design documents for
players to read. And then
the last one was “This is
about to be deployed.” So
we had three levels of
designs that were flowing
through where the players
had pretty high visibility
and knew what was com-
ing. And they felt like they
had pretty good interac-
tion with the design team.
On the other hand, if you
look at the interaction,
about half or more of the
features we describe on
the board, invariably half
the players would say, “Oh, we love it,” and the other half of the players would say, “Oh,
we hate it.” It’s not like it was always really clear feedback as to what was good or bad.
Because we had players in the game doing totally different things with totally different
motivational structures. So, you just can’t please everybody all the time.
So how did you decide what to add?
Some of the things we pretty much felt like they were fundamental things that we had
to push through design, even if the players were half and half for and against. At that
point we just had to go with our own gut feeling, our own design sense. I think part of it
is it’s good just in general to give players the ability to have feedback. If they know that
you’re listening to them, that’s half the battle right there. The players are seeing that
it’s an even split, so if you fall on one side or the other they’re not going to really blame
you. But if ninety percent of the players say that sucks and you go ahead and do it, that’s
when they’ll nail you.
How did playtesting proceed onThe Sims Online?
It was a little tricky because our really early tests were just in-house tests with thirty or
forty people playing, and we didn’t have nearly the critical mass we needed to validate a
lot of the features. So it wasn’t until we actually got into beta testing that we got a real
sense of the way players were going to behave. We also had different types of players
flowing through the game at different points in time. In the beta test we had a very dif-
ferent kind of player than we had five months after launch. And they valued the features
entirely differently.
How so?
The early people were more socializers, the later people were more goal seekers, in
general. Also, the players got more casual over time, basically, just in terms of how
game savvy they were. I think it felt like it got younger over time. We were collecting a
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