What is "The Sims"?

You've undoubtedly heard of the original Sims game, but unless you've actually played it, the whole concept is probably fairly mystifying. So, before we take a look at the sequel, let's stop a moment for the uninitiated. Just what is "The Sims" anyway?

Simply put, "The Sims" is a computer-based dollhouse, filled with dolls that pay attention to what you want, but also do things of their own accord. To play the game, first you create a sim (or several sims), by picking out a body, dressing it, and assigning it personality traits. You start off with a certain amount of money, which you use to build a house for your sim(s) and buy assorted things (furniture, TVs, etc.). You plop your sim down in the house, and start telling it what to do. You tell it when to eat, when to bathe, when to clean, when to go to the bathroom, who to talk to, etc. Your sim will also do what it wants to do, however, and it may not get around to your requests right away. It has a mind of its own.

There is no essential goal, and there is no way to "win." If you want your sim to be happy, you might try to keep a good balance of TV-watching, socializing, reading, and you make sure it gets to work on time every day and lives in a clean house. If you want your sim to be rich, you might focus on developing new job skills (by making it read books, for example). If you want your sim to be miserable, you don't build a bathroom in its house -- or a TV, or a bed -- and you never have it clean up.

The secret behind all this is an innovative use of artificial intelligence (AI). The term artificial intelligence can mean a lot of different things, but in this case, it means complex computer code that makes sims do certain things based on their assigned personality characteristics and what things have happened to them in the game. In other words, the code makes sure various actions have logical reactions: If a sim doesn't eat, it dies. If a Sim doesn't talk to other sims, it gets unhappy and won't do much of anything.

By building in tons of these pre-wired connections and giving the player hundreds of chances to create new situations for the sims, the game developers created a world that seems to carry on as if it was alive. At the conceptual level, "The Sims" is an elaborate machine built to react in expected and unexpected ways every time you give it new input.

To make "The Sims 2" bigger than "The Sims," Maxis, logically enough, created more types of input for the player and expanded the range of things that might happen in response to that input. In the next section, we'll take a look at the major new additions.