The Sims FreePlay case study part 1 - Language & Audience

Language / Gameplay analysis

Watch The Sims: FreePlay trailer and answer the following questions:

1) What elements of gameplay are shown?

• Character customisation - a range of races and ethnicities
• House decorating
• Playing with pets (furry friends)
• Finding true love and getting married
• Having children
• Dancing
• Sim Town
• Volcano
• Creative possibilities- painting, guitar, etc

2) What audience is the trailer targeting?

• Predominately female - colour scheme emphasises femininity and all the relationship scenes make the audience positioned to respond with the female (OTS camera shots)
• The female characters are shown first in the customisation
• Aged 10-40+ 
• Broad target audience

3) What audience pleasures are suggested by the trailer?

• A younger audience can do things in the game that they can't do in real life (clubbing, relationships, etc)
• Making a character how you want
• Forming a perfect lifestyle - personal identity and relationships
• Aspiration, diversion and escapism

Now watch this walk-through of the beginning of The Sims FreePlay and answer the following questions:

1) How is the game constructed?

• Lots of little tasks - constant mini rewards
• The time it takes to carry out tasks is real time (you can pay to speed up the game)
• Adverts in return for free crystals/ in-game currency
• Product placement - a revenue generator

2) What audience is this game targeting?

• Female - more female clothing available
• Capitalist ideology reinforced - 'You need a job'

3) What audience pleasures does the game provide?

• Consumer culture - capitalist ideology - job, spending money
• Constant rewards
• Customisation (can also make yourself
• SimChef = MasterChef (intertextuality)

4) How does the game encourage in-app purchases?

• You can buy modifications in the game with in-game currency (e.g. speed up the game) - this is reinforced with the time countdowns 
• You can buy in-game currency with real money
• Onions take 7 hours to grow but reward a lot of money 

Audience

Read this App Store description 
and the customer reviews for The Sims FreePlay and answer the following questions:  

1) What critics reviews are included in the game information section?

• "5 STARS ...The Sims FreePlay is everything you could ever want a freemium Sims game to be.” (Gamezebo)
• “10/10 …one of the most addictive and highly polished games available and there’s no excuse for anyone to not download it; especially since it is free to play (the clue’s in the title).” (God is a Geek)
• “...plenty of hours of fun... at an excellent, non-existent, price.” (148Apps)

2) What do the reviews suggest regarding the audience pleasures of The Sims FreePlay?

• How it resembles real life
• Growing babies
• Designing houses 
• Lots to do 
• Lots of diversity in the game

3) How do the reviews reflect the strong element of participatory culture in The Sims?
The reviews made by players include suggestions on how EA should improve the game. The players seem to be very passionate about the game and give suggestions that they believe would make the game more fun for everyone. For example, one review suggested that the developers should increase the maximum amount of sims that can be in a house or building at once to over 10.

Participatory culture

Read this academic journal article - The Sims: A Participatory Culture 14 Years On. Answer the following questions:

1) What did The Sims designer Will Wright describe the game as?

He describes The Sims as ‘a train set or a doll’s house where each person comes to it with their own interest and picks their own goals’ (Wright 1999).

2) Why was the development company Maxis initially not interested in The Sims?
The company Maxis was initially not interested in The Sims because, at the time, it was only males who played videogames. The Sims was described as a 'dollhouse' and this would not be suitable for a male audience because "dollhouses are for girls and girls don't play videogames"

3) What is ‘modding’?
Modding is a form of participatory culture where players are able to modify game assets by manipulating the game code.

4) How does ‘modding’ link to Henry Jenkins’ idea of ‘textual poaching’?
Just like in textual poaching, audiences are able to take a media text that already exists and make it into their own by modifying it. Modding has brought fan communities closer.

5) Look specifically at p136. Note down key quotes from Jenkins, Pearce and Wright on this page. 

• Participatory culture creates communities that are ‘held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge’ (Jenkins 2006a: 137).
• ‘The original Sims series has the most vibrant emergent fan culture of a single-player game in history’ (Pearce 2009: 272).
• Even before the first game was released, Jenkins notes, ‘there were already more than fifty fan Web sites dedicated to The Sims. Today, there are thousands’ (2006b: 166).

6) What examples of intertextuality are discussed in relation to The Sims? (Look for “replicating works from popular culture”)

Players seemed to display a gleeful desire to recreate the worlds of their favourite fandoms within The Sims. Therefore, The Sims has always included skins depicting characters from cult media such as
Star Trek, Star Wars, The X-Files and even Japanese anime and manga were extremely popular. Even crossovers were a possibility, allowing one lot to house Marvel Universe characters and another to house DC Universe characters – the two sets of characters could interact and even build relationships and their own life stories.

7) What is ‘transmedia storytelling’ and how does The Sims allow players to create it?

Transmedia storytelling is a process wherein the primary text encoded in an official commercial product could be dispersed over multiple media, both digital and analogue in form (Jenkins 2007). This means that players could create an alternative ending to a movie they are really interested in and then share this with other players, through pictures, videos or word of mouth.

8) How have Sims online communities developed over the last 20 years?
Over the last 20 years, the Sims online communities have become more advanced and more like a family. They have grown so much. New members of the modding community can contact experts for advice and the expert acts like a teacher who guides, supports and helps them.

9) Why have conflicts sometimes developed within The Sims online communities?

In the past there have been conflicts between creators and non-creators; between creators who wish to charge money for their mods and those who wish to share them for free; even between players and Maxis/EA itself. Fans of The Sims are not homogeneous. Some fans have complained of fellow community members receiving more recognition and power because they can create things that others can’t – opportunities for participation do not necessarily imply an attendant equality (Sihvonen 2011: 109).

10) What does the writer suggest The Sims will be remembered for?

The Sims will be remembered for the cult following that it engendered well beyond the usual lifespan of a popular computer game; and also for the culture of digital production it helped to pioneer, one that remains such a staple of fan and game modding communities today.

Read this Henry Jenkins interview with James Paul Gee, writer of Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010).

1) How is ‘modding’ used in The Sims?
Modding is used in The Sims to create new challenges and gameplay that "is simultaneously in the game world, in the real world, and in writing things like graphic novels."

2) Why does James Paul Gee see The Sims as an important game?
He believes that it is a game that is meant to take people beyond gaming. This is indeed true for The Sims because people have the ability to create what they want and do what they want in the game with endless possibilities.

3) What does the designer of The Sims, Will Wright, want players to do with the game?
He wants to "empower people to think like designers, to organize themselves around the game to become learn new skills that extend beyond the game, and to express their own creativity." This means that he wants players to express their creativity and do anything they would dream of doing or creating in real life.

4) Do you agree with the view that The Sims is not a game – but something else entirely?
I don't agree with the fact that The Sims is not a game. However, I believe that The Sims is a great example of post-modernism and the blurring between reality and the media. I can understand why some people may see it as something more than a game, especially if they are very big fans of the game who have created incredible houses or lives on there. This is especially true for the new Sims 4, where you can share the content you create online and other players can add it into their own game - some players may view themselves as artists.

5) How do you see the future of gaming? Do you agree with James Paul Gee that all games in the future will have the flexibility and interactivity of The Sims?
I agree with Gee that games in the future will have the same flexibility and interactivity of The Sims. This is because consumers want to be more than just passive audiences, they want to engage and bring their own talents and creativity into what they love. This links to Clay Shirky's theory of 'end of audience'. However, I don't think that all games will be like this, just because some game structures won't allow participitation.