You're in charge of the second most popular videogames franchise in the western world in recent years. Your studio produces a game so big - both in terms of sales and in terms of cachet - that it's actually become a label in its own right within the world's biggest third-party publisher. In total, it's sold 95 million pieces of software in twenty-two languages since its inception, and come to think of it, it's the only PC gaming property that's actually bigger than Blizzard's Warcraft juggernaut.
Nobody is denying that Rod Humble, the man in charge of EA's Sims studio in sunny Redwood Shores, is in a rather enviable position. The veteran developer, who moved into EA - and the Sims unit - after a long stint working on the EverQuest franchise for Sony Online Entertainment, is at the helm of a franchise whose success runs so deep as to defy description.
No game whose audience is 62 per cent female and only 21 per cent under 17 - with a heavy bias for the over-45s - could comfortably be called "hardcore". Yet equally, can a game for which hundreds of thousands of pieces of user-created content have been uploaded, with four million active online users on the community site every month, really be called "casual"?
The Sims, then, is a phenomenon - one which defies conventional analysis as a videogame. Which means that for all that Humble's position is enviable, it's also challenging - because when it came to creating the next instalment in the series, he and the team at Redwood Shores were facing questions about game design that no other game had ever posed.
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