The Sims FreePlay CSP - Audience and Industries blog tasks

Audience

Read this App Store description and the customer reviews for The Sims FreePlay and answer the following questions:  

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.

• video footage of the gameplay
• New updates 
• ongoing events

2) How does the game information on this page reflect the strong element of participatory culture in The Sims?

• Every aspect of the game is centred around the choice of the player, from being able to customize and direct the life of each Sim, to connecting your towns to other players. 

3) Read a few of the user reviews. What do they suggest about the audience pleasures of the game? 

• The user reviews emphasise how important variety is to the players, and they mention being impressed by how much content the game has to offer, including making stories for each individual Sim, suggesting audiences use the game for a sense of diversion. 

Participatory culture

Read this academic journal article - The Sims: A Participatory Culture 14 Years On. Answer the following questions:

1) What did The Sims designer Will Wright describe the game as?

• Will Wright described 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’. 

2) Why was development company Maxis initially not interested in The Sims?

• 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’. 

3) What is ‘modding’? How does ‘modding’ link to Henry Jenkins’ idea of ‘textual poaching’?

• Modding is modifying game assets by manipulating the game code, which links to the concept of textual poaching as players can take aspects from the media they already enjoy, such as character designs.

4) Look specifically at p136. Note down key quotes from Jenkins, Pearce and Wright on this page.

• Pearce 
• ‘The original Sims series has the most vibrant emergent fan culture of a single-player game in history’
• Jenkins 
• ‘there were already more than fifty fan Web sites dedicated to The Sims. Today, there are thousands’
• Wright 
• ‘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 con-sumers a base neighbourhood, wardrobe and furni-ture sets to play with, the players themselves turned producers (or producers, to cite Axel Bruns’
• Jenkins 
• The Sims 'has been used to replicate and ‘rearrange’ scenes and character settings from famous works of popular culture in much the same way fans have traditional-ly been performing their fandom through recycling texts and images’

5) What examples of intertextuality 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 Starship Enterprise from Star Trek, all one had to do was search the internet looking for the relevant website. Alternatively, one could consult a fan-generated information resource or links list to find a website that stocked transporters and replicators. Once downloaded, you could decorate your in-game Star Trek world accordingly.

6) What is ‘transmedia storytelling’ and how does The Sims allow players to create it?

• 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. The Sims space provided a playground for cult media fans, a stage for enacting fannish stories which could later be shared (via the game’s in-built camera and photo album) with other game players who had similar interests. In fact, The Sims helped to pioneer other transmedia, narrative practices such as gamics (comics made from game screenshots).

7) How have Sims online communities developed over the last 20 years?

• 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. 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.

8) What does the writer suggest The Sims will be remembered 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) Why does James Paul Gee see The Sims as an important game?

• The Sims is a real game and a very important one because it is a game that is meant to take people beyond gaming and helps people see how women play and design is not mainstream but cutting edge. 

2) 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.

3) Do you agree with the view that The Sims is not a game – but something else entirely?

• Although the variety of its large amount of content and potential for modding elevates The Sims in terms of its potential for creativity, it is still ultimately a roleplaying and sandbox game.

Industries

Electronic Arts & Sims FreePlay industries focus

Read this Pocket Gamer interview with EA’s Amanda Schofield, Senior Producer on The Sims FreePlay at EA's Melbourne-based Firemonkeys studio. Answer the following questions:

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. When we find systems that are particularly exciting to our players, we focus our efforts to build that section out a little more.

4) How has EA kept the game fresh and maintained the active player base?

• For instance, a lot of our players are able to build incredible houses in ways we could never have imagined when we created Build Mode. We’ve been working to give them more tools and freedom to make the houses of their dreams by adding balconies, pools, a second story and all manner of furniture styles over the years. It's also really key to remember that we don’t have one kind of player. People play the games for lots of different reasons and are at different stages in the game. Some people love Build Mode, some people really want to tell stories or relive their favourite movies through the game and still others are collectors and want to do everything.

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.

• 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!

Read this blog on how EA is ruining the franchise (or not) due to its downloadable content. Answer the following questions:

1) What audience pleasures for The Sims are discussed at the beginning of the blog?

• Diversion
• The Sims is a game franchise where players can escape from reality and live multiple different lives through Sims who each have their own personalities and identities.
• Personal relationships
• Players can grow attached to their Sims and become invested in the events going on in their lives.
• Personal identity
• Players can create  a sim based off of themselves 

2) What examples of downloadable content are presented?

• Pets, tween, teen, boutique, police

3) How did Electronic Arts enrage The Sims online communities with expansion packs and DLC?

• 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.” That’s why, on March 6, 2018, long time fans of “The Sims” franchise — myself included — were stunned by EA’s nerve. They had outdone themselves. As true industry innovators, EA created, possibly, the first DLC for your DLC: meet “The Sims 4: My First Pet Stuff.”

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.” The newest member of the family introduced the capability to travel between multiple neighbourhoods, download other players’ creations within seconds through the “Gallery” and customize gender options to improve the level of diversity present in the game — all for free.

5) In your opinion, do expansion packs like these exploit a loyal audience or is it simply EA responding to customer demand?

• I believe that expansion packs are not necessarily exploiting a loyal audience as they can be used to give players brand new experiences that the company may not have been able to afford to produce if they did not put a price tag on it however I believe that EA is exploiting their audience by gating every expansion added to the game behind a pay wall even going so far as to create dlc for dlc as they do not want to give to their players despite the players being the ones allowing the company to continue to thrive.

The ‘Freemium’ gaming model

Read this Business Insider feature on freemium gaming and multiplayer games. Answer the following questions:

1) Note the key statistics in the first paragraph.

• “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. 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?

• Freemium games have generated most of their criticism over the mobile gaming experience. Last year, South Park famously skewered the concept as a money grab that preys on addicts and leads to boring games. The singer of the Sex Pistols, John Lyndon, claimed last year that he spent over $15,000 on iPad apps. In 2013, Apple settled a class-action lawsuit for parents who alleged that Apple didn’t make it clear that free apps could charge money.

Regulation – PEGI

Research the following using the Games Rating Authority website - look at the videos and FAQ section.

1) How does the PEGI ratings system work and how does it link to UK law?

• The rating system works to help parents decide whether a game is suitable for their children to play. This links to UK law PEGI 12, 16 and 18 rated games supplied in physical form, such as on discs and cartridges, are legally enforceable and cannot be sold or rented to anyone under those ages.

2) What are the age ratings and what content guidance do they include?

• 3 = suitable for all age groups
• 7 = frightening scenes/sounds, unrealistic violence
• 12 = realistic violence, sexual posturing, mild/bad language and horror sequences
• Parental guidance = parents recommended to watch with child
• 16 = violence, sexual activity, strong bad language, alcohol/drugs
• 18 = extreme violence, sexual violence and threat, gambling/illegal drugs/alcohol, sexual activity

3) What is the PEGI process for rating a game? 

• Content declaration assessment
• Submission materials
• Video footage examination
• Game examination
• Receiving the PEGI licence