Making the Sims Into Neighbors You Can Relate To

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The Sims lets players choose characters and create lives for them,
selecting everything from when they sleep to what their bathroom looks
like (“Sims” is short for “simulated”). Introduced in 2000, and updated
in 2004, it became the best-selling line of PC-based video games in the
world.In The Sims 3, which goes on sale June 2, there are new features. Previously,
players could choose what Sims looked like; now they can choose their
personality traits — neurotic, vain, loves to cook and so on. “What
they want from life is determined by their personality traits,” said
Benjamin Bell, the game’s executive producer. “We really felt
like the ability to create human beings, to give them a soul if you
will, was really exciting, so we wanted to come up with some ways that
people could define the personalities of their character,” Mr. Bell
said.And while the characters lived in a single household in
earlier versions, they now live in a town. The game supplies characters
that also live in the town, but players can create new citizens, change
the existing ones, or remove them and replace them with, say, replicas
of the cast of “Lost” to see what it is like to live next door to them.•Electronic
Arts executives wanted the marketing campaign to showcase the new
features of The Sims 3, and to get people who might not play the game
to understand what it was about.The focus of the marketing is
online, and beginning Friday, Electronic Arts will begin offering three
ways for consumers to play with Sims characters on the Web.There will be a free trial available at Sims3.com and at the Sims 3 fan page on Facebook, meant for people who have never played the game before. Another
option, called SimFriend, lets visitors to the Web site pick a Sim pen
pal from among 120 characters, and that pen pal will send e-mail
messages. For example, a Sim might send a message asking what type of
dinner she should cook for her boyfriend, and the fan picks from
options like “Cook an elegant meal.” The e-mail chain would continue,
tailored to the Sim’s personality and skills. “If the Sim
happens to be a kleptomaniac chef, the response you get back might be,
‘Thanks, I went and stole food today,’ when what you’re expecting is
‘Thanks, I just had lunch,’ ” said John Buchanan, senior director of
worldwide marketing for the Sims line at Electronic Arts.The
third option is called SimSidekick. A fans chooses from 6 characters on
the Web site, and an image of the character that is chosen floats on
top of the browser as the fan moves around the Web. The character has site-specific responses to sites that Electronic Arts has chosen, like MTV.com, YouTube, and Twitter.
On Twitter, for instance, where the mascot is a bird, a flock of
bluebirds descends on the character, and, depending on its personality,
the character will jump, wave his or her hands, or respond in some
other way. On other sites, the SimSidekick software looks for
the category of the Web site, like travel or news, and the character
responds appropriately, acting like a sports fanatic on a site like ESPN.com, or looking like he’s searching for something on Google.com.The effort is reminiscent of what Skittles, the Mars
candy brand, did this year with its Web site, showing a floating
Skittles graphic on top of the browser that took visitors to the
brand’s photos on Flickr or product pages on Facebook.Sims characters will also come to life on the Viacom sites MTV.com, VH1.com and AddictingGames.com,
a game site, on June 2. Characters will move around text and graphics
on pages of the sites. The game will also be promoted through an iPhone
sampler application, available now (the full game will be available for
purchase and play on the iPhone or iTouch on June 2; a Macintosh
version will also be available then). Freestyle Interactive in San
Francisco, part of the Isobar division of Aegis, worked on the digital
advertising efforts.But measuring whether these efforts are a
hit or a flop is a challenge for Electronic Arts, which, like other
marketers, hasn’t quite determined how to assess social media
advertising. As Microsoft
marketing executive Mich Mathews said at the annual 4A’s advertising
conference last month, a result like 100,000 views of a YouTube video
doesn’t mean very much. “I would confess, though, we look at it: ‘Is
that a good number or not a good number?’ ” she said. Mr.
Buchanan said that Electronic Arts would look closely at Web site
traffic, advance sales and game sales, along with monitoring how
consumers were reacting to the game in online discussions. “We’ll be
able to get closer to measuring what’s working and not working, but
there’s still a little bit of art in identifying performance in the new
media space, versus being all science,” he said.In print and
television, the ads will emphasize the new features of The Sims 3.
Along with the town setting and the personality traits, it will be the
first time that players can minutely adjust features like the
squareness of a character’s chin, the depth of its eyes, or its weight
. The campaign’s tagline is “Let There Be Sims.”•“It’s
referring to the fact that there are almost little people that live in
your computer, and because of these new personalities and traits, they
have a life of their own and do what they want,” said Aaron Allen, a
creative director at Wieden + Kennedy, which created the print and
television ads. One TV ad shows a house on fire and people stealing a
television — to appeal to the subset of Sims players known
affectionately as deviants — and then, for the romantics, a couple
finding one another.“The Sims is all about the characters, and
it’s characters that are written into the game and characters you
create, and every interaction you have, you get a different response,”
said Ian Schafer, the chief executive of the digital-marketing firm
Deep Focus, which did not work on the campaign. “That’s the beauty of
the game, and that’s the beauty of the campaign,” He said.

Aj kako su slatki ovi simsi, ali mi se neda citat sve ovo,
sad kako gledam njihove slike, nikako ne mogu cekat