The Sims Carnival

» see simscarnival.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The years line up with mine and the intent does not. In 2008 I was 24 and out of university, and if I wanted to make something I opened an editor and a compiler. A site that handed you parts and let you snap a game together in a browser was aimed at the people who did not have that and wanted the result anyway. Good aim. Wrong person.

It showed up at GDC in February 2008 wearing the strongest brand EA had. Simscarnival.com was a community where you made games and put yours up next to everyone else's. It came with a creator tool and packs of art to build from, plus leaderboards over the top of the whole thing. The Sims name was doing work here that the product could not do on its own, because "come and use our flash game editor" sells to nobody.

The thing that made it interesting was that everything on it was open. Any game on the site could be pulled into the editor by any other user and rebuilt, on the one condition that attribution followed it. That is a remix policy shipped on a consumer site in 2008 by Electronic Arts. It is not the company anybody remembers from that decade.

There were boxed pieces too, sold before the site was properly running. Bumperblast arrived at the end of 2007 and SnapCity followed on 8 January 2008. SnapCity was a falling-block puzzle with SimCity zoning stapled to it, and GameSpot gave it four and a half out of ten while describing it as easy to play and hard to understand. Neither one is why the name is here.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was competing with ~

The flash portals owned that window. Newgrounds had been running for a decade and Kongregate was two years old and already paying its makers a share of ad revenue. Both had what Carnival never got, which is a population of people who made things there because that was their scene. EA had a brand and a budget instead of a scene, and you cannot buy one of those with either.

The editor also set a ceiling. Assembling from supplied parts gets a beginner to a finished game fast and then stops, and the makers good enough to build an audience were already in Flash proper, uploading swf files to portals that asked nothing of them. The site ended up with a lot of first games by people who did not make a second.

~ where EA went instead ~

By 2010 the browser-games question inside EA had a different answer, and the answer was Facebook. Playfish was bought in November 2009 for around 300 million dollars. FarmVille had made the platform look like the only place casual games were going to happen, and a standalone destination site where users made their own was suddenly the slow, expensive version of that idea.

Carnival closed in January 2011. The Sims Social launched on Facebook that August with the same brand pointed at the same casual audience, except this time the players were not making anything. That one lasted until June 2013.

~ what got buried with it ~

The shutdown notice told users that starting 17 January 2011 nothing on the site would be reachable, including anything they had created or modified and any embedded links they had put on their own pages. You had until the 16th to download your game files and the creator tool if you wanted to keep playing locally. That is a fair warning and it is also an admission that the archive was not going to be anybody's responsibility.

So it is gone. What survives publicly is a handful of screenshots and a review of a puzzle spin-off. Whatever thousands of people assembled on that site exists now only on hard drives nobody has imaged, in a file format whose player was killed in its own right at the end of 2020.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »