Tuesday 14 November, 2006

The first thing I noticed in the create character screen was that the personality selector was similar to RPGs in the sense that you are given a set amount of resources to allot to certain kinds of traits such as niceness, playfulness, etc. Could these traits match up to D&D's abilities? Outgoing = Charisma. Active = Dexterity. Not much else works. Oh well. If only it mapped up one to one, then we could have your typical Sims player rolling d10s for Niceness and so forth.

My character started off getting into a hot tub with a female, only to be interrupted from his dream by his mother telling him to get up off the couch. He then gets pestered by his mother to fix the TV, cook dinner, take a shower, etc. The goals of the game are told to you either at the beginning of the scene or from the characters within it. I read a book on mechanics which allowed me to successfully fix the TV. As a reward, I was given the opportunity to purchase a vanity. I am not sure what fixing a TV has to do with buying a vanity. I then proceeded to set the kitchen on fire by attempting to cook dinner without studying the cook books first. This brought a fireman into my home.

It seems like what I have read about the Sims is true. The story does not really occur while playing the game, it occurs when you tell someone else about what you did within the game. I think that kind of storytelling could be applied to any game, however. I could list off the sequence of events that occurred to my avatar in The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker and it would seem like a story. But the Sims does seem to have story embedded in it. The story elements seem to be in more discernible chunks. It is almost as if you are manipulating those chunks rather than manipulating just what the avatar is doing. That is what makes the story different than just the retelling of the avatar's actions.

Wouldn't you also say that the "stories" that emerge from the Sims tend to gravitate towards being short, anecdotal and gag-like? There is usually very little room for humorous things to happen in most other games, which I think was an interesting attractor for The Sims.