A Mobile Gaming Look at the Sims
Only a few years ago, gaming on mobiles was the domain of Tetris and Bust-A-Move, and that was about it. Some solitaire and Mahjohng in there too - nothing to get excited about. But recently the smartphone and PDA platforms have gotten powerful enough to play games with a little more meat on them. And it's gotten all the way up to The Sims (2) for mobile phones!
The Sims might be the most-played gaming franchise ever created, with perhaps some competition for that title with either Warcraft (as in "World of -") or Quake (king of first-person shooters). The Sims takes the concept of a simulation of life which was born all the way back in 1989 with Sim City, and runs it all the way up to the level of managing individual lives, households, and neighborhoods instead of cities.
The Sims is also one of the few gaming franchises to attract equal shares of male and female gamers. While women gamers shy away from the violence of first-person shooters and aren't generally turned on by the intricacies of plotting an attack in a real-time strategy game, they happily spend hours playing the Sims, which does after all resemble an electronic dollhouse.
At least half the attraction of the game stems from the open possibilities. EA Games, at first reluctant to embrace the hacked object sub-culture, has since cheerfully encouraged user-created custom objects once they saw that it boosted their sales. User-designed content for the Sims games, available to download all over the web, has introduced new themes, designs, and ideas that the original developers never thought of.
Such as? Well, you could make a rural/farming household with modified crops to grow and sell and modified livestock which can reproduce. You can make an occultist with the psychic career path, using crystal balls, magic mirrors, Tarot cards, a voodoo doll, and the magic potion chemistry bench - all modified by users to have effects more potent and more amusing than the EA-designed versions - and sometimes more deadly! Or you can make the work-at-home Sim, who uses computers, artists easels, and office furniture to bring the work environment home - much more entertaining than seeing them ride away in a carpool every day.
There's a host of Goth-themed objects and skins out there. Fans of just about any TV show or fiction franchise can find custom-themed objects and skins, such as is the case with the Harry Potter sets. There's even a whole genre of Star Trek themed objects, including food replicators, uniforms, transporters, and Klingon objects.
Every detail of decor is taken care of. Users create custom wallpaper, floor covering, plants and decorations, doors, and windows to go with whatever theme you have in mind. Anything from a 16th century British castle to Dr. Who's laboratory is possible.
A nod should be given to Spore here as well. Spore is the game designed by Sims creator Will Wright, and it takes the idea of playing God beyond mere humans to evolving your own life forms, starting with single-cell primordial goop and ending up with sentient beings that achieve space travel! This is far more in-depth in scope - your species evolves and mutates according to rules you have set, forms tribes and later cities, and advances its whole civilization to eventually travel to other planets and found an interstellar empire - if you play it right, that is! this game hasn't been ported to mobile devices yet, but it's certainly doable on a laptop.
Simulator games have introduced a new genre to the gaming world in the past couple of decades, putting forth the concept of an "open-ended sandbox". It isn't so much whether you win the game or even how many points you get. In fact, there is no game score in the Sims. the idea is just to let your imagination play, whether with a city in Sim City, a household in the Sims, or individual lifeforms in Spore.
Filed Under: Mobile Computing • Mobile Internet • PDAs
