Short summary of the game
The Sims 4 video game is a life and everyday simulation that was released in its fourth iteration of the game series in 2014 for PC, Xbox and Playstation in 19 different languages each. Since 2014, many free DLCs with more or less additional content have been released continuously. The medium is designed for the single-player mode and can be started offline, but has occasional optional online features such as the library, in which players* can share their own game content worldwide. The Sims 4 recreates everyday life in a setting that resembles North American suburbs. Players can design the virtual people (Sims), houses, furniture and landscapes in the game themselves. They then take control of one or more semi-autonomous Sims on a property and can control virtually every aspect of the Sims' daily lives by shaping and influencing the individual development of the played Sims' lives, careers and relationships. The Sims in the game have free will, but follow the player's commands via point-and-click, where the desired action can be selected from a mostly diverse drag-and-drop menu. The player plays from a god perspective and thus controls every aspect of the Sim's life, directing relationships and interactions and even choosing fate-like traits and aspirations during Sim creation. Since The Sims 4 has no end, everyone can play the game differently. In the end, it is up to the players themselves what individual goals they pursue for their Sims, whether it is to climb a certain career ladder, to start a family or to furnish a particularly fancy mansion. This allows players to simulate exactly the content that interests them, especially since there is no prescribed story or campaign. The game world is filled with player-created sims and computer-generated sims that can be met in the neighbourhood, for example, in public places such as clubs, parks or swimming pools.
Research on The Sims 4
Since the game characters in The Sims 4 can be accompanied by the players over their entire lifespan, which is modelled on real life, and since there are seemingly limitless possibilities for influence, it can be guessed that the game, in addition to a high fun factor, also contains individual points of contact for personal identity work. Within the framework of an explorative and multimodal research design, we want to find out to what extent The Sims 4 can evoke identity-forming processes in players. To this end, we observed players playing the game and then asked them how they reflected on individual game scenes and their reasons for certain decisions. For this reason, the research took place in the form of a mixed-methods design, which is characterised by an integration of quantitative and qualitative methods. The systematic observation of gaming behaviour as well as the recording of personality via a fully standardised test on the Big Five enables a quantification of the data, whereby this data set was supplemented by a qualitative investigation in which we recorded the perceptions, emotions and assessments of the test persons. Furthermore, the research question was to be kept general and open in order not to anticipate any potentially relevant findings. Assuming that identity-forming processes are individual and are not evoked by all players in the same way, the research was conducted with the aim of developing typologies in this regard. These typologies should depict different forms of identity work in video games in order to ensure a more specific, yet generalisable description of them.
The concrete research question for the present study is therefore as follows: In what way(s) do players engage in identity work in the video game 'The Sims 4'?
In the context of this research, a master's thesis is currently being written with the title "Identity work in video games using the example of The Sims 4", which will also be available on this page after its completion.
Further research on The Sims 4
In the future, further research on The Sims 4 will be conducted with the aim of identifying possible stereotypical ways of thinking among players. The game has a reputation for being very liberal and diverse, especially compared to most other games. For example, players have the option not only to choose the biological sex of their Sims, but also to decide which gender they identify with, for example in terms of clothing, whether they can have children or which gender they prefer when choosing a partner. In the area of ethnicities, too, the Sims series has already distinguished itself in the previous games with a relatively large number of selectable skin colours, which has been improved in The Sims 4 with even more diversity. How diverse and liberal the Sims really are in the end, however, is also up to the players who create their Sims. The aim of the study is therefore to find out whether players implement stereotypical guidelines in the game in the same stereotypical way, or to what extent The Sims 4 can counteract stereotypical implementations. For this purpose, test persons will be divided into two samples. The first group will be given some personality traits on the basis of which they are to create a suitable sense. The second group is to assign personality traits to given stereotypical Sims.