The Sims Mediator
Described by Asli Kolbas (author of the practice), based on Will Wright (game designer)Description
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Context: who/when/where |
Who: Youth When: During Play Session Where: Youth Center, GIGOS Nieuw Kempen |
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Description: |
Building on earlier activities, "The Sims Mediator Challenge" insights showed youth responded better to real-life home/family topics than abstract concepts, highlighting the need for simpler, concrete prompts. This led to leveraging youth's existing mediating role (e.g., helping with paperwork) as a key strength. The Sims Free Play in the Genk garden city context, is a game that simulates homes, energy upgrades, and neighbourhood sharing. Its core "Prompt Play Cards" focus on missions mirroring real life and exploring the mediating role. With 70 prompt cards in Dutch, the game remains a work in progress, constantly refined through feedback, including shifting focus from the Sim character to the real family context for more natural youth responses. In the Genk garden city context, "The Sims Mediator Challenge" is designed to tackle complex energy challenges. By simulating homes, energy upgrades, and neighbourhood sharing, the game engages with the tangible aspects of the energy transition, highlighting the interconnectedness between humans and their built/natural environment. Building on earlier activities, "The Sims Mediator Challenge" is a story-driven mobile game using the familiar The Sims Free Play platform. Youth build homes, interact with simulated families (Sims), and undertake missions mirroring real-life challenges. Designed for multiple weeks to encourage return play, progress is tracked via puzzle pieces. The game aims to explore and leverage the youth's existing mediating role within their families, fostering their adaptation journey in the Genk garden city context. "Prompt Play Cards", are designed to elicit experiences and discussions about the youth's mediating role. They vary in colour (action/interaction type) and difficulty. Completing tasks earