Simsulating Reality

N’Gai Croal asks the reasonable question, “Should a game whose core audience is teen girls become a movie aimed at teen boys?” The Sims is being made into a bizarre movie that sounds like equal parts Weird Science and Jumanji.  You might suspect that the answer is no.  I won’t disagree with that, but in this particular situation, I think it’s actually sort of irrelevant. 

The main theme of the Sims - the source of its popularity - is the ability to create your own domestic reality and move people through the mundanities of regular life.  People enjoy it because they get to create their own worlds.  Unfortunately, because movies are entirely different media, you can’t do that in a film… you might be able to vicariously enjoy watching someone else do that, but it just wouldn’t be too fun to watch someone recreate the same world you’re in a theater to escape.  So it wouldn’t be possible to make a Sims movie that really captures what women liked about the game.

This leaves open the question of whether or not it made sense for the studio to license the Sims in the first place.  It seems pretty obvious that the answer is no to me.  What about the film made it impossible to create without branding the game that the kids receive “The Sims”?  The only benefit of licensing it is to get people into the theater in the first place, and as Croal points out, there’s no reason to think this will work (not that there was much of one in the first place).  But movie studios have been licensing all sorts of terrible ideas, so it’s not that surprising to see.