Sim City

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= case of user participation in game development


Discussion

Charles Leadbeater:

"The computer games industry now outsells Hollywood largely because it encourages massive user participation in co-creating games. There is no better example of co-creation than the Sims, the most successful computer game ever. The Sims grew out of a game called Sim City, which allows people to design a city and watch it grow, prosper, decline and collapse. The Sims translates that into a home, with a family, for whom the player is responsible. You create your family and watch them sleep, eat, argue, marry, make love, fight and die. The original version of the game, launched in 2000 quickly developed into an online community, with players swapping tools, software and artefacts to put in their online houses. Hundreds of websites now display many thousands of collectible items that are available to the millions of players. One estimate is that 90% of the content of the game is now created not by the game’s original authors, working for Electronic Arts, the computer games giant, but by a large and innovative sector of the playing community. One player-created tool that allows a player to draw in an edging to a floor rug has had hundreds of thousands of downloads. The 3D Sims Online launched in 2004 was designed from the outset as a community-based game. Five months before the game was launched, Electronic Arts released tools to allow players to create their own content and characters. By the time the game was launched one estimate was that about 50,000 such items had been created. The Sims online is not just a game but a platform to support a vast, rolling do-it-yourself community of gamers who develop and share their ideas. The point is not just to play the game but to add to it and share ideas.

The Sims is not pure user driven innovation. It did not come about entirely through self- help. The kernel to the online 3D game cost $15m to develop. The information infrastructure to support the community is also costly: it has to deal with more than 30,000 request for information a second. The Sims’s is not open source. A player has to pay Electronic Arts an entrance fee to join the game and the community: like eBay it is a managed commons. But knowledge about the Sims is not just held in the heads of its original creators who ship their ideas in the form of packaged software to a waiting audience. The Sims community is a distributed, self-organising body of knowledge in which players are constantly training one another and developing new content. In the Sims community most of the value is co-created among the players, with the help of Electronic Arts’ platform and development tools. The original transaction – when the gamer bought the software – was just the entry ticket into that unfolding process.

Will Wright, the game’s original creator, explained why the players want to contribute to the game not just consume it: “The currency is exposure and recognition for their ideas. People are spending time creating cool objects – a lot of them are not spending so much time playing the game. How do we build the most thriving community online? We have to let the business model flow from that.” The Sims business is built on the Sims community, which provides the rolling innovation that extends the game’s life and enriches the content. A game’s official release is the moment when the innovation initiative passes from the in-house development team to the community of player-developers. If a computer game has 1m players, it just needs 1% of those to be dedicated player-developers for it to have acquired an unpaid development team of 10,000 people whose main incentive seems to be to show off their skills and make the game more enjoyable to play. They are not in it for the money. Computer games are another glimpse of the emerging participative culture." (http://wethink.wikia.com/wiki/Chapter_6_part_3)