CHAPTER 1

             Despite Will’s immediate understanding of how he wanted The Sims’ online community to look, he wasn’t the first to create an environment like this online in which a usually single player game had an online element that centered around creating content and sharing it in a decentralized way. Petz’ community is the primordial soup from which The Sims’ community spawned. While I can’t prove this, I’d reckon that someone who worked on The Sims had seen how Petz’ community had created a game element that was also a marketing campaign. Every person who stumbled across a ‘PETZ’ pet online somewhere would be aware of the game and people who just wanted to share what they’d created became their own mini-marketers. 

Maxis had originally been extremely active in the community. Returning to the conference given by Will in 2001. Those fan sites that were created by users over the first few months were meant to be diverse, while the early contenders that were most general continue today (such as TSR) they were meant to, to quote Will, “act as peers” rather than being in competition with each other. At least, that was the intent in the beginning. 

 

The Exchange, an official system to disperse content made by players, was Maxis’ official site with special features that were built directly into the game. You could upload directly from your game, it didn’t require you to have hosting space (which was important in the early 2000s when social media was still very much in its infancy), and you could write your own stories. This feature exists today for The Sims 4 even if it has been renamed and had many of its features stripped from what they were in previous games.

 

Despite  Will’s, and by extension, EA’s views of what the community was, there are some things that were likely already on the mind’s of EA and Will, and if they weren’t they soon would be. Firstly, EA, as admitted by several developers, had wanted to make sure that content made by players wasn’t nearly as good as what EA could make in-house. There was no reason to compete with your own players in content creation. This was, at the time, a non-issue for the most part. In the early 2000s, the demographics of the average internet user and video game player looked very different. Most players just didn’t have the technical literacy to create anything that was very advanced, whether that was assets for the game or tools. While there were exceptions to that rule, they were few and far between. Additionally, most players had an extremely short reach. The idea of ‘viral’ content was still far off on the horizon. The internet of the time was simply not built to get content in front of eyes. 

 

All of this to say, despite EA’s hands-off-approach at this specific point in time they didn’t have to worry very much regarding what players may have done that looked ‘bad’ for the brand. The internet that The Sims’ community was built for was a very different place structurally and socially. And any larger content farms that worked in a way similar to EA’s official Exchange were kept in close contact with EA’s official team but still didn’t have the features that were baked straight into the game. They gave sites such as TSR special attention but still didn’t allow them the same privileges they, themselves, had. 

 

This imbalance in power makes sense as the brand still needed to be able to publish high quality content that you couldn’t get elsewhere in the community. Which is why the content creation tools that were used by Maxis to create the game were kept under lock and key. Moving forward EA would even help ‘tool makers’, as Will referred to them, create more intricate tools but they were still refusing to allow users tools such as EDITH, the tools that was used to easily change sims behavior in game. Instead, players got tools that were more difficult to use, were only maintained by tool makers, and had to be used outside of the game and then have the code imported in for testing. This process is, and was, very taxing and the tools aren’t very user friendly.

 

Now, I’m not arguing that players should have gotten those tools, it would have been nice though, rather I’m telling you this to highlight the ways in which Maxis had set the playing field with a very specific goal in mind. Content creation by users wasn’t meant to go too far. While I couldn’t tell you at what point EA had expected content creation to get to, or if they’d thought very much about it at all past planning not to give users access to these tools, I can say that it seems like that there was some internal friction regarding what players should and shouldn’t be able to to do with the game.