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Showtime social feedback features and its natural progression into the Sims 3
TOLKIEN
Posts: 1,594 Member
So as I've been watching this forum in the last 2 days explode into fury and fights in reaction to Showtime and its become very clear that most of you don't want the social aspects included either way (myself included) while a divide remains between you on the games content (I will end up buying it I'm sure as long as it has an offline mode).
I must admit though, I'm a little surprised at such venom toward the new social aspects from a userbase of sims players who are majority female (EA quoted a percentage of Simmers to be 70% of their customers/players to be female last I heard).
You see the highest prolific users of facebook/social media per capita of time and social use are female too. Now while I completely understand not wanting to include or rather exclude your gaming habits from your "social" habits (aka alone time) I can totally understand how the Sim's development team naturally progressed in adding such social features into their games when they have 9+ million Sims Social players and have sold 10 copies of the Sims 3 with these numbers in mind.
Further combined with the Sims exchange were users are already exchanging sims - from a development point of view, its a very natural progression of the series to take AND I'm a hundred percent sure that they are shocked to see such negative feedback.
That all aside, as I'm reading the forums and adding my own thoughts into the fury of discussions, its really hit me that NONE of my female friends or acquaintances I've EVER KNOWN (or male for that matter) play the Sims 3.
I actually have EVER only known ONE girl who played the Sims 2 and that was 4 years ago.
Yet here you all are!
Yet I've never met one...in any social circle I've known.
If even only 60% of the 10 million copies of the Sims 3 (a number which IS higher) are owned by females - that means their are 6 million females minimum playing the sims 3.
Yet I know not one....yet you are legion.
Where are you all hiding????
I must admit though, I'm a little surprised at such venom toward the new social aspects from a userbase of sims players who are majority female (EA quoted a percentage of Simmers to be 70% of their customers/players to be female last I heard).
You see the highest prolific users of facebook/social media per capita of time and social use are female too. Now while I completely understand not wanting to include or rather exclude your gaming habits from your "social" habits (aka alone time) I can totally understand how the Sim's development team naturally progressed in adding such social features into their games when they have 9+ million Sims Social players and have sold 10 copies of the Sims 3 with these numbers in mind.
Further combined with the Sims exchange were users are already exchanging sims - from a development point of view, its a very natural progression of the series to take AND I'm a hundred percent sure that they are shocked to see such negative feedback.
That all aside, as I'm reading the forums and adding my own thoughts into the fury of discussions, its really hit me that NONE of my female friends or acquaintances I've EVER KNOWN (or male for that matter) play the Sims 3.
I actually have EVER only known ONE girl who played the Sims 2 and that was 4 years ago.
Yet here you all are!
Yet I've never met one...in any social circle I've known.
If even only 60% of the 10 million copies of the Sims 3 (a number which IS higher) are owned by females - that means their are 6 million females minimum playing the sims 3.
Yet I know not one....yet you are legion.
Where are you all hiding????
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As a female player I myself have only met one other person that loves this game as much as I do and that person is male.
I can only speculate that not many people actually fess up to playing this game. It is after all a ONE PLAYER game and offers a beautiful world in which to express our own imaginations and creativity for ourselves away from the preasures of real life. I am not ashamed of being a Sim player, but I don't talk about it with people. It's the one thing that I can say I do solely for myself and I just don't care to share my innocent little fantasy world with anyone.
I don't think the corelation of female percentages between the game and Social Networking had much to do with EA's decision to incorporate it into the game. I think it has more to to with the sheer numbers of people playing Sim Social and trying to convert those players into paying customers. It's a shame that the demographic of free players is dictating where this series is going and not the one that has already bought it. It's clear that if they were paying attention to the people on their own official site, we wouldn't have this being thrust on us. I remember the poll where they asked about different features and it included social networking as one of the choices, but it didn't win and yet we are getting it anyway.
Maybe we like to keep our sims private? It's not like I'm doing anything off the wall with my sims game but I guess it's just not something that seems to come up in conversation on a daily bases.
Edit: Came back to say maybe it's age related? I'm a mother of a teen so that makes me an older player I'm sure. But I've been around since sims2. A friend I ran across on-line got me hooked. We later became real life friends. : ) Point being, maybe us older players don't talk about our hobby of playing sims? People tend to think computer game = children playing.
I quite like the social aspect that EA is going to add into Showtime. It is something pretty new, and it will allow other simmers another way to connect to one another, besides using the forums. Hey, it will also be fun to chat to others while playing the game!
Then again, besides Sims, I also play some MMORPGS and quite like the social aspect of some of those as well (LOTRO, for example.) Some of folks in the MMO community are quite mature, while others can be quite immature as well.
