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After watching all 35 minutes of the Spore video demo and reading Brian's post about it today, I was reminded why I think that all the recent games Maxis has made (and other Sim games) have just been no good.

Let me start by saying what I like about early Maxis games. The first Sim City, Sim Tower, Sim Ant, they all had this end goal that you were reaching for, at which point you could say that you had "beaten" the game (be it that Megagopolis, Five Star Tower, or the entire backyard and house, respectively). And, while there was this lack of narrative inherent in all Sim games, the aforementioned titles were short and simple enough that you didn't have to put much time or effort in to get a lot out of them. They were fun and entertaining, and that's all a video game has to be.

But when things started getting more complex, the fun and entertainment slowed way down, and the feeling of working ramped up. As early as Sim City 2000 I stopped playing the Maxis Sim games, because it was just too complex. I thought that managing power lines was enough for utility oversight, I didn't want to worry about water pipes as well. When games start to approach real life too much for all the management and overhead that goes into playing them, I back off and stop playing.

The end game also became less clear. To get to wherever I was going (and I often had no clue as to what my final goal was) I had to put in more time and effort into a system that was increasingly complex, and eventually just downright boring.

The Sims is really the peak of this trend. The game is probably the best selling game of all time (if you include the expansion packs), but I absolutely can't stand it. I may be a hardcore gamer, with tolerance for extremely challenging and tedious gameplay, but I have never been able to get through more than 5 minutes of continuous playing with The Sims. I kept asking friends who were playing, "What's the point of this game?" And the answers only ranged from "There really isn't one" to "Just to play and be your person!" Well, to me that's dumb circular thinking. In modern Sim games, like The Sims, and what Spore will be, the point of playing is just to further your existence and make your character or society better. There's no point where you can feel satisfied, where you'll ever be satiated, and worst of all, the complexity of the systems makes playing feel like working.

Lastly, there's still no narrative. If there was ever a game experience killer for me, it's that one. I can see the value of something like RPG Maker as a tool, but it's not really a game, per se. In that same way, The Sims, Spore, Black & White, and most MMORPGs fail to make me want to play them. In fact, I've tried a lot of games like that and never once got hooked.

The point of a good game is that the creators have done the work of the story telling for you, and even if you customize your character and grow along the way, the idea is that you do that to get somewhere. If the point of life was just to be alive and continue living, then why would any of us be here? That'd be so boring, and it'd feel pointless. Besides, I have to work at my life, because I'm trying to grow and tell my own story here in the real world. When I relax with a game, I certainly don't want to have to work at telling the story there too.