505001 research-article2013

TVN15110.1177/1527476413505001Television & New MediaWirman

Article

Playing by Doing and Players’ Localization of The Sims 2

Television & New Media 2014, Vol 15(1) 58­–67 © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1527476413505001 tvnm.sagepub.com

Hanna Wirman1

Abstract In this article, I will introduce how and why a group of female game modders (or “skinners”) modify the computer game The Sims 2. I will draw on examples of players’ creations that represent aspects of their Finnish cultural context to illustrate a connection between the game’s encouragement for being productive and for understanding skinning as a form of play. Keywords computer games, participation, gender, new media, identity, popular culture

A young participant in my study of The Sims 2 mostly female game modifiers remarked that creating new objects and other textures for the game was like “hacking with permission.” This assertion was made in a group interview situation after I had brought up the question whether the players’ participation in creating new content for The Sims 2 could be considered in terms of hacking. According to the players, the game makes modifying so easy that “it is almost like the whole idea that people can create the content they wish.” Instead of accepting the implied connection to a masculine domain of technological mediation and resistance, the players pondered “if it is really possible to hack The Sims 2 at all?” In games studies literature, hackerism is seen as a historical backdrop to game modifying (Flowers 2008; Lowood 2006; Sotamaa 2005). After all, modifying is usually about reworking game codes, graphics, or systemic functions in a way that tweaks the original content technically and ideologically. Modifiers are tech-savvy players, who find excitement in not accepting software as a fixed composition. The economic 1The

Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hunghom, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Corresponding Author: Hanna Wirman, Visiting Assistant Professor, School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hunghom, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Email: [email protected]

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and ethical aspects of player input and engagement in game development processes have been thoroughly discussed in terms of players’ cultural capital and the revenue models of the games industry (Banks 2002; Banks and Humphreys 2008; Kücklich 2005; Morris 2003; Nieborg and van der Graaf 2008; Postigo 2003; Sihvonen 2009; Sotamaa 2009). The high degree of user involvement and creativity in what constitutes these cultural texts has blurred the boundaries between designers and end users. Consequently, studies of hackers and fans show that questions of ownership, shared authorship, and even exploitation have become central alongside those of subversion, resistance, and appropriation. While the critical frameworks of fandom and hackerism are sometimes appropriate to describe modifying, they are not adequate (Wirman 2011). Fandom emphasizes production of new texts as something that only fans engage in, but in practice every game player is always partly responsible for the creation of game texts,1 and many games, such as Little Big Planet and The Sims 3, incorporate the creation of new content into their core gameplay. Players do not have to identify as fans to be part of what looks like a fan culture. Understanding game modifying as hackerism, meanwhile, is troubled by the fact that many contemporary games invite and encourage player participation with such an intensity that the practice no longer appears illegitimate or marginal. Some modifications operate only on the “surface” of the game and thus do not change underlying code. From a hacker’s perspective these skins (or graphical details) appear trivial and marginal (Wirman 2011; Forthcoming). The set of conceptual frameworks available to the field of game studies misses the nuances of experiences for the skinners of The Sims 2. My own explorations into player-creativity benefits from media, communication and cultural studies’ perspectives around active audiences, cocreativity, and user-generated content (Dovey and Kennedy 2006; Humphreys 2005; Poremba 2003). In the following pages, I review the characteristics of The Sims 2 that make it particularly appealing to a small group of game modders or skinners, and I explore the ways in which players as national subjects and as women contribute to the game’s success. Finally, I try to address where play is situated in their production practices. The activity of skinning will be framed as a gendered form of leisure that incorporates a type of work that seems to be particularly attractive among women players. My argument here is largely based on a small sample of e-mail correspondences of thirteen The Sims 2 players (Wirman 2012). The participants ranged in age and country of origin, but the majority were teenagers who participated in Radola, an online, Finnish-language forum for The Sims skinners. My primary focus was women players. Although my invitations to participate did not specify preference for females only one male (a fifteen-year-old boy) participated. The e-mail interviews took place between March 2008 and May 2010. Each interview consisted of six to eighteen questions and replies. One group interview with four players was further conducted in Helsinki in 2010.

An Invitation to Skinning The Sims 2 The Sims games have been among the first to successfully mobilize players en masse into being cocreative and has resulted in vast quantities of player-created content.

