I’m thinking back to 1999. After a day of sitting in classes, I had one main motivation in 8th grade to finish my homework as quickly as I could — SimCity 3000. While it wasn’t practical that at age twelve, I’d be able to quit school, start my own town, and become mayor (hey, a girl can dream, right?), SimCity 3000 offered me the closest glimpse of it that I could get.
SimCity 3000 was a simulation game, released in 1999, in which the gamer builds and runs his own city, making every single decision about it from start to finish. Every decision had some kind of consequence, and the gamer was able to tell if he was a good mayor by how populated the city became and by another feature I loved — the news ticker that would scroll at the bottom of the screen, displaying important (or sometimes comical) news about the city.
I loved the game for many different reasons:
1. It offered me an escape from the real world (and, being that I was only 12 at the time, my life was ruled by taking orders from adults). In turn, I got to create my own little world in which I called all the shots. I had power over something!
2. It was fun to see what would happen in the city even based on what seemed to be the smallest decisions.
3. I got to create my ideal city, which consisted of theme parks in almost every corner that I could squeeze them into, although they always seemed to catch on fire for some reason… (Maybe that’s why my cities never reached a population of more than 200…)
4. I wanted to make better cities than the ones my older brother made, who introduced me to the game.
5. I wanted to make better cities than the ones my friends made, who I introduced to the game.
The reasoning behind my love for the game brings me to think about one of the key ways games catch on (word of mouth or “virality”) and how this has affected the gaming industry and brought us to the point that we are at today. Whatever it is that brings gamers to this sphere (escapism, control, etc.), it’s got them talking.
Word of mouth has the power to make things spread like wildfire, which is exactly how social networking infiltrated our lives. People saw something they liked, such as Facebook and MySpace, and wanted to be able to use it to connect with their friends, so they sent out invites or told them to join, much like how I enjoyed SimCity and wanted to be able to compare my cities with my friends’ simulated cities. We could either take turns on the computer (but a round of SimCity could last a while) or play separately in our own homes and discuss it later.
In comes my 2008 news ticker scrolling, “Melanie, it’s not 1999 anymore.” Now, with gaming, people no longer have to just tell each other about how or what they do in a game. Thanks to the wonders of technology and the Internet, gaming has changed and allowed people to connect in ways they were never able to before and they can share, discuss, and play each other in real time.
What better way to bring passionate gamers together and expand the gaming industry’s reach than by merging it with another global industry, the social web? The idea is beginning to catch on and is a space that will continue to develop as it spreads like the wildfire that is known as word of mouth, but because social gaming is fairly new, there are many questions to be discussed and answered about the sphere. And I think that’s what we’re going to talk about at Interplay. See ya there.
