Posts tagged the-sims 
The Daily Grind: Should your characters age?
For a genre that prides itself on creating a virtual life for imaginary characters, many elements of real life are conspicuously absent. Like bathrooms. Why don't your characters ever need to go? What would be so wrong about having a third bar under "health" and "mana" titled "bladder?" Okay, bad ...
Academic: games and virtual worlds teach better than teachers
An academic named James Gee told lecture attendees at the Games, Learning, and Society Conference in Wisconsin that game and virtual world developers have a better handle on how to foster "passionate communities for learning" than most teachers do. He used World of Warcraft as an example of ...
The Daily Grind: Realism in MMOs ... good or bad?
When you hear the word "realistic" as it's applied to graphics and/or gameplay, do you cheer or wince? World of Warcraft, Mabinogi, Hello Kitty Online -- these are all titles that make a fantastical graphics aesthetic work well for them. At the same time, Age of Conan, Guild Wars, Tabula Rasa -- ...
EA "thinking about" online features for The Sims, even as EA-Land dies
A recent article in The Times Online offers a few choice phrases from Nancy Smith, the executive in charge of the Sims Division at Electronic Arts, regarding a possible future direction the franchise could take. It begins with Smith saying that the Sims " ... may soon become a multi-player game." ...
TV shows that could be MMOs: Battlestar Galactica
Watching the final season of the new Battlestar Galactica the other night, and getting only a taste of the amazing, chaotic, shaky-cam ship-to-ship action left us wanting more. But even better than a full episode devoted to space combat would be an MMO based in that world. How would that work, you ...
Bridging the gap between MMO and social networking
Think of it as a mix between The Sims and Facebook, with a bit of EVE Online thrown in for good measure. That's our impression of Erepublik so far. Following a recent trend where the target demographic seems to be the casual, browser-based audience, Erepublik enters this niche as an actual strategic ...
The Digital Continuum: MMO-unfriendly games
It's a subject that's been touched on here at Massively not once or twice, but three times. Still, I feel like there's more to be said on the subject of making some non-MMO games into actual MMOs. Being a constant contributor to Massively means I obviously love MMOs, but that doesn't mean they're ...
Molyneux laments the state of PC gaming, blames WoW and The Sims
Gamesindustry.biz has posted an article that features comments from outspoken game designer Peter Molyneux, and his thoughts on the current state of PC gaming -- and he's not awfully happy. The primary causes for his concern are the two enormous PC successes, World of Warcraft and The Sims. While ...
