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When Wright created The Sims in 2000, he narrowed his focus to a single suburban family wrestling with the everyday demands of job, family, housework and personal hygiene. On paper it sounds hopelessly soporific, the video-game equivalent of a Warhol movie, but the response from players was seismic. Counting its various add-on packs, The Sims franchise has sold almost 20 million units.
The game's genius lies in exactly what should have made it a flop: its mundanity. Instead of transporting players to another place and time, it offers them familiar, everyday situations. The object of the game, to the extent that it has one, is to keep your Sims--your digital alter egos--well fed, solvent, healthy, entertained and, in short, happy. The game never formally ends: you can keep on living your simulated life as long as you like.
But in the hands of its legions of devotees, the game has become an expressive language they can use to tell stories about their own lives. Briar Sauro, 27, a school librarian in Brooklyn, N.Y., readily admits to having a "slight Sims obsession," i.e., on a good day she limits herself to two or three hours. "It can take up my whole evening. I don't do anything else." She experiments with using The Sims to "re-create real-life interpersonal relationships." Sauro has created an entire Sims world full of her actual friends and family. "The first year I had the game, we were all having affairs with one another's spouses," she says. "When the Sims get jealous, they slap each other. There was a lot of slapping."
Sometimes things get even more serious. Elizabeth Powell, 56, a retired nurse, took up the game after her husband died. She made little Sims versions of herself and her husband to help her work through her grief. "I could still be with him psychologically, even though I understood the reality," she says. "To many of us, it is more than just a game. We don't just play The Sims; we express ourselves and our lives with real emotions, situations and interactions." Wright believes that it helps people understand their own lives: "You start to see patterns you don't when you're living. It takes all the messy grayness of real life and makes it bright and shiny."
When The Sims Online launches in December, the private dramas of the Sims will emerge on a much larger stage. Instead of Simming alone on their computers, players will connect to central servers over the Internet, where their Sims will coexist and interact in a shared three-dimensional virtual world. In The Sims Online, each player will control a character who lives with, talks to and works for other Sims, all of whom will be controlled by other players, all living together in simulated cities in a simulated country on the Internet. In effect, it's a vast virtual society built from the state of nature up.
To live in that virtual world there is a one-time fee of $49.95 for the software, and the player-inhabitants of The Sims Online will then fork over $9.95 a month for access to its servers. Based on pre-orders, Electronic Arts expects to have "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers at launch.