In an online community, there's this kind of social economy between the community members. Some people have status because they make cool skins or that's a good website that's visited a lot, but there's no real gameplay there.

And every now and then people find the bugs, and they interpret those as cool failures in the Sims terms. For them it's like a treasure hunt, you know.

It used to be that you knew your neighbors and maybe your coworkers - the people in your physical vicinity.

Players like to know that they've discovered things that even the designers didn't know were in the game.

The big thing is that we have five percent or less of the hardcore players actively entertaining the other ninety-five percent.

The new generation of consoles has as much power to do the kind of games that we do as the PC does.

A lot of the interesting issues and dynamics within a city occur over things such as socio-economic issues or ethnic issues. But they require a much more elaborate model of human behavior.