This new wave of life sims should take inspiration from Minecraft and Fortnite

polygon.com:

It’s been 10 years since The Sims 4 was released, and there hasn’t really been anything else like it since. The Sims games have only really competed with each other — but that could change. Several Sims-like games are in active development, announced within the past several years: Paralives, Life By You (now delayed), inZOI, and an unnamed life simulator from Midsummer Studios. (We can’t forget Project Rene, which is the codename for Electronic Arts and Maxis’ The Sims 5.) While The Sims 4 has been a paragon of emergent player stories, this recent wave of life simulators may have been inspired by something else: Roblox, Fortnite, and PUBG: Battlegrounds, perhaps.

Though it’s been popularized in recent years, “emergent narrative” was coined by game designer Marc LeBlanc at the Game Developers Conference in 2000, but it’s taken on new life in recent years with the popularity of games like battle royales PUBG and Fortnite, sandbox game Minecraft, and hyper-focused sims on Roblox, like Laundry Simulator. As LeBlanc defined it, “emergent narrative” refers to stories that come out of game events. “A game’s fantasy gives meaning to the narrative,” he wrote on a PowerPoint slide of the GDC presentation. The emergent narrative “occurs as short vignettes,” he added. With the spotlight on these buzzy new games, people began to notice players creating their own compelling, engaging stories — building something themselves around what’s happening in-game on their own terms, outside of what was intended.

It’s an obvious thing to expect from a game like The Sims 4, which lets players create characters and live out unique stories in a set environment. It’s a little more surprising to see these sorts of stories emerge from games like Fortnite or PUBG, which can be misunderstood as nothing else but shooter games. The reality is that, even in these stricter environments, stories emerge as players interact with each other: An ongoing story about the Fortnite island is happening as it