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Aspects of the game’s play make it particularly attractive for enhancing and extending the digital materials. One fifteen-year-old player wrote “The Sims is the only game I would like to rework, other games I play would just get worse, not better, if I changed something in them :DD” (Simmer 2). This is partly due to the game’s perceived openness. There is no single goal or narrative in the game, although its theme and rules offer the player a limited set of actions and directions to pursue. It is exactly this free form of play and the possibility to initiate one’s own goals that the interviewed players enjoyed. One player wrote that she likes the game “because of the freedom, because you can do what you like to do, and you are not supposed to pass a level—the game kind of never ends” (Simmer 4). Stein (2006, 258) has similarly described The Sims as expansive in nature, well suited to the exploration of fannish themes and to the affirmation of a sense of fully developed characters, and yet at the same time replete with the types and challenges and restrictions within which fannish play flourishes. (cf. Fullerton et al. 2007)

For the interviewees, a lack of closure results in what they described as “gameplay [that] is incredibly liberating, spontaneous and creative” (Simmer 1). Such openness in media texts is often considered a characteristic that appeals to women in particular (Kerr 2003; Modleski 1982). Many of the interviewed players said they make skins to fulfill other players’ wishes rather than for their own needs. On Radola, players who are not able to or interested in creating skins start their forum threads by posting “wishes” for skins. An available skinner then takes on the task and posts the finished skin to the thread. When players create skins by such requests from other players, it offers them goals that open gameplay itself does not. One player described that “wishes are like challenges for me; it is nice to try if I can do it” (Simmer 3). The common dollhouse discourse surrounding The Sims games emphasizes the importance of characters and their customization. Directing the lives of virtual characters inhabiting their private houses, The Sims play focuses on character development and home decoration. Through leading the lives and through customizing the living environments of game characters, modders are encouraged to create spaces and identities that perhaps they cannot reach in their off-line lives. The millions of playercreated textures often represent very specific tastes and styles, such as manga tattoos, Rothko paintings, and UGG sheepskin boots. The game establishes an environment in which progress and identities are based on the accumulation of materials, looks and trends reflecting an ideology of consumerism. A myriad of ready-made skins such as character clothing, furniture and surface textures is available in the game, but, as one player suggested, “one gets quickly bored without downloadables” (Simmer 15) and looks to find a solution from the never-ending flow of player-made contents. It is not only the quantity, but also the quality of ready-made textures that encourages players to invent their own. Almost all participants hinted that players strongly disliked the original style of The Sims 2 items and the character clothes. In detailed accounts during the interviews, the players confirmed the thoughts of one player that “the readymade stuff of the game . . . is rather awful in all its tasteless American, lower-middle-class, suburban home style” (Simmer 1). Another player wrote that

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“eyebrows are, to my taste, too wide, and in makeup, it is the lipsticks that are somehow too plain and eyelashes should stick out better” (Simmer 5). For one, “the readymade clothes are just horrible” (Simmer 3). Players felt they demonstrated their good taste and style through selection of player-made alternatives. Such merging of frustration and admiration—Odi et amo—is familiar in the study of media fandoms. Jenkins (1992), among others, has suggested that simultaneous appreciation and questioning is one of the characteristics of fandom. Some players even proposed that the game encouraged skinning as a reaction to the game’s “bad taste.” The limitations of the game’s original content may be a well-calculated strategy of the developers, who “leave space for players and hobbyists to create their own and different content,” as a forty-five-year-old female player reflected. Easy-to-use tools for creating custom content and fora for distributing such content have been made available by the game’s publisher Electronic Arts to retain control over content that is created and shared within the community.2 More importantly, though, such readily available tools also invite customization. While they were competent with image editing tools and software for self-made textures, the interviewed players seemed to prefer these easy-to-use tools over coding. One interviewed player wrote that the required level of technical skill at first prevented her from becoming a more active contributor: “I thought making downloadables is like hard code editing, so I left it to others” (Simmer 4). Players’ interest in skinning in other words did not generally build on mastery over technology, but the available tools encouraged female players to feel at ease with it.

Playing by Doing Given the skinners’ interest in fulfilling other people’s wishes, it may not come as a surprise that they were often more interested in the process of skinning and the challenges it offered than in the particular skins they made or in their own gameplay with the skins. Skinners did, however, sometimes make vague references to actual play and to skinning as an extra-gaming activity. The difficulty of pinpointing what Sims gameplay actually was became apparent through the words of one of the skinners: “I don’t really play The Sims that much . . . but build and decorate houses instead” (Simmer 4). For the players I studied, skinning was not an addition to The Sims 2 play, because for many of them, playing was limited to skinning. One participant coined the term simsseily, or simming, to describe the practice of making skins. Although it might not be the “most obvious way” of playing, one player wrote that “my playing is quite custom-content emphasized” (Simmer 2), while another wrote that “my ‘play’ is particularly about building and doing” (Simmer 1). The latter player suggests that we should consider skinning as a form of playing by doing. Approaching skinning as a way of playing The Sims 2, we can see the game consists of more than the character-play mechanics and worlds designed by its developers. Yet, this form of play builds on the invitations for skinning that are specific to the game. The Sims 2, as played by skinners, or “simmers,” is a genuinely participatory product; it is a relatively open system with a theme, tools and form that support cocreative play.

