The Sims Online was just a little too close to reality for a virtual world

Weeks after the closing of EA-land, formerly known as The Sims Online (TSO), the head of the Sims Division at EA is hinting at a multiplayer future for this popular life-simulating strategy game. Isn’t she, like Merlin, getting the timeline backwards?

Surely the bestselling computer game of all time would have experienced a smoother transition from single- to multiplayer, especially a game with a social needs bar; friendless Sims end up moping around on the couch and experiencing Social Bunny hallucinations. Yet TSO was poorly received.

The fact that EA had nixed user-created content and turned a multitude of flexible worlds into one persistent world did not help. Most disappointingly, the necessities of eating, sleeping, and acquiring career skills ended up overshadowing what should have been the central aspect of TSO: socialization. After five years of stagnation, TSO was demoted to EA-land in February, then closed down altogether last month.

Mere emoticons and asterisk-enclosed actions don’t cut it for everyone. Fellow conversationalists seem more real if their avatars can visibly laugh, shrug, weep, grin, or even just sit there.

At the same time, there’s a necessary element of unreality in virtual worlds. Although the real world doesn’t allow you to walk up to someone and click “flirt” over and over, reach the “propose” option half an hour later, and start a new family over the course of an evening that strikes me as a little too close to home for many players. The life-simulating MMORPG presents a paradox of the real and the unreal.

Why does World of Warcraft have 10 million active players while Second Life has only about thirty thousand? My guess: people prefer to visualize themselves as powerful conjurers rather than as human beings. When we interact in human form, the corresponding human fantasies pushing themselves out into the open—the sudden significance of sexual preference, the out-of-the-blue professions of love—might be harder to deal with than any challenge a WoW raid could present.