I've been playing sims since the original Sims came out. If it matters, I am a young adult female (21). I also wonder if it is age related.
As far as simmers go I have a family of lots of simmers. There was 29 of us when Sims 3 started. A few went off to college, a few went off to the armed services, a few graduated college and went on with life, and a few still play, a few new ones - youngsters have just started playing. We have a lot of game turnovers I guess. I live in a small town - with a winter population of 2500 people and surprisingly one of my neighbor and 3 of the parishners that attend my church play sims. I am though the only one of everyone I know who comes on this forum except to check out store stuff or to get patches. They spend their between sims time on facebook social gaming. So they are not going to care about that feature at all and is probably the groups of simmers begging for that social connection because they want no part of EA forums. I have one daughter-in-law that might occassionally see me somewhere and say hi, then is gone and back on facebook before I even know she was there.
Of them I believe now 14 are playing simmers - 3 are male and 11 are female.
"Games Are Not The Place To Tell Stories, Games Are Meant To Let People Tell Their Own Stories"...Will Wright.
In dreams - I LIVE!
In REALITY, I simply exist.....
So, first thing is to force players to go online who initially bought a game that wasn't an online game, so they feel dragged into the open. Then, it's also connected to their private space, which makes them feel their privacy is violated, too. I don't say that EA intended this or that it will even be so, but it certainly feels like this for many players.
Sorry if this is badly expressed, I'm from the german forums and just checking the mood over here
Another indication is a personal experience I had when I had my developer practical training at the DLR (kind of german NASA) several years ago. The colleagues discussed about what games they play. Gosh you should have seen their reactions when I told them I play The Sims. "What are you, a girl?"
My girlfriend and I will occasionally play The Sims together on one of my computers; we'll pass the mouse/keyboard off to the other one, maybe give creative input, and create something together. What we're enjoying though is each others company; the game is just icing on the cake and a fun way to pass the time. We don't need to be together to play the game, but if we are, it can be a lot of fun. Again though, there's a difference between two people huddling around a screen and playing with someone in a remote location. The former involves personal interaction and the latter does not; it's analogous to the difference between playing a game on an Arcade machine and playing the same game online using a service like XBox Live. There's a level of social interaction that's actually absent from the online form of play.
Personally, I despise social networking sites and make a habit to avoid them, even though most people that I know tend to use them. It should go without saying that I despise the idea of a concept I already dislike being shoehorned into a game that I generally enjoy, at least when I can get it to function.
My girlfriend is a different story though; she uses Facebook, and even plays, or attempts to play The Sims Social on it. Her computer is an iBook G4; it's not exactly set up for modern gaming, so the only games she can play are basic games available online, or older Mac games if one of us can find one that she happens to like. She plays The Sims Social because her computer can't handle the regular Sims games; not because she wants to play a game on a social networking site. Additionally, her Sim's house has not been expanded, because she doesn't know anyone else who plays The Sims Social, and she has a policy of refusing to ask anyone to join a game on Facebook. Her reason for this is the fact that she hates it when people ask her to join games, and I quote, "it makes me (her) want to reach through the screen and punch them." And here I thought I was the cranky one.
Still, I can understand her point; my girlfriend likes to play certain games in her "alone time," and The Sims has always been a very personal game. The people I'm likely to share my Simming experiences with are people who are close to me, and few others. Remember, the entire point of the Sims series is that it's always been totally open ended. Once others are allowed into our little Sandbox, we lose some of that "open ended" control. I really think that a good portion of the negative reception to the social networking features stem from the fact that people tend to view the experience of Simming as a personal one. Sharing content is one thing, but sharing experiences are something very different. They're the type of things we reserve for close friends and family, if we share them at all.
I think playing the sims is a personal matter most of the time, I hate it when people glance over at my screen and give me their input lol having said that my 2 best friends (both female) in high school played the sims 2 and we would all play together at my house on a weekend but we often disagreed with how the other was playing because every simmer is different.
I had another friend (also female) in college who played the sims but all 3 of them are now at uni and don't really have time to play the sims so I have no friends in my social circle that play the sims anymore.
I think you hit the core very well with that and EA should take tha into account. I hope it's not too late to make the appropriate changes to this EP. I'm sure they won't drop the whole "send your Sims over to friends" thing because this EP is designed around it but we shouldn't be forced to do it in order to gain career levels and rewards.
I'm starting to wonder what's the big deal now. It's not like the lid of my game is going to be ripped off and people are going to dive in without me being able to stop them.
I can keep some sims to myself and I can make sims that are meant to be shared. People talk like their sims are not a renewable resource. We do it anyway by the exchange and the forum. There are a lot of different type of simmers and no one segment owns the game. The segment who are more social about their sims, who like to chat and who like to share, got a EP.
