Sim Nation

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When The Sims Online launches in December, the private dramas of the Sims will emerge on a much larger stage. Instead of Simming alone on their computers, players will connect to central servers over the Internet, where their Sims will coexist and interact in a shared three-dimensional virtual world. In The Sims Online, each player will control a character who lives with, talks to and works for other Sims, all of whom will be controlled by other players, all living together in simulated cities in a simulated country on the Internet. In effect, it's a vast virtual society built from the state of nature up.

To live in that virtual world there is a one-time fee of $49.95 for the software, and the player-inhabitants of The Sims Online will then fork over $9.95 a month for access to its servers. Based on pre-orders, Electronic Arts expects to have "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers at launch.

Experiencing The Sims Online is less like playing a game than taking part in an open-ended community theater production, where the dialogue is improvised, the theme is modern life and the star is you. As in the original game, players control the behavior of their characters by choosing from menus of actions and interactions. (Unlike in The Sims, they can also type messages to one another in real time.) The primary goal is similar to the original as well — you want your Sim to be happy — but there's a new emphasis on making friends and setting up a successful business, like a coffeehouse or a nightclub. If other people like your business, you'll make more money and more friends.

Life in this Simerica has a dreamlike quality: the elements are familiar but scrambled. In a typical session you may walk into a stranger's home in the middle of the night, grab a shower in the bathroom (never mind that his wife is using the toilet), practice the piano for a while, then start making and selling pizzas out of your host's kitchen. In the trial beta version of the game, which currently has around 35,000 participants, Wright plays a Sim who is the proprietor of a lounge located in a submarine. It's called Das Love Boat (he describes it, not very helpfully, as "a German U-boat with a romantic-comedy theme.")

But it's not all surreal chaos. To a greater extent than the original game, The Sims Online has built-in group activities to encourage people to get together and socialize. It's built right into the simulated psychology. Call it "simbiosis": your Sim won't be happy if it's not hanging out with other Sims. In The Sims Online, nice guys really do finish first. "We're giving the players a blank slate, a blank world," says Wright. "We want people to try to build a large, diverse world, so we're tailoring our reward structures to encourage the kind of world people will want to be in." You can see the outlines of a fantasy America emerging, one that's touchingly utopian and crassly commercial at the same time.

Not that Wright is opposed to making a buck or two in the real world. The Sims Online belongs to an emerging category of computer games that use the Internet to put players into a three-dimensional shared virtual world. These games can be ferociously addictive: the most successful example of the genre, Sony's Everquest, is known to its player-inhabitants as "Evercrack."

Wright's real challenge will be to expand beyond the nerdy niche of hard-core gamers that currently constitutes his audience and start attracting the mainstream. To do that, he'll have to overcome the, shall we say, stigma still attached to computer games and the people who play them. "It's like watching somebody watch television," says Wright. "Until you have the controller in your hand, it's hard to understand the appeal." But he's confident that in the next decade, as more and more people grow up playing video games, they will take their rightful place beside books and movies as a form of recognized mass entertainment.

And why shouldn't they? The Sims Online might be exactly what America needs right now: a virtual sandbox where we can play out our fantasies and confront our fears about what America might become. "One of our long-term goals is that we want to see the players evolve their own governance," says Wright. "We're going to let the whole thing grow from the bottom up, see what the players want. As structures get larger and larger, we'll give them more and more power." And you thought midterm elections were interesting. Can we look forward to electing a virtual President of Simerica? "Or a committee?" Wright muses. "Or a dictator? It will be interesting to see if people replay history or come up with something new."