Some days, you wake up to find the perfect storm of absurd nonsense and comical tomfoolery that you doesn’t’t even require you to sit and plan how you’re going to shape it into a story. Those are the best days, the ones where your first article is so utterly ridiculous you don’t even need to try and convince people of the fact. Such is the case with The Sims Spark’d, a reality show that will see twelve die-hard Sims players compete for $100,000. Sure, why not? The world has ended so we might as well scrape the bottom of the barrel for reality show pitches and just run with whatever we yank out of there.
These twelve players will…I don’t know, complete challenges in The Sims and be eliminated if they do badly? It’s a reality show so originality isn’t exactly allowed, right? Quoting from the brief trailer of the show, the goal of The Sims Spark’d is for contestants to forge “unique characters, worlds and stories.” So I’m gonna go out on a limb here and saying that they’re not going to be building an entire family only to have them drown in the swimming pool after they remove the ladder. Fun? Definitely. Probably doesn’t make for great television though.
As for contestants, they’ve pulled in a range of Sims enthusiasts and content creators to obviously rake in that lucrative YouTube audience. Speaking of which, The Sims Spark’d will be playing on the Buzzfeed Multiplayer YouTube channel every Monday. The episodes are first airing on American television on the TBS channel (I’ve never heard of it either) but South Africa obviously can’t access that so YouTube should do us just fine.
Look, I can sit here and bash this idea all day but at the same time it’s pretty cool to see non-traditional competitive games form their own kind of platform and community beyond the traditional avenues offered by the internet. I’d like to see more kinds of shows like this with less…crying. There always has to be some kind of sob story, right? Maybe I’m just a heartless cynic. Or grumpy.
(Source: Engadget)