EA to launch Sims Stories

Electronic Arts Inc announced a new line of video games called "The Sims Stories" aimed at the laptop-toting youth market as it strives to deliver a bigger proportion of titles based on more lucrative company-owned material.

Players of "The Sims" control virtual people called Sims as they sleep, eat, cook, socialise, buy things and work.

"The Sims" is the No. 1 franchise at EA, the world's biggest video game publisher, which has sold more than 70 million games globally since 2000. It also has a broader audience than most games. Half of its players are female -- unlike most commercial video game audiences, who are mostly male.

"The Sims Life Stories" is the first in the new series and is due in the United States and Europe in the first week of February.


"The Sims Pet Stories" and "The Sims Castaway Stories" are scheduled to ship in mid-2007 and late 2008, respectively.

EA aims to use the new titles to expand the "Sims" audience to more casual players and is targeting multitasking MySpace teens and consumers in their early 20s with the new games.

"The Sims Life Stories" has a comic-romantic plot and offers a new story mode, which runs through 12 chapters of a set story line, while also supporting the franchise's traditional open style of play.

All of "The Sims Life Stories" games are designed to run on laptops and do not require upgraded graphics cards, as many PC games do. The games can also be played for hours or minutes in a window while other programs, such as instant messaging or e-mail, run simultaneously.

The games have a "Teen" rating and will retail for $40.

American Technology Research analyst Paul-Jon McNealy said the franchise-expanding move comes at a time when "The Sims" was due for a refresh and fits in with EA's goal of creating more games with internally owned properties -- which have better margins than games based on licensed material such as films.

It also comes amid changes in the laptop market.

"The laptop market has opened up to a younger demographic in the last seven years," McNealy said.

Video games fulfilling needs

Researchers say they've found another reason why video games are so hard to give up: They may help fulfil basic psychological needs.

In a study published in the January issue of Motivation and Emotion, investigators from the University of Rochester and Immersyve Inc. looked at what motivated 1,000 gamers to keep playing video games.

"We think there's a deeper theory than the fun of playing," lead investigator Richard Ryan, a motivational psychologist at Rochester, said in a prepared statement.

The gamers were divided into four groups, each asked to play different games. They answered questionnaires both before and after playing the games. The researchers used the questionnaires to look at the underlying motives and satisfactions that can spark players' interests and sustain them during play.



More than just mindless fun
The researchers found that the games can provide opportunities for achievement, freedom and even a connection to other players. Those benefits trumped a shallow sense of fun, which doesn't keep gamers as interested. Players reported feeling the best when the games produced positive experiences and challenges that connected to what they knew in the real world.

"It's our contention that the psychological 'pull' of games is largely due to their capacity to engender feelings of autonomy, competence and relatedness," said Ryan. He believes that video games not only motivate further play but "also can be experienced as enhancing psychological wellness, at least short-term."

For the participants who played massively multiplayer online, or MMO, games - which are capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of players simultaneously - the need for relatedness emerged "as an important satisfaction that promotes a sense of presence, game enjoyment and an intention for future play," the researchers found.

Ryan pointed out that while not all video games are able to satisfy basic psychological needs, "those that do may be the best at keeping players coming back." – (HealthDayNews)

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