The Sims Online
Game
Documents about The Sims Online
Article
Se i Sims vanno su Facebook
Agata Meneghelli's essay, published in the 2012 inaugural issue of the Italian journal Critical Notes, examines why The Sims Social, launched by Electronic Arts on Facebook in August 2011, achieved rapid success and then lost a substantial share of its audience within months.
- The Sims Social, launched by Electronic Arts on Facebook in August 2011, reached more than 60 million monthly active users and over 10 million daily active users within about a month of launch.
- The game's audience collapsed quickly: by January 2012 it had fallen to roughly 24 million monthly and 4 million daily active users, a loss of more than half its monthly and over 60% of its daily players.
- Meneghelli argues that the success and decline stem from how the franchise's core qualities of interactivity, personalization, and creativity were adapted to Facebook's social, real-time logic, rather than from a statistical measure of player behaviour, since the essay is a qualitative, theory-informed reading.
G|A|M|E – The Italian Journal of Game StudiesMar 2012
Article
MMOGs and the Future of Literature
Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) such as EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies are presented as textual works that can be read as a modern extension of the realist novel.
- The report argues that MMOGs such as EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies can be read as a modern extension of the realist novel, with meaning emerging from the collective actions of thousands of players.
- The central conclusion is that MMOGs have dialogic potential for multiple voices and shared meaning, but publisher control over intellectual property and player "citizenship" suppresses that potential, leaving their realism and social possibilities largely unrealized.
- Virtual worlds are presented as resembling the real one because both lack a fixed plot and are shaped by complex social dynamics, allowing them to function as social critique and models for society.
DiGRAJan 2007