Rod Humble worked for years at EA and was involved in The Sims 2 and 3. According to him, many men lied during surveys about in-game activities.
In life simulations, you can do all sorts of things and test various lifestyles, no matter how far they are from real life.
According to Rod Humble, players need their privacy. In 2010, he finally left EA and is currently working on his own life simulation titled “Life by You”. In it, he wants to avoid collecting in-game data, unlike what is done in the Sims titles.
Surveyed individuals lied about killing and starving Sims
Humble recalls in a conversation with PCGamer about a focus group, a kind of playtest. Young men returned to the room, and Humble asked them what they had just done in “The Sims 3”.
They replied that they had killed people, let them starve, and had affairs with everyone in town. However, they didn’t know they were being watched while playing. “Actually, you just redecorated the bathroom,” one was told.
According to the director, it’s important to be able to experiment but then distance oneself from it.
Here you can see the trailer for Life by You:
According to Humble, players sometimes want distance from their Sims
“When you hear us talking about playing a life simulation, we often switch between first and third person,” says Humble. He finds it important to adopt different perspectives to experiment without immediately identifying with the character being played.
In the upcoming title Life by You, it should be possible to switch to first-person perspective and control the character from their viewpoint. However, players can always switch back to third person and gain some distance.
Additionally, Humble reveals more details about gameplay in his interview with PCGamer: players should be able to customize the distribution of Sims via pie charts. They can decide which Sims have which skin color, gender, or sexual orientation.
For example, EA knows how many millions of “WooHoos” were made in The Sims 4 last year. The developers collect such and similar data, but Rod Humble wants to do without it. “It’s very important for this community nowadays to know that this is a private experience,” he explains.
What do you think about privacy in life simulations? Feel free to let us know in the comments here on MeinMMO!
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