Other than her, there's my mom. She's the one who introduced me to the game when Hot Date came out. Ever since then, we've played together and shared our Sim stories. Playing the Sims has always been something that just she and I would do; kind of like quality time. When I really think about it, I really don't want to share my Sims with anyone else (unless it's on here of course.) The Sims holds a special place in my heart because of my mom and for some random people to try to intrude my game with friend requests and pop-ups really doesn't sit well with me.
I really hope that we'll be able to keep the social networking to a minimum...minimum as in not at all.
Thank you for sharing you views and experiences with the Sims in your personal lifes!
Myself I am 32 and have been playing the Sims since day 1 release of the Sims 2.
My father won a copy of the Sims 2 when it came out too, he wasn't interested in it but I also have 1 step brother and 2 step sisters...one of which LIKED the idea of playing the Sims but she just "didn't have time to play it" which was her way of saying it wasn't cool at the time. (She was in the popular crowd at highschool...and wasn't the type to do anything that was "different")
My step brother is a gamer but my father felt he was too young at the time to play such a "mature game"(?) as the Sims 2 - so that copy he won of the Sims 2 just sat on the shelf until eventually it disappeared...
Playing the Sims IS a very private experience because (even when played between two people) we each play it in are own very individual way.
I can understand how pushing players to interact with one another via ingame socializing thats being introduced in Showtime can alienate a lot of Simmers.
Its almost like some kind of social pure pressure being forced upon us to all do the same thing or pressure us to share are personal sims...
Anyway food for thought...
I'm 32, female and played this game from TS1. I didn't get into it until TS1 was almost over and started off with one of those combo packs. Shortly after TS2 launched and I was all over that from day 1 and played it and every ep until TS3 came out. When that happened I dropped TS2 like a hot potato, joined TS3 and never looked back.
ALL of the people I know IRL who do play any sims game are female. All 6 of them and 7 if you count myself. I know not one male who is interested in this game and it's kind of cool to see the males responding to this thread and knowing that they are out there. It's funny because I could ask the same question as you except opposite, where are all the males hiding? :P
But, to me it's just an optional EP. I can fully enjoy the game without it. In fact, the only EPs I have at the moment are Generations (because of the Age Freeze Potion) and Ambitions (because of self-employment). That's it. All the other EPs are optional to me. Sure it is nice to have every EP out there, but they're not essential.
Now I don't exactly understand what all the commotion is all about, but then again I never really gotten the importance of the social aspect in gaming anyway, so I can't really talk about that. However, I do get that some people don't want to share everything they do in the games. I mean, I have to admit, I only or mainly create female Sims so they can hook up with each other (I'm a 🐸🐸🐸🐸, big whoop). I don't want to share their every moment.
And aside from that, do we really want to share everything we do in games? Do we really need to share how many Goombas we stomped, or how many hit-and-runs we had? I mean, I can fully understand that *some* people want to share all that, but that's where the optional part is.
If the social aspect is completely optional, that's a really good thing, however, if it's not optional, they do need to expect that not many will buy this EP, and it will only hurt those who do only go the legal way. I mean, look at all the games with heavy DRM that get pirated. I do not approve pirating games in any way, but it's really telling that pirates don't have to put up with all the nonsense we as paying customers do get, and I'm not talking here about games. Just look at the DVDs and Blu-Rays. We all get notices before every movie saying that it's illegal to copy that floppy in any way, yet the pirates will never see this screen.
So, what I'm saying is, the social media is a nice touch, but not everybody will like it. Or at least I think that's what I'm trying to say.
And a by the way, here's a little joke. What do you get when you remove the blue and green from the white? Sim-ply Red. That joke worked better in my head...
Anyone else seems to think its a dolls house type of game .
For me the problem is I play sims to play them how i want to in my style . Not having someone i do not know take them over and do something else completely different with them .
I have no interest either in having my sims go sing or perform for other people . If they want singers and performers let them create their own .
If i wanted to share my sims i would put them on the exchange which i did briefly when i first started Sims 3 but then removed them once people stopped downloading them .
For me playing Sims is getting away from reality for a few hours and playing how i want to on my own . If i want to play with others i would reinstall something like Second Life .
My wife feels exactly the same and has no interest in having someone elses sim in her game or sending hers to anyone else, just to give free advertising to EA
IF (as another simmer suggested) it is using a facebook-style site or an extension of this site, I still don't want to be required to post things or to ask other simmers to give me things in order to progress through the game. That would be my biggest concern. If you've played any of the facebook games like Sims Social, you'll know what I'm talking about - you have to constantly ask people to send you gifts and you have to invite friends to join so you can move to the next level. I am *not* interested in that at all. I only bothered posting my memories so I could earn the free prizes.
