Life sims are having a moment

It’s been 10 years since The Sims 4 was released, and there hasn’t really been anything else like it since. The Sims games have only really competed with each other — but that could change. Several Sims-like games are in active development, announced within the past several years: Paralives, Life By You (now delayed), inZOI, and an unnamed life simulator from Midsummer Studios. (We can’t forget Project Rene, which is the codename for Electronic Arts and Maxis’ The Sims 5.) While The Sims 4 has been a paragon of emergent player stories, this recent wave of life simulators may have been inspired by something else: Roblox, Fortnite, and PUBG: Battlegrounds, perhaps.

Though it’s been popularized in recent years, “emergent narrative” was coined by game designer Marc LeBlanc at the Game Developers Conference in 2000, but it’s taken on new life in recent years with the popularity of games like battle royales PUBG and Fortnite, sandbox game Minecraft, and hyper-focused sims on Roblox, like Laundry Simulator. As LeBlanc defined it, “emergent narrative” refers to stories that come out of game events. “A game’s fantasy gives meaning to the narrative,” he wrote on a PowerPoint slide of the GDC presentation. The emergent narrative “occurs as short vignettes,” he added. With the spotlight on these buzzy new games, people began to notice players creating their own compelling, engaging stories — building something themselves around what’s happening in-game on their own terms, outside of what was intended.

It’s an obvious thing to expect from a game like The Sims 4, which lets players create characters and live out unique stories in a set environment. It’s a little more surprising to see these sorts of stories emerge from games like Fortnite or PUBG, which can be misunderstood as nothing else but shooter games. The reality is that, even in these stricter environments, stories emerge as players interact with each other: An ongoing story about the Fortnite island is happening as it shifts and changes, but each of its players is creating their own stories in the moments between and within battles. The objective — winning a battle royale, for instance — is always the same, but each player will reach that objective in their own way. It’s a similar experience with Minecraft: The first goal is simply to survive, but the game builds out so much more from there — eventually, your goal may be to wrangle villagers into a community or to build a working Game Boy. Anything can happen.

It might sound like a wild idea, but the next wave of life sims could pull some inspiration from the likes of Fortnite and PUBG and their emergent narratives. Even Epic Games itself is going the way of bringing this kind of storytelling out of Fortnite and into other worlds. The special kind of player-driven storytelling that Fortnite and PUBG offer may be what makes the next generation of life sims games a way to stand out — by adding more parameters, there’s room for greater creativity.

Jake Solomon, Midsummer Studios co-founder and former XCOM design lead, announced the new studio and its unnamed project earlier this year — right in the midst of the life sims boom that saw several others in the genre announced over the past few years. “I felt pretty clever about a year ago when I wanted to make a life sim,” Solomon told Polygon via email. “Now there are 3 or 4 really compelling games in development that are doing exactly that. But I don’t believe games are ever a zero sum environment, in fact I think having more life sims will actually help revitalize a big, arguably underserved audience. Gamers are used to having choice, and that makes us as developers better.”

Emergent narrative is the big buzzword around the game: It’s the studio’s “specialization” that’ll help it stand apart, Solomon said. It’s pulling from the greats — the likes of Minecraft and The Sims 4 — to provide some guidelines for players to build out from. Sometimes, those guidelines are created by the developer itself; in The Sims 4, for instance, that’s keeping up with your Sims’ needs, i.e., making sure they don’t pee themselves in public. (Or, on the flip side, guaranteeing they do.) Other times, The Sims 4 players are building those guidelines into the game themselves, like with the 100 Baby Challenge: Give birth to 100 babies in as few generations as possible. These parameters set up a world in which a wacky narrative emerges, something that Sims influencers and YouTubers play up. But Midsummer Studios will likely take some of its inspiration from the XCOM franchise, which Solomon previously worked on. Like Fortnite or PUBG, XCOM is known for providing the parameters for creative, player-driven narrative.

Image: Paradox Tectonic/Paradox Interactive

“One, we ask players to choose what kind of story they are trying to tell right at game start (Romance, Family Drama, Town with a Cast of Eccentric Characters), and as a result, we can tailor the cast of characters and the storylines we introduce into the player’s game to support the type of story the player wants,” Solomon said. “Two, we are generating a web of relationships between characters right at the very start of every game so that players are instantly stepping into a ‘narrative rich’ environment rife for telling dramatic storylines. What if your ex-lover was also your coworker? What if your estranged father was your neighbor? And players can, of course, customize these to their heart’s content.”

Like Minecraft or Fortnite, the next generation of life sims needs to pull from emergent storytelling to emphasize the one thing a game can’t thrive without — the players and the stories they create.