Videogames: The Sims FreePlay part 1 - Language & Audience

Language / Gameplay analysis

1) What elements of gameplay are shown?
Some of the gameplay is shown
- House customisation
-Playing with pets
-Finding true love/ romance
-Having children
-Town
-Dancing

2) What audience is the trailer targeting?
The audience is targeted predominantly towards females through the colour scheme used and the font shows femininity.
Target age is around 11+. Targeting more teenagers and young adults so they can create a life that they could wish to live or live through the game.

3) What audience pleasures are suggested by the trailer?
Diversion- The game makes the player forget about their reality by looking after the reality in the game.
Personal Identity- They can relate to the character they make. Could customize the character to them personally.
Personal Relationship- Will form a bond with the character they make.

Walk-through of the beginning of The Sims FreePlay

1) How is the game constructed?
The game is constructed where the player has to first make a character and create a house. Then they complete the task to level up and try to gain simoleons to unlock different features.

2) What audience is this game targeting?
Female Audience- Fewer choices for the male character

3) What audience pleasures does the game provide?
Diversion- Dressing up the character and customizing their house. Doing the different tasks
Personal Identity- Creating the character to base from the player's interest

4) How does the game encourage in-app purchases?
Purchase LPs to speed the times
Branding- Through the tasks

Audience
Read this App Store description and the customer reviews for The Sims FreePlay and answer the following questions:

1) What critics reviews are included in the game information section?

Amazing game

I’ve been playing the sims since 2015 and I love it! It’s definitely one of my favorite games, if not my favorite!I would also like better clothes. The teen wardrobe is exceptionally atrocious. Also, in my earlier years with the game, I would rarely have LP because it costs so much to age up sims, and by the time I had 5 LP it was time for one of my sims to age up 

Lover of the game right here!!

I absolutely loveee freeplay! So addicting.
when you are doing a quest, some of the things you need to do can take hours!
If you could make actions quicker, you won’t run out of time for the quest and it would be so much easier than counting down the seconds, minutes, or hours!

Social disconnect!

Hey!

First off, I love this game! 

doing what I previously mentioned and holding my sim for the rest of the 24 hours unless I end task

 I do wish pre teens and toddlers had more hobbies, especially with items to collect for LP and XP 



2) What do the reviews suggest regarding the audience pleasures of The Sims FreePlay?
How it resembles real life
Designing houses
Lots to do - hobbies etc


3) How the reviews reflect the strong element of participatory culture in The Sims?
The reviews show how the audience has an influence on the game and what they critique can be taken by The Sims and updated.

Participatory culture

Read this academic journal article - The Sims: A Participatory Culture 14 Years On. Answer the following questions:

1) What did The Sims designer Will Wright describe the game as?
‘a train set or a doll’s house where each person comes to it with their own interest and picks their own goals’

2) Why was the development company Maxis initially not interested in The Sims?
The board of directors thought that ‘dollhouses were for girls, and girls didn’t play video games’

3) What is ‘modding’?
A culture where players were able to modify game assets by manipulating the game code with the sanction of the rights owners and to share their new creations via personal websites and online

4) How does ‘modding’ link to Henry Jenkins’ idea of ‘textual poaching’?
The fans add content that they want to improve the game for them.

5) Look specifically at p136. Note down key quotes from Jenkins, Pearce and Wright on this page.
‘The original Sims series has the most vibrant emergent fan culture of a single-player game in history’

6) What examples of intertextuality are discussed in relation to The Sims? (Look for “replicating works from popular culture”)
Anime, star wars

7) What is ‘transmedia storytelling’ and how does The Sims allow players to create it?
A process where the primary text encoded in an official commercial the product could be dispersed over multiple media, both digital and analogue in form

8) How have Sims online communities developed over the last 20 years?
The internet means the community can connect across with the globes.

9) Why have conflicts sometimes developed within The Sims online communities?
Been conflicts between creators and non-creators; between creators who wish to charge
money for their mods and those who wish to share them for free; even between players and Maxis/EA itself.

10) What does the writer suggest The Sims will be remembered for?
Creativity. Ability to tell stories.


Read this Henry Jenkins interview with James Paul Gee, writer of Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010).

1) How is ‘modding’ used in The Sims?
modding is the force that sustains a passionate affinity space that builds artistic, technical, social, and emotional skills

2) Why does James Paul Gee see The Sims as an important game?
The Sims is a real game and a very important one because it is a game that is meant to take people beyond gaming. She helped me see how women play and design is not "mainstream" (see comments above) but cutting edge, the edge of the future.

3) What does the designer of The Sims, Will Wright, want players to do with the game?
Empower people to think like designers, to organize themselves around the game to become learn new skills that extend beyond the game, and to express their own creativity.

4) Do you agree with the view that The Sims is not a game – but something else entirely?
To some extent, The Sims is a game because it has conventions of being a game however the freedom and power the game holds allowing the user to be the most in control and through modding how much the fundamentals of the game can change it is also quite different to a game.

5) How do you see the future of gaming? Do you agree with James Paul Gee that all games in the future will have the flexibility and interactivity of The Sims?
Depends on the genre and type of game as all games cannot have this much flexibility and interactivity as it must defeat the purpose of the game.

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