Former Sims lead says men would lie about how they played during focus groups: 'Actually, what you did is you redecorated that bathroom'
One reason people play life sims, says former Sims studio head Rod Humble, is that they offer a noncommittal way to explore self-identity. Players can try on lifestyles and experiences they're curious about, but if they feel uncomfortable, they can always hit the eject button by deciding that they're playing a game about their sims rather than as them. That tendency to experiment and then retreat was completely apparent during focus groups, according to Humble, because players would deny doing things he watched them do.
«Remember, we've just watched these people play the game,» Humble told me, «and I had people come out and lie to us, to the whole group, about what they just did.»
Humble hasn't worked on The Sims for a while now—he's currently making a new life sim called Life By You—and he mostly avoided direct references to the EA series when I spoke to him at GDC last week, but it's obvious that he was referring to the Sims when describing these focus group fabrications:
«I remember a bunch of young guys, and they get into the room, it's a mixed room, and we're like, 'Hey, what did you do?' and they're like, 'Murdered people. Went in and starved people, had sex with everybody in the town.' But actually, what you did is you redecorated that bathroom, right? Like, that's actually what you did. There's this idea that there are some things you should say you're doing, but actually, no, you're cooking, you're making house.»
This wasn't just an idle observation about out-of-date Sims 3 market research, but a major focus of our talk: Humble's new game, Life By You, is built on the understanding that people may not always want to acknowledge what they do in life sims, even to themselves. Humble refers to the phenomenon as an
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