In 2000, I came across The Sims when I was looking for software to make house plans, just because it was a hobby I'd had years ago and really enjoyed it.
Then I started getting hooked into The Sims' lives - their struggles, their triumphs, their foibles, successes and failures.
To this day, I share only what I want to and usually in a general way. My game is -my- game; it's my own little Sim world and it's private. I would no more want to interact in someone else's game than I would want to invite someone else's Sim into mine.
Natural progression? Not for me. I see it as an unnatural regression.
BTW I am a female with probably 4 known friends that play.
I do share some aspects of my stories. In fact, I've been engaged in some limited horse trading with some other horse breeding simmers since Pets came out, but it has always been my choice whether I engage in that social interaction and It's always been under my precise control how much interaction I engage in. The last thing I want is to be forced into making my Sims a social arena where a legion of strangers are notified every time a Sim's bladder need is satisfied. :roll:
I tried The Sims Social when it came out because I do have a FB page, but I quickly discovered that that kind of browswer isn't for me. I'm not the nagging sort to badger my contacts into helping me achieve things anymore than I'm a natural salesman or reporter to badger people into buying things or answering questions. The last thinkg I want is to be forced into badgering people into letting my Sims come sing for them so I can have those SIms progress. I lose the priovacy aspect of the game. I'd have much less trouble if those Sims could migrate through my own saved games and sing for the sims in the other saved towns I have, then at least, it would remain my game and my Sims to share as I choose.
Heck, that's a feature people have been wanting for some time - the ability to migrate sims from town to town, game to game without losing their associations in the old game. If they figured out how to port celeb sims across game saves, couldn't you also move sims between games?
I've played multi-player online games, was on the Sims Online for awhile, and am currently semi-active on a German MUD called Xyllomer that I've been playing for ten years, off and on.
I also currently have 3 Zynga games that I play on Facebook, so I'm not unfamiliar with social networking. However, when it comes to playing the Sims, like most people, I prefer to play my game privately. My daughter and son-in-law don't play, but my 4 year old grandson supervises while I build him a house, and after I've set him up, he plays as himself (as a man). It's very simple gameplay for him.
What is irritating the heck out of me at this point, is the fact that EA is apparently trying to turn this into another version of The Sims Social; it irks me that it made the decision to listen to the demands of the Sims Social crowd who wanted these social networking features added into the game, and ignored those of us dedicated players who have been with them from Day One, and have supported them through 3 franchises, and who clearly stated that they did not want social networking in the game...or any kind of online version of The Sims 2/The Sims 3.
I am also irritated at the fact that they have just up and changed the game dynamic from a private individulistic game, to a Zynga-esque Facebook game where you have to depend on other people to help your Sim advance in the game. This isn't the way the Sims was designed to be played. The Sims Online, with its emphasis on popularity and enforced social gameplay proved that. I won't go into why I think the game flopped, but I only lasted six monts before I returned to my Ultima Online and dropped The Sims Online like a hot potato.
EA should not have been so shocked at the negative outcry; but apparently their marketing department was so ratteled that they felt the need to go into damage control and try to put a new spin on things. Many of the younger players are reassured; but I suspect many of us older players are wise to their tactics. It's obvious to me from the tone of the SimGuru's post that EA intends to push the social networking aspect for all its worth, but especially the encouragement to use Simport. It's also obvious to me that they are trying to reassure the older non-social players so we won't leave their franchise in droves. It's not working with me, and I suspect not with others, either. I have been a loyal Sims player for ten years; but with this new proposed expansion pack, they lost me. Nothing I have seen or read has changed my mind.
I don't care if I can opt out of the social networking; as far as I'm concerned, the game is ruined. And I don't trust EA not to mess up the opt out feature, or not to "punish" us in some way for doing so...after all, in The Sims Online, I was forced to change my gamestyle of making my Sim a home to come home at night, because the cost of building even a small house was outrageous, and my Sim took a big hit in social need...the game required you to hang around the skilling and other lots where there were other people; and it was one big popularity contest. I loathed being manipulated, and I loathe being pushed into doing something I don't want. I resent that if I buy this expansion pack, I won't be able to play a performer Sim with the same degree of satisfaction that I normally would, because the Sim would be receiving countles opportunities that involve her going on tour, and that sort of thing, all for the sake of pushing me to use Simport and send her off to some "friend", who might or might not play her.
I am not a Happy Camper. And I'm not buying Showtime or any other expansion pack, because, even though I can opt out on them, the social network program will still be in the game.
"We Don't Care If You LIKE The Game, Just As Long As You BUY The Game!"
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