Within the team, we call The Sims “hamsters with jobs” because the idea is that you’ll flip between third and first person a lot, and you’ll look at them as sort of these little weird animals that you can’t understand, but you also know that they’re people. And a lot of SIMS players will talk about that, which is, if they tell you a story, they will say something like, “Yeah, I was playing ‘The SIMS’ and I went on a date, but my SIM messed it up, and so he went home.” And it’s this change from something I inAsmussenStigted to, “but the SIM messed it up” you know, had a free will. And we, whenever we feel that we’re all first person or all third-person with those little avatars that you make, we try and correct that balance because we like that tension. So within “The SIMS” the avatar is a…an emotional investment in a little creature that looks like a human that you’ve created and you’ve followed that life from birth to death. I’d say with other games, quite often it can be an aspirational character, or um, a hero from regular storytelling which is also perfectly appropriate. The, you can also have abstract avatars…it’s a pretty big cliché, but people got it, is when I did a game about a marriage and I had a blue square and a pink square, everyone knew what they were. There was no ambiguity there; it’s not very subtle. So you can have avatars which are as simple as a square. I think video games are interesting in that a lot of their heroes are non-human; they’re kind of these weird cartoony creatures, and I’m not sure what that says about video games, but I think its interesting, but yeah, people have no problem playing a rabbit. “Yeah, it’s a rabbit, its got a bazooka, and you know, a jetpack.” Obviously. Why wouldn’t that be the case? So I think that’s interesting. Owes a lot to cartoons, I’m sure.
