I must say I’m not too excited about SimCity Societies. But this trailer made it slightly interesting:

I will probably be a bad pirate and download it when it comes. If it is any good I’l buy it. And that means if I want to play it after trying it. Most games I don’t want to play once I’ve seen them nowadays. They are too transparent to me. Too predictable. I know what will happen if I do this and that, and that is no fun. When the way to success lies only in endurance of the game… where’s the fun?

I want games to be unpredictable, full of exploration of my own (and perhaps others) mind. I want them to give me something to think about. And I want to feel like I’m creating something. Building something up…

Am I a typical girl, or is it only me that wants this from games?

I do know that girls tend to like different games than boys. And when they seem to like the same game… if you listen to them when they explain why, there tend to be a huge difference.

Take for instance my small cousins when they were 2 years old and played with those train-on-track thingies (they weren’t 2 at the same time). The boy built some tracks pretty fast. That was not the important part to him. He even forgot to build an ending to the bridge, wich made the train fall and all the carriages flew in different directions. This was very funny to him, and he made the train go over the edge over and over again. The girl however, she spent an eternity building tracks and imagining what it would be like when the train went there. She made sure the tracks were properly connected and put the train together carefully.

See the difference? Same game, but played so differently!

I’ll admit, I released the giant lizzard pretty often when I was plaing SimCity (the first one, for mac). But mostly because I cared more about the cute noises it made than the city… =)

Hmmm… what was my point? Was there one?

I think I wanted to explain something about what girls want from games. Because there seems to be a total lack of understanding of this subject in game creators minds. How is that even possible? I mean, The Sims was a huge hit, but noone seems to understand why.

I can tell you what I think. It’s because the game lets you create. It lets your imagination free. It lets you think about stuff you’ve never considered. It lets you imagine how it would be to live your life completely different. Not that you would want to, but why do we only get one life when our mind is ready for hundreds?

Oh, and you can play it in so many different ways. You don’t even have to play it. You can just toy with it. You can take all the cheatcodes and make pretty much what you like. Your imagination is the limit. And that is not even true! If your mind is blank and you go into the game, your imagination will get dragged along a path that you never thought was possible.

But most people focus on the gameplay and try to figure out why all girls like to send their little bunch of polygons to the loo and then off to the kitchen cooking dinner… Hey guys! That’s not the point! That’s just a touch of realism in our fantasyworld!

Anyways. This went on far enough. I have to go… um… imagining stuffs now! =)