One of the reasons people play Life Sims is that they provide an unassuming way to explore self-identity, says Rod Humble, former president of The Sims Studio. Players can experiment with lifestyles and experiences that interest them, but if they feel uncomfortable, they can always hit the escape button, deciding that they are playing a game about their Sim, not as themselves. According to Humble, this tendency toward experimentation and withdrawal was fully evident during the focus groups.

"Remember, I just saw these people playing the game," Humble told me.

Humble has not been working on The Sims for some time now and is currently working on a new life sim called Life by You. When I spoke with him at GDC last week, he mostly avoided direct references to the EA series, but it is clear that he was referring to "The Sims" when describing the fabrication of these focus groups.

"I remember a group of young people," Humble said, "who were all talking about The Sims. And I said, 'Hey, what did you do? But actually, what you did was redecorate the bathroom, right? There's this idea that there are a few things you should say you're doing, but actually, no, I'm cooking, I'm building a house."

This was not just a rambling observation about the outdated Sims 3 market research, but the main focus of our conversation: Humble's new game, Life by You, is a life sim where people may not necessarily want to admit, even to themselves, that what they are doing in a life sim It is built on the understanding that people may not necessarily want to admit what they are doing in a lifesim, even to themselves, or at least want the option to feel that it is the people in their sim who are making the decisions, not them. Humble calls this a desirable "tension" inherent in the genre.

"When you hear us talk about playing a lifesim, we often alternate between first and third person. "I asked Jeffrey out on a date, he went on a date, and my guy screwed it up. Then it changes between "me as the player" and "my agent did something." That tension is the magic of life simulation. I go back and forth between whether I'm playing the person or the little creature I'm distancing myself from."

In Life By You, you can literally switch to a first-person perspective, directly controlling any character on the street, exploring the open world and making decisions as them or on their behalf, depending on the metaphorical perspective you adopt. However, you can always escape to a third-person, overhead perspective. There, the inhabitants of the customizable town will not break the fourth wall to acknowledge you or your giant godhand.

Along with individual character customization, Humble said, players can override their town's default gender, sexual orientation, age, and skin color distributions and adjust pie charts to create custom demographics. Players can create something that is representative of where they live, for example, or a town where everyone is in love with a certain person, or where everyone is gay. Non-binary and trans identities can also be represented, Humble confirmed to me.

Given the idea that players might want plausible deniability for what they do in a life sim, Humble excluded certain things from Life by You. For example, that's why EA knows that there were 289 million "WooHoo "s (open in new tab) across "Sims 4" games last year. Many games do it and the responsible game asks you before sending you anything, but Humble decided it was better to eliminate it altogether.

"In this day and age, it's very important for this community to know that this is a private experience," Humble told me.

"There is no telemetry in the game that collects data that would go to a hostile government, for example.

While there is no particular reason to believe that Sims 4 telemetry data could be leaked, and Humble himself did not directly mention the series in this context, the fact that he considered the issue from a player's perspective and chose to do it in a way that would protect privacy as much as possible, namely by not telemetering Some people should be reassured by the fact that he has considered the issue from the player's point of view and has chosen to do it in the most privacy-preserving way possible, i.e., without telemetry at all. There is no such thing as perfect data security.

Last week at GDC, I also spoke to Humble about sex mods (he is in favor of mods). It's a cool, yet dangerously ambitious game.