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The second thing for me, probably a few clicks down, is the idea that The Sims smoothly age and have different concerns and motivations and needs at different age ranges.

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.

The great games are the space sims and driving sims and these experiences where you're basically sitting at a table with nothing happening in front of you. A lot of interesting things are evolving there. There are great games that can be made.

What I like about The Sims is that I don't have a normal life at all, so I play this game where these people have these really boring, mundane lives. It's fun.

In 1989, SimCity introduced an entirely new brand of game play.

Also, after people play these Sim games, it tends to change their perception of the world around them, so they see their city, house or family in a slightly different way after playing.

Now, I admire The Sims as a game, but from a story viewpoint, there are two glaring problems. First, your relationship with those characters is like they're bugs in a jar. There's no empathy. And secondly, you've got this clunky, chemistry-set interface between you and them, with bars to show how tired or angry they are. It's all tell not show.

I try not so much to create new characters and worlds but to create new game-play experiences.

In my 20s, I became obsessed with the role-playing game 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms,' named after a classical Chinese novel, and later 'The Sims,' a life-simulation game, and 'StarCraft,' a science-fiction game.

Games take years to make, and it's important that when we launch, it can't just be a great launch catalog and then a desert for a really long time. To be honest, for a lot of developers, they'd rather not be competing at launch with all this other software.