How would you distinguish between a software toy and a game?
Toys can be used to build games. You can play games with toys. But you can also engage
in more freeform play with toys. It doesn’t have to be a goal-directed activity. I think of
toys as being more open-ended than games. We can use a ball to play a game such as
basketball, or we can just toss the ball back and forth, or I can experiment with the ball,
bouncing it off of different things. So, I would think of toys as a broader category. Also,
toys can be combined. I can strap Barbie to my R.C. car and drive her around, thus mak-
ing up a new activity by combining toys. Games tend to be isolated universes where
there’s a rule set, and once you leave that universe the rule set is meaningless. Another
way to think about it, and this is a more recent version of the same idea, is that I tend to
think of the games we do in more of a hobby kind of way, whereas most games are
thought about more in terms of a movie or cinematic form. Movies have a beginning and
an end, there’s a climax, there’s one particular story line, and a lot of games are built
more on that model.
Our games are more like a hobby, which you approach in a different way. Like with a
model train set, some people get totally into the scenery and the details on the cliffs and
the hills. Other people get into the little village in the middle. Other people get into the
switching on the tracks. And sometimes these will play off of each other when a com-
munity builds around a hobby. You’ll have certain people in the community who are very
into certain aspects of the hobby and they have expertise which they can teach to other
people. And you have subspecializations within the community. People can create
things and trade them, or they can just share ideas. I tend to think of hobbies as being a
bit more community based than the cinematic model. That’s more of a shared experi-
ence, it’s a kind of cultural currency: “Oh, did you see that movie last night? What did
you think?”
But with a software toy likeSimCity,only one person is really playing it at any
one time.
The community I’m referring to now more than ever is the online community. I can go
online and I can start trading strategies with people, or I can upload my city or my family
or my stories, or I can make skins forThe Sims. And if someone gets really good at it
they can have a standing in the community: “Oh, he makes the best skins.” So there’s
this whole community on the web that develops around the game, with people creating
things and sharing things.
Which is more possible now than whenSimCityoriginally came out.
Back whenSimCitycame out, it was really just a few sporadic message boards on some
of the online services like CompuServe or later AOL. It was mostly just chat discus-
sions and things like that. There wasn’t really a forum where people could meet. It
wasn’t really a very involving online community. But even before we had our first web
site, people were already uploading their cities to AOL and trading them. There were
big sections with hundreds of cities trading. CompuServe was the first place where
large collections of cities started to appear, not too long after the game came out.
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