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Experiencing The Sims Online is less like playing a game than taking part in an open-ended community theater production, where the dialogue is improvised, the theme is modern life and the star is you. As in the original game, players control the behavior of their characters by choosing from menus of actions and interactions. (Unlike in The Sims, they can also type messages to one another in real time.) The primary goal is similar to the original as well--you want your Sim to be happy--but there's a new emphasis on making friends and setting up a successful business, like a coffeehouse or a nightclub. If other people like your business, you'll make more money and more friends.
Life in this Simerica has a dreamlike quality: the elements are familiar but scrambled. In a typical session you may walk into a stranger's home in the middle of the night, grab a shower in the bathroom (never mind that his wife is using the toilet), practice the piano for a while, then start making and selling pizzas out of your host's kitchen. In the trial beta version of the game, which currently has around 35,000 participants, Wright plays a Sim who is the proprietor of a lounge located in a submarine. It's called Das Love Boat (he describes it, not very helpfully, as "a German U-boat with a romantic-comedy theme.")
But it's not all surreal chaos. To a greater extent than the original game, The Sims Online has built-in group activities to encourage people to get together and socialize. It's built right into the simulated psychology. Call it "simbiosis": your Sim won't be happy if it's not hanging out with other Sims. In The Sims Online, nice guys really do finish first. "We're giving the players a blank slate, a blank world," says Wright. "We want people to try to build a large, diverse world, so we're tailoring our reward structures to encourage the kind of world people will want to be in." You can see the outlines of a fantasy America emerging, one that's touchingly utopian and crassly commercial at the same time.
Not that Wright is opposed to making a buck or two in the real world. The Sims Online belongs to an emerging category of computer games that use the Internet to put players into a three-dimensional shared virtual world. These games can be ferociously addictive: the most successful example of the genre, Sony's Everquest, is known to its player-inhabitants as "Evercrack."
Wright's real challenge will be to expand beyond the nerdy niche of hard-core gamers that currently constitutes his audience and start attracting the mainstream. To do that, he'll have to overcome the, shall we say, stigma still attached to computer games and the people who play them. "It's like watching somebody watch television," says Wright. "Until you have the controller in your hand, it's hard to understand the appeal." But he's confident that in the next decade, as more and more people grow up playing video games, they will take their rightful place beside books and movies as a form of recognized mass entertainment.