Language / Gameplay analysis
Watch The Sims: FreePlay trailer and answer the following questions:
1) What elements of gameplay are shown?
3rd person camera control
creativity/make the game your own
able to create your own avatar
able to make friendships and form relationships.
2) What audience is the trailer targeting?
psychographics: Aspirer, player has control over the world, events and story.
12+ age rating as there are references to alcohol consumption, sexual themes and other adult content.
3) What audience pleasures are suggested by the trailer?
being in control
personal relationships towards characters and finding their personal identities represented
Diversion from the real world to an idealistic world/
1) How is the game constructed?
3rd person camera
personal avatar that you create the story for
sandbox/life simulation game
2) What audience is this game targeting?
psychographic: aspirers
age: older teenagers/young adults
3) What audience pleasures does the game provide?
main gratification of diversion provides entertainment. Other gratifications include: control, personal identity and relationships.
4) How does the game encourage in-app purchases?
The game is based on a freemium model which is where the base of the game is free, but players need to pay for further content in expansion packs, time locked or level locked items/events.
Audience
1) What critics reviews are included in the game information section?
- "5STARS ...The Sims FreePlay is everything you could ever want a freemium Sims game to be.” (Gamezebo)
- “10/10 …one of the most addictive and highly polished games available and there’s no excuse for anyone to not download it; especially since it is free to play (the clue’s in the title).” (God is a Geek)“...plenty of hours of fun... at an excellent, non-existent, price.” (148Apps)
2) What do the reviews suggest regarding the audience pleasures of The Sims FreePlay?
Life simulation where the player has a large amount of control
personalisation of character and the world around them.
Participatory culture
1) What did The Sims designer Will Wright describe the game 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?
The dollhouse pitch wasn't favoured.
There was a culture at the time that gaming was not for girls and The Sims was too feminine to succeed in the market.
3) What is ‘modding’?
players manipulate the games code so they can create their own gamemodes/mechanics
4) How does ‘modding’ link to Henry Jenkins’ idea of ‘textual poaching’?
fans can create their own content based off the source material and share it.
5) Look specifically at p136. Note down key quotes from Jenkins, Pearce and Wright on this page.
‘The original Sims series has the most vibrant emergent fan culture of a single-player game in history’.
‘there were already more than fifty fan Web sites dedicated to The Sims. Today, there are thousands’.
‘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 neighborhood, wardrobe and furniture sets to play with, the players themselves turned producers (or produsers, to cite Axel Bruns’.
6) What examples of intertextuality are discussed in relation to The Sims? (Look for “replicating works from popular culture”)
Star Trek, Star Wars, The X-files and Japanese manga.
7) What is ‘transmedia storytelling’ and how does The Sims allow players to create it?
code of an official product can be spread over media platforms in both digital and analogue form.
9) Why have conflicts sometimes developed within The Sims online communities?
some players disagree with the concept of modding whilst some are for it.
10) What does the writer suggest The Sims will be remembered for?
"The collaborative communities that continue to exist around the game and its descendants."
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?
create challenges and game play that is simultaneously in the game world, in the real world
2) Why does James Paul Gee see The Sims as an important game?
It takes people beyond gaming.
3) What does the designer of The Sims, Will Wright, want players to do with the game?
think like designers, create and express creativity.
4) Do you agree with the view that The Sims is not a game – but something else entirely?
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?
