The Sims 3 Addresses Materialism With New Gameplay Mechanics

When you’ve created a game series that’s sold more copies than any other PC game ever, you’re likely to attract some attention if your game contains a questionable value. The value in question is the emphasis placed on materialism in The Sims. When you’re trying to take care of your Sim, it tends to be happiest when you buy it expensive toys, valuable furniture, rare paintings, and fancy clothes. Everything will come to them naturally after that including friends, career advancement, and happiness [1].

Since The Sims 3 is still in the works, researchers and critics haven’t had much time to evaluate how it will address this issue. However, there is enough information about the games’ features to see that the developers are trying to change the emphasis away from “having lots of stuff.”

The game will allow you to choose goals for your character which range from small tasks that you could accomplish in a casual sitting to long-term projects which may take a while to achieve [2]. The player may abandon these goals and get new ones at any time. The rewards for completing these goals are meant to be the new focus for the player including perks such as free meals or a special knack for achieving romantic relationships. This draws the player away from saving up to buy new things and turns them towards their goals. The player may have 500 simoleons saved up and instead of buying a new TV they are likely to spend it towards one of their goals such as impressing the girl down the street with a gift. Even if the goals do require the player to buy expensive things to accomplish them, buying those things would now have purpose other than simple materialism.

The second game feature that tries to draw attention away from materialism is the way in which a Sim’s mood is handled. Rather than having to micro-manage bars indicating hunger, social, and hygienic needs, the Sim is rewarded for doing things that make it happy and punished for doing things it dislikes. This allows the Sim to find happiness in things other than expensive toys. A Sim that has the trait of ‘natural cook’ would get more pleasure from preparing a meal than from buying an expensive robot that does the cooking for it. A Sim can have many of these traits and that list does include ‘materialistic’, so while the option to love expensive things is still there, it doesn’t have to be that way for everyone.