Roommates from Heaven or Hell?
To compete or to cooperate? This simple question has as profound an impact on our social systems as anything else you can imagine. This dynamic operates on all scales and through all cultures. Siblings compete for parental attention but at the same time will cooperate as part of a family unit. Employees compete for recognition and job advancement while at the same time working together to make their company competitive in its market. In general, the drive to cooperate will begin to take hold when people form group structures (families, neighborhoods, clubs, gangs, companies, nations) that begin to compete at a higher level.
In The Sims Online™ the most fundamental relationship happens at the roommate level. Each city in The Sims Online can be inhabited by about 30,000 players, and this number will increase as we improve our servers. The players in these cities can either buy a lot for themselves or choose to move in with other players (with the owner's permission). Unlike in The Sims™, these lots are not just houses but can be anything the players want to create -- a house, park, business, restaurant, sports field, etc.
A few of the important differences that players will discover from The Sims include: the number of items in the catalog is tremendous, build and buy mode doesn't pause the game, multiple roommates can be building and buying at the same time on a lot, objects on the lot are now owned by individuals not the household, you can select environmental options for the lot (background sound effects, lighting, time of day), you can control access to your lot (either pick who's allowed to visit or just pick which people are banned from visiting), architecture is much cheaper to buy, and maybe most importantly, you can't use the money cheat.
This last point will highlight one of the largest advantages of roommates in the game. They can give you a tremendous economic head start on players that choose to "go it alone." In addition to this, they will also allow you to keep your lot online longer and earn more visitor bonus (a reward you earn when other players spend time on your lot) as well as upgrade to a larger lot to give you more building room.
Of course, as anyone who's lived with real roommates can tell you, it's not always wine and roses. Each lot has an identified "leader" (the player who bought the lot in the first place). The leader is the only player in a lot with the power to add new roommates or kick out existing ones. A roommate that is "kicked out" from a lot still keeps all the objects they own but any architectural improvements they make stays with the lot (hence the much cheaper architecture). It is in the leader's best interest to attract roommates and maintain a stable environment for them to contribute to the success of the lot.
From the design point of view, we want to balance the game against these two dynamics (cooperation and competition) at each of the levels (lot, neighborhood, clubs, etc) of the game. By putting players in a situation where they are spending about half of their time in each mode, I think we'll end up with a dynamic online world that has the richest social experience of any interactive entertainment product to date.
Will Wright
Creator of SimCity™ and The Sims™
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