and started working on the traffic code. In most of the cases, it was, “How does the Ger-
man distributor feel about this product?” and he’d be on the phone to the German
distributor. You really have to pick your battles. And if you pick the right battles, you’ll
only have to win five percent of them. So anyway, there’s this certain business savvy
that certain people that Electronic Arts brought in had in abundance, that I was very
impressed to learn from.
How didThe Sims Onlinecome about, and what were the initial design goals?
EA wanted to explore the
online space. We had kind
of a hit withThe Simsand
we wanted to leverage the
franchise into the online
space; that was how the
project came about. Early
design goals were to make
an online game that was
extremely approachable
that felt very different,
kinda more in line with
The Sims world, and
where primarily the play-
ers were constructing the
world they were then
playing in. Also, we
wanted to put more emphasis on the social connections between the players, almost as
an alternate topology that the players were playing within.
What was the process you went through adapting such a distinctly single-
player game to be multi-player?
A lot of it was weird tactical issues. The first, most apparent thing when anybody played
The Sims Onlinewas the fact that they couldn’t speed up time. We had to have one
timeline for everybody, obviously. How we were going to let the players customize the
environment was kind of an ongoing discussion. We had all wanted to have players be
able to bring in custom content. It turned out to be extraordinarily hard to achieve for a
number of reasons.
Why was that?
It had to do with bandwidth issues and validating the content, making sure it was robust
enough that it didn’t crash somebody’s application. For us it was the first big online
game we’d ever built. And in fact, if you looked underneath the hood of this thing it’s ten
fairly elaborate pieces of software running on different platforms that all have to be syn-
chronized for the thing to work. It proved to be a very, very high friction environment
for design. On the other hand, we had a lot of assets forThe Simsexpansion packs that
we were getting pretty much at half-price, because they were being developed anyway,
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The Sims Online