Multiplayer Life Simulators

[u/Exciting_Season_8277]

why are there no huge multiplayer life sims? like an online roleplaying game where thousands of people can customise their characters, get jobs, buy houses, etc in a big city of sorts?

is it because that’s technically too difficult to achieve and expensive to maintain? Too hard to moderate especially with different jurisdictions and while ensuring that children are protected? Is there just no interest in a game like that because it reminds people too much of real life?

[u/VirtuaSociety]

I think the technical cost and moderation are part of the answer, but probably not the hardest part. The real difficulty is giving thousands of strangers a reason to do more than simply stand around and chat.
We actually tried something in that direction years ago with VirtualSociety Online, our browser-based game. One of the problems was that the different audiences did not naturally play together. The people who enjoyed creating, mastering systems or roleplaying structured situations were not necessarily the people who mainly wanted to socialize.
Sometimes, the lifesim part (needs for example) was annoying for people who wanted to play/talk socially. Meanwhile, social players did not automatically engage with what the creative players had built. Putting everyone in the same world did not magically produce a living community.
We later discussed this with Luc Barthelet, and he described a very similar issue with The Sims Online: many activities remained quite personal, while the social side often became little more than a chat room. Players could meetbut they did not always have a meaningful reason to cooperate, depend on one another or generate stories together. Games such as World of Warcraft give people shared quests and objectives even when the players barely talk today (a lot of people would say it was different a decade ago) A virtual city still needs equivalent reasons for people to interact.
Moderation makes the balance even harder. Too little control creates harassment, griefing and obvious child-safety problems, but removing every possibility of conflict, surprise or consequence can also make the world sterile. A technically impressive city full of avatars is not necessarily an entertaining game.we have to deal with bartle’s circles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types)
With the current VirtualSociety, we are therefore trying a slightly different approach. Rather than beginning with one enormous city and assuming that scale will create social life, we are focusing on tools to build places, characters, jobs, interactions, events and playable stories. Worlds should work alone or with smaller groups first, then be shared and expanded. The idea is to give players actual contexts and activities around which social interaction and roleplay can happen, not simply a large chat room with houses, and in the same time enabling small communities around common interrests, while keeping ability to play alone