Word: wright
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...