Media Audiences

Main target audience are female casual gamers age 18-40. People who are more into hardcore gaming.

One of the reasons people may enjoy playing sims is the feeling of “playing god” and being in control, you can choose where they live, how they look, what they like, who they want to be friends with, etc. This allows audiences to create the virtual reality they want as they can create a family of their own.

This may appeal to caring side of audiences, for example maternal feelings in female players as characters can have babies and you can see them grow up, reflecting the virtual reality into their own lives.

This allows creativity to be explored as you are able to build like Minecraft which allows audiences to do what they like. This allows audiences to be creative and experiment with building and design choices.

Sims gives us the impression of escapism as people who choose to play sims can be offered the sense of a utopian dream world. The trailer of sims free play allows us to look into how we can create our dream life and dream home. This offers audiences a fantasy escape from their boring lives.

Creating your character isn’t the main part of sims as you can create characters or situations they can identify with, for example they can form their perfect love interest or make them famous and allows them to gain attention, etc.

Audiences may enjoy being able to experience things in a safe detached way. For example, people can die in your game or come to harm but it gives you the feeling that nothing will happen in their own real life.

There are many players who might find the game cathartic as they can experience situations that are exciting via the game, as the game allows them to explore different ways on how to play with the sims free play. This permits audiences to vent their own frustration or feelings in a safe way through the use of cathartic experiences.

There is a big diverse of players who may enjoy the diverse range of characters options, so you can choose a male or female characters or ethnicity, or be straight or be part of the LGBTQ community. Producers responded to audience requests for aspects such as more skin colours, more hair types, pregnancy, etc.

The game is very simple and doesn’t need that much experience to play it. It is reassembly self explanatory. However, many audiences would like the mobile nature of the game. For example phones and tablets are increasingly popular ways of playing games.

The game is free to download and is appealing to many audiences, which makes it popular. However, there were some audiences who believed that there was too many in app purchases and that it was too hard to enjoy the game fully without spending money. This makes some audiences annoyed as they wouldn’t want to keep spending money to gain access to more upgrades. Generally there are some audiences who enjoy hacking games and often share these tips online.

Media representation

Sims can be a diverse game where you can create hundred of different options including gender, age, ethnicity, eye colour, hair colour, personality trait etc. This means the representation in the game is not fixed, and almost infinite in terms of diversity and peoples choice.

Unlike other media products, video games (particularly sims) allows audiences to shape the representation themselves. Many video games offer only a couple limitations of playable characters and they are often straight, white men. Sims free p[lay offers this diverse choice of choosing which kind of character you want to play, different ethnicities and your sexuality.

The representations in this game might be seen as more liberal and diverse than in others. The game offers a much broader range of skin tones, hair types, and accessories than other / previous games.

However, due to the game being set, some people can manipulate the game which doesn’t allow for players to officially make their sims intolerant, players can manipulate the game options to create intolerant worlds.

In terms of gender, their is lots of interests of women in their trailers looking for love and having babies, although the game offers a variety of choice for representation, the marketing shows common gender stereotypes. Women as shown taking on domestic roles of childcare and men are shown playing sports and working. However, the game does allow players to challenge gender stereotypes. For example, you can choose to play as a female characters for their sims does not limit their options in terms of clothing, hair style, or facial hair. Therefore you can manipulate the wide range of gender identities to be expressed by players although they still only have two genders to choose from on official options.

There is also a simulation that the game is designed to mimic reality in many ways. They try to keep the game as similar to real life as possible, their are elements such as morning sickness that add to to the realism of the game, the idea of verisimilitude.

There are many tasks that reflect the tedium, of real life, for example cleaning.

Sometimes players can feel immersed into the world of the games because of how realistic it feels. The graphics are low and it is not a real world. It removes some of the verisimilitude, as the game does not feature miscarriage or abortion so removes some more serious aspects of real life.

The game is game entertaining and fun and light-hearted, therefore they are trying to keep it real and pleasant.

Media Industry

Sims is published by 2 companies, EA mobile company and Firemonkeys studios. They are both subsidiaries of electronic arts. EA has a reputation for big budget triple A games that have had a huge success so many have pre-sold audience of fans.

EA mobile has over 800 staff in the US just to work on mobile gaming. EA mobile has 9 office around the world, reflecting the increasing popularity of mobile and casual gaming. EA has nearly 10,000 staff, 44 studios across 20 countries and nearly £6billion income each year.

A company called Maxis originally developed sims game and began the franchiser, and they recognised the potential and brought in Maxis in 1997 which is a horizontal integration.

The game has been successful as over 200 million have download the game. Distributing games digitally via things like the app store, is much cheaper than “hard copy” distribution eg discs.

However mobile gaming presents its own unique costs and difficulties for developers , sometimes mobile gamers have to constant update to cope with update releases for mobile operating systems. This is to make sure free mobile games can releases updates to keep audiences playing the game and making in app purchases. For example, add pets, more buildings etc.

Hesmondhalgh talks about minimising risks and profit, if you keep updating the game is a great way of maximising profits. Applying Sims to a mobile app and making it free allows more profit to come in and minimises the risk.

The VSC used the PEGI rating system to award the game a 12 rating. It has mild horror or fear themes, mild sexual content and nudity and mild alcohol, tobacco or drug references. This is likely because the players can put their SIMS in a variety of scenarios such as drinking, kissing, sex etc.

However, considering how it is easy for players under 12 can access the game, it has issues with regulation. It is difficult to regulate and online game because what is legal or socially acceptable varies from country to country and yet the game is distributed online where global players can access it. Particularly is Asia it is banned, due to LGBTQ characters and relationships.

Audiences were the ones who suggests pregnancy as being a desirable game feature which helps form a connection with the audience, to attract more audiences.