, energy and money, and cluster their activities around property you control? Once you've convinced them to move there, how do you keep the population spending freely without going bankrupt yourself? These are urban planning issues.

Not surprisingly, some of the best online urban designers work for Maxis, the company whose "SimCity" franchise transformed the death and life of virtual cities into a model-railroad hobby for millions of people. Its most recent product, "The Sims," is an object lesson in the hustle and bustle of networked experience.

Unlike "SimCity" and its sequels, "The Sims" takes place on a human scale. The player creates a household of virtual characters with predefined personality traits (neat, outgoing, active, playful, nice) who have straightforward and measurable needs (hunger, comfort, hygiene, bladder, energy, fun, social and room).

"The Sims" live in a perfect consumer society where more expensive stuff makes their lives more fulfilled. You spend the game pushing your virtual characters up the corporate and social ladders so that they can earn more money, so they can buy bigger houses filled with designer furniture, so they can be happier. Along the way you nudge them into fights, romances and family melodramas.

It doesn't sound like much, but "The Sims" has become a popular phenomenon, selling more than 3 million copies (at $40 bucks a pop) since its release and spawning two expansion packs, "Livin' Large" (a departure from "The Sims'" white-bread Americana, featuring five less-reputable occupations -- slacker, hacker, paranormalist, musician and journalist -- as well as home decor options from High Goth to High Vegas), and the recently released "House Party" (a hundred objects to facilitate your Sims' social life, including togas, dance cages and mechanical bulls).

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But aside from its twisted humor and its ability to turn virtual dollhouses into a mass-market cash cow, "The Sims" is a remarkable example of how a company and its customers can help a product evolve to the point where customers not only do a large portion of the innovation and marketing but also produce as much intellectual capital as they consume.

"A lot of the same dynamics that happen at the urban level are replicated in user communities," says Will Wright, Maxis' chief visionary and the Jane Jacobs of all things Sim. "One of the most basic ideas from urban planning is the relationship between basic and nonbasic production."

Most American cities began life around some basic means of production, like mining or manufacturing. "People come in to work at the factory," Wright says, "and the goods from that factory are sent out to other cities or across the region. But over time, smaller services start building up within the city, like little grocery stores or gas stations, that are servicing needs within the community. The internal infrastructure gets larger and larger, and over time it becomes the biggest part of the city -- the city producing goods and services for itself."

In the case of "The Sims," this evolution was engineered into every aspect of the product, from the development model to the marketing strategy. For all its mainstream appeal, The Sims hinges on a sophisticated set of authoring tools that allow people with zero programming skills to do radical plastic surgery on standard-issue Sims and to create custom objects, from lawn ornaments to limousines. Eight months before the game shipped, these tools were released online. By the time "The Sims" hit the shelves, there were 20 independent tool developers, 50 fan sites, 40 artists hacking up custom content and 50,000 collectors of these user-created objects. When new players arrived, the virtual economy was already feeding itself.

Currently, 200 fan sites in 14 languages furnish 90 percent of the game's content. Mall of the Sims, an independent portal to SimPhenomena of all descriptions, is self-sufficient through advertising revenue. The Web has become a Sim central-casting agency for custom characters, from alien species to celebrity look-alikes. Sims furniture showrooms, sporting-goods outlets and clothing stores are chock-full of downloadable merchandise. Online, you can pour over Sim real estate listings, skim a newsletter devoted exclusively to other Sim fan sites and find out if your Sim is Hot or Not.

If you've got a software problem, a self-organized brigade of volunteer enthusiasts provides free technical support via ICQ. Online political rivalries, traffic-sharing agreements and interdependent social circles have grown up around "The Sims" that have nothing to do with Maxis.

When a trend gains critical mass in the Sim user community -- say, converting one's house into a Hollywood B-movie set or throwing a theme party -- Maxis publishes a $29.99 expansion pack that allows players to extend that experience.

The Sims Online, a persistent virtual world scheduled to launch next year, leverages community interaction on an unprecedented level by allowing characters to sell each other SimGoods and SimServices for in-game money. In its early stage of development, the obvious professions seem to be architecture and exotic dancing. Naked skins are freely available on the Web; a jukebox animates them, and a turnstile allows you to charge admission. It's amazing how these simple elements combine.

More subtly, the Sims Online will allow players to bookmark retail objects. For instance, if you see a cool chair at someone's house, you bookmark it. If you buy the chair, a commission flows back to the person from whom you bookmarked it, and the person from whom they bookmarked it, as well as the creator of that object. This motivates people to buy expensive stuff and throw parties. It also makes it economically attractive to buy one of every chair in the Sim universe and open a Chairs "R" Us showroom. Imagine a world where you could earn an Amazon-style affiliate commission for every product on your homepage -- it makes retail into a massively multiplayer game.

For the business community, "The Sims'" lessons are twofold. The first is that interaction design trumps graphics. "The Sims" is less photorealistic than any computer game on the market, or any broadband site on the Web -- it's not even fully 3-D. Yet it succeeds tremendously because it allows players with different agendas to interact as consumers, producers, mavens and community leaders and to reap rewards for all of these activities. The richness and complexity of an online experience, like the richness and complexity of a city, is created by the people who live there as they engage with the place and each other.

The second lesson is that online businesses don't just exist, like buildings, in space. They exist, like cities, in human context over time. The best ones are designed to grow more interconnected, not just bigger, as the population evolves. They're always messy. They're never finished. They harbor an almost palpable sense of around-the-clock activity and a sense of place that owes as much to collective experience as to snazzy signage. When you open your window, there's a there there.