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Cocreativity assumes a broad definition of a game where it cannot be seen as a mere commercial product, but as a part of larger cultural system incorporating professional and hobbyist creativities.

Crowd-Sourcing Localization: The Sims 2 with a Finnish Accent I have established that The Sims 2 skinning can be approached as a way of playing the game, and suggested that we should consider the game as a product of participatory cultures. From the games industry point of view, the developers of The Sims series openly acknowledge players’ contribution to their business (Terdiman 2005). Skinning results in such an enormous body of new culture-specific or ethnicity-specific game content that it can be characterized as a form of crowd-sourced localization. Game localization is typically one of the most challenging and expensive aspects of game development. Player-created content for The Sims 2, however, brings along trends and local themes that are not only of great relevance to the players, but also draw on current imagery and symbolism such as local celebrities or the latest designer clothes relevant to specific cultures. Given players’ interest in living through alternative—but—personalized story lines in game settings, skinners wrote that they often began their hobby by altering the game’s “Western,” if not North-American, white suburban lifestyle environments and objects. While the game has been translated and thus partly localized to fit various target regions, the game’s different versions vary primarily by language. The Finnish version of the game, for example, does not include any particularly Finnish meanings beyond names of families and neighborhoods. Acknowledging the cultural specificities of the sixty countries in which the game is currently played, a need to customize the game from a national perspective offers an interesting perspective for approaching the types of skins being produced. A proportion of custom-made content indeed reveals local and national meanings and some Finnish players have taken advantage of their abilities to add local imagery. Such player-created content is also valued by other players on the websites where its distribution takes place. Brands and iconic cultural products are two distinctive categories of player-created skins that point toward national Finnish identity. Brands included Marimekko home textiles and Moomin patterns. While certain aspects of Finnish culture have been reproduced as skins, an emphasis on Finnish brands stems from the intersection of the consumerist ideology of the game and a desire toward local customization. Although the original game has not sponsored any particular brands, the orientation of the game obviously has promoted consumerism. Indeed most of the participants I spoke with did not create skins that would break the consumerist, suburban setting and ideology of the game. Official crossover products such as H&M and IKEA “Stuff Packs” were later added to the range of The Sims 2 products, too. Famous Scandinavian design items and furniture skins at the same time referred to a Finnish national identity that is, to a large extent, built on innovation in industrial design. These items are also among the few that people from outside Finland might recognize. As Robertson (1997, 26)

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suggests, “[m]uch of what is often declared to be local is in fact the local expressed in terms of generalized recipes of locality.” In skinning, local taste, cultural heritage and traditional lifestyle were reinvented within the frame of American suburban consumerism. Such skins were more about fitting Finnishness into American systems than about challenging its core values. As Wise (2008, 43–44) also suggests, national cultures promote only “the types of differences that can be easily packaged and sold, the types of differences that are not threatening to global capitalism.” Player-created skins align with the game’s ideology of representing cultural differences through commercial items and stereotyping. Based on material gathered for this research, game developers set the terms for cocreativity in The Sims 2 as users’ contributions were predominantly in line with the ideology and original themes and content of the game. While it would be possible to create more critically inclined and subversive content for The Sims 2, the type of cocreativity explored here did not appear to compete with or challenge the original game but complimented it instead. Some anticonsumerist player-created content exists including graffiti, soiled character faces, crumpled rugs, and broken and dirty furniture. Such skins do not essentially represent Finnish culture, but aimed perhaps to produce an alternative to the “flawless” game items and characters. In this vein, a player mentioned a classic Finnish wooden chair as the best skin she has made, because “why heaven’s name I would play a conservative American, middle-class dream, when there’s a possibility to play totally against the grain.” (Simmer 1) The participants further discussed national game content that was based on national cultural symbols, such as sauna and famous art from the period of Finnish National Romanticism. One of the participants (Simmer 1) created various Finnish artifacts for the game, but was most proud of her bath whisk.3 “For me and my rural sims this bath whisk is a must—and I think that this still is the greatest single object I have ever . . . created!” Finnish skins represented a form of lived Finnishness that allowed the player to relive situations and stage such moments. These built on domestic settings that highlighted the importance of the player’s own everyday items and symbolism. Such local details suggested new hybrids of collaboration and products that belonged to a “global media culture . . . that is unlike any national media culture in its composition” (Consalvo 2006, 120). In the interculturally shared design work between game developers and players, alternative symbolism was made available for the benefit of at least a little bit more inclusive and diverse game culture (cf. Kerr 2010; Moshirnia and Walker 2007). While beneficial for the industry, creativity in participatory cultures cannot be exhausted through a division between work and pleasure only, because these two forms of engaging with a text become fundamentally intertwined and feed back into each other. For various reasons, players, too, gain pleasure from skinning as they enjoy creating skins and personalizing the game through modification. Postigo (2003) and Kücklich (2005) liken players’ labor to Terranova’s (2000, 74) notion of immaterial labor in that it is “[s]imultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” (cf. Sotamaa 2009). Players also recognize that their cocreativity benefits the industry (Banks and Humphreys 2008).

