The Sims Community is Different

Okay, I’m not going to post about the glitches, missing features, and other problems in the forum itself. We all know what those are.  I would just like to amplify something that maybe needs to be taken more seriously by those who decide these things, and that is this: the Sims game is completely different from the others here, and so is the Sims gaming community.

I took some time to look at the boards for the other EA games on the forum, and we simmers are definitely having the most difficulty with the switch. My perspective is that forum interaction and community is directly related to the way the game is played, and the Sims is not like the others. This type of forum is fine when gameplay and community are centered around gaining levels, adding in-game allies or friends, getting performance tips, or raising gameplay related questions. Those types of interactions are the basis of the community for those types of games, because the game has structure. There’s only so much to discuss.

A sandbox game like The Sims doesn’t fit in that box. The game itself is open ended. It can be anything we want it to be, and one person’s game is not like anyone else’s. That kind of player directed, open ended game requires a community format that is also open ended and user directed. It needs a loose structure that allows players to share the wide range of possibilities the game gives us.

This forum cannot do this. Big, continuous topics with multiple people sharing stories and screenshots are a staple of the Sims community, and after a matter of only weeks, this forum is breaking under the weight of those long threads. On the old forum, we had topics that were years old, still going strong. Conversational topics, idea threads, creative threads and social threads are being buried under long loads, “see more” scrolling and nested replies that don’t allow a natural flow of ideas and communication.  My own “Blue Moon” thread is becoming difficult to maintain because I can’t even tell where the new responses are, in order to respond back.

While this forum seems to suit games like Star Wars, it is not functional for a game like the Sims and the community that plays it. The Sims is not Star Wars, and it requires a community format that recognizes the difference.