EA Mulls 'Sims'-Like Interactive TV Show By Adam Pasick LONDON (Reuters) - Reality TV, meet virtual reality. Electronic Arts, the world's biggest video game publisher, is considering an interactive TV show that would let viewers control the actions of the characters as in its popular game "The Sims." "One idea could be that you're controlling a family, telling them when to go to the kitchen and when to go to the bedroom, and with this mechanism you have gamers all over the world 'playing the show'," said Jan Bolz, vice president of marketing and sales for EA Europe. The proposed show, which might involve viewers voting on possible actions, is still in the early stages, but EA confirmed it is in talks with several TV production companies. Bolz declined to disclose any additional details. A TV show would be a major cross-over into popular culture as EA and other video game creators attempt to shed the image of an industry that mostly makes products that target young men. "The Sims" lets gamers control the lives of everyday characters in an elaborate virtual world, and has been particularly successful in reaching out to women, who have traditionally scorned video games. Women account for about 60 percent of the game's more than 36 million sales to date. The "Yourself!Fitness" personal training program for Xbox and the "SingStar Party" karaoke game for PlayStation 2 are two other recent examples of an industry that has reached beyond stereotypical video game subjects, despite the enormous popularity of violent games such as "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas." EA hopes that new platforms like the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) will do even more to broaden the industry's appeal. "I expect a lot from the PSP," said Gerhard Florin, EA's managing director of European publishing. "It's stylish like an iPod and you don't look like a nerdy teenager using it." The next generations of Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation will go even further by giving developers more computational firepower -- often measured in the number of polygons a computer can draw per second -- to invest game characters with realistic emotion, said Rory Armes, managing director of EA's UK studio. "It's the subtleties, the eyes, the mouth -- 5,000 polygons doesn't really sell the emotion. With PS3 and XBox 2, we can go on the main character with 30,000-50,000 polygons," he said. "With that increased firepower, the 'Finding Nemo' video game looks just like the movie, but in real time." Whatever EA's success in navigating the unpredictable currents of popular culture, there will always be people who are simply unwilling to embrace its product. However, Florin is optimistic that time is on his side. "We're not attracting 50-year-old people, but that's okay," he said. "It's a generational question. The world is changing and no one can stop it." var year = new Date() document.write('© Reuters ' + year.getFullYear() + ". All Rights Reserved." ); Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.
Yikes! The TV companies will clutch at any straw to try to recapture their rapidly shrinking audiences. Thanks to games like The Sims my TV is down to one episode of The Simpsons per day and Scrapheap Challenge of a Sunday
LOL At Mirelly and Zooty. As saturated as we are with reality TV, I don't think this will be such a big hit. I mean, doesn't it sound a tad to me like "Big Brother", (at least, the 1st season) because we got to watch live feeds online and vote to control who stayed in the house??
Also, this little bundle reminded me of something else annoying. Games companies are too scared of making games that sell badly to put any effort into making games that don't follow the winning formula of male-oriented violent games. This paragraph includes an especially poignant example of this: San Andreas, an excellent game, follows the formula of blood-spattered masculinity, and those two unspeakable games at the top are offered as examples of thinking outside the box. It's so tedious playing game after game which revolves around combat. I have nothing against violent games per se, and I definately don't see them as being responsible for cultural ills and the like. I just object to a market saturated with uninspired violence-oriented games and dominated by adolescent and postadolescent males. The colossal Sims and Sims 2 franchise is proof that it's not only boys who're interested in playing games, and that it's unnecessary and stupid to restrict games to being formulaic bloodbaths.