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Applying the idea of women’s leisure as utilitarian to the practice of skinning can help unpack the meanings of skinning for the female players themselves. New media studies and Women’s studies recognize how women’s leisure often takes the form of useful chores and productive activities, such as baking, knitting, exercising, gardening, and fashion (e.g., Shaw 1994). Statistically, when home and personal care are excluded from leisure, women enjoy less such time in their daily lives than men (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] 2009). Kearney (2006, 25) suggests that “[o]ne of those more fascinating aspects of domestic arts is their blurring of the traditional boundaries of labor and leisure, alienated work and creative expression.” Similarly, The Sims 2 skinning and the players’ emphasis on helping others and creating, instead of merely playing, proposes that pleasure fits with utilitarian values. Value to the community and helping others reflect a kind of gift economy in which players gain cultural recognition through giving, receiving, and reciprocating (cf. Hellekson 2009). An interest in making the game better through creating more diverse content or fixes for the perceived tastelessness of the graphics are examples of how women find communal value in their own simmer work. For the players, skinning offers a form of productive play that, instead of being considered a waste of time, can emphasize textual productivity and new digital creation. As an alternative to an activity considered lonely and antisocial, cocreative play may offer women a way to avoid the negative connotations of playing computer games, by instead emphasizing one’s cultural capital in a community of users. In cultures in which women do not typically have the same feeling of entitlement to personal pastimes as men (Gray 1992; Henderson and Bialeschki 1991; Shaw 1994; cf. Chess 2009; Wirman 2011), skinning may be justified by the same rationales of usefulness that have typically characterized women’s leisure. As a response, they have turned their play into productivity. Critically Modleski (1982, 4) ponders in another context if we have internalized the ubiquitous male spy, who watches as we read romances or view soap operas, as he watched Virginia Woolf from behind the curtain (or so she suspected) when she delivered her subversive lectures at “Oxbridge,” or as he intently observes the romantic heroine just when she thinks she is alone and free at last to be herself.

This steering of women’s leisure toward productive activities is evidenced in some recent game titles, too. Games with clear utilitarian value, such as Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! and Wii Fit are marketed to female audiences more than to males (Chess 2009). So pervasive is the idea of productive feminine leisure that it finds its way into the rhetoric of how games are sold to women. Playing by doing The Sims 2 can be seen as a continuation to attributing usefulness and productivity into women’s leisure practices, and a respective tendency of women to seek these values in their pastimes. The Sims 2 skinning as a cocreative playing style establishes an extreme case of playbour in which the games industry not only “capitalises on the products of the leisure derived from them” (Kücklich 2005, n.p.), but in which the very production of these texts is the activity that is capitalized. This ties into

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a much broader field of research surrounding the gendering of consumption and production as well as the appreciation of the latter over the former. For the female players I interviewed, it offers a more acceptable, productive player identity. While players’ additions to The Sims 2 game are not resistant, skinning emerges—paradoxically—as a way to consume The Sims 2. Through the game’s emphasis on personal content and customization, the players’ very interest to add local content takes a form of crowdsourced localization. It is a type of modding that has been domesticated from a marginal novelty into a mainstream everyday practice (cf. Berker et al. 2006). Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: The PhD research from which this work builds upon was funded by the University of the West of England.

Notes 1. Here I refer to the understanding that games always bring along their peculiar requirement for user contribution as a prerequisite for the existence of a game as a cultural text (Dovey and Kennedy 2006; Humphreys 2005; Poremba 2003). 2. In the latest The Sims game, The Sims 3, content customization appears as a fully integrated feature of the boxed game. 3. A “bath whisk” is a bunch of fragrant boughs of silver birch bound together. They are commonly used in saunas to beat oneself or one’s partner, to stimulate the skin and to remove tension from muscles.

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Author Biography Hanna Wirman is a games researcher at the School of Design of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University where she teaches game design. Her research interests include digital games, gender, participatory cultures, game modifying, emerging audiences, and animal play. Her research brings together the study of new audiences and cocreative design practices, highlighting the importance of experimentation, critical theory, and ethnographic sensitivity.