Maxis

Challenge Balance and Diversity: Playing The Sims and The Sims 2

Sara Mosberg Iversen's paper uses the concept of challenge to examine The Sims (2000) and The Sims 2 (2004) as dynamic systems that motivate player activity, rather than as the ideological or cultural artifacts that much prior scholarship has focused on.

• The paper treats The Sims (2000) and The Sims 2 (2004) as dynamic systems that motivate player activity through challenge, rather than as ideological or cultural artifacts as much prior scholarship has done.
• The author classes these people-simulation games as 'borderline' games under a classical definition because they lack clear overall goals or winning conditions, yet argues challenge is a productive framework for understanding them and could support a broader definition of games.
• Challenge is defined experientially as a situation of resistance that calls for transformative action and requires non-trivial effort or has an uncertain outcome.