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This simulation game was first released in the turn of the new century, in other words the year 2000. Now, with its new release the Sims 4, this PC franchise has sold over 150 million copies and is now also on the Nintendo DS, iPhone’s, and even Facebook. So what makes this game so popular? Some would argue that the graphics and constant updates that make this game so popular.
As the technological world constantly improves itself, the Sims has been evolving with it, going from strength to strength, constantly getting better and finding new ways to interest people; from those occasional, casual gamers who play to pass the time or those hardcore gamers who live and breathe gaming. The gaming genre itself isn’t original to the gaming world, as we can see from numerous other simulation games such as King’s Quest or Black & White. How is it different yet still as popular, if not more so than it was back then. To put it simply, what is its USP?
The answer is that it is both simple and complex at the same time. What this means is, that there isn’t any pre-determined ending, there are no rules that we have to follow. Yet, it is complex because there are so many activities our Sims can do, in fact, they even have their own language. In a world where everything is a mouse click away; children have stopped needing to use their imaginations in comparison to those who were born merely a decade ago.
The Sims literally makes the world our oyster. It allows children and adults alike to dream and create whatever house, person or creature that they want without much difficulty all they need is to let their minds run wild with ideas. In the Sims one could be said to play god, the fate of many virtual lives lie in our fingertips and that is possibly the main attraction to the game. The social norm is wiped out of existence because we can create it or destroy it, we can create a tragedy or a love story, the ending is something we actually aim towards and can be changed with a simple ‘click.’
Human are drawn to power, some people like being able to lead, others admire from a distance but the beauty of it is that there is nothing wrong with that because we can do as we please within this world. We create our own reality, we know what’s going to happen and we control the destiny of our Sims. There are some generic controversies with the idea that people might not be able to identify between what is virtual and what is real, but the Sims does not however have this problem because every action is done by us.
We can choose to make the game as real as possible but there will always be that consciousness in our minds that the world is ours, ours which we have made from scratch. Also, unlike other games such as GTA the violence in this game is minimal and has been created to be more user-friendly. Furthermore, despite the game having some goals that you have to complete in order to keep it interesting it doesn’t force you to complete the goals set out like in some other games, we can do things at our own pace and the best part is, that we get rewarded for doing so and just doing as we please. What’s not to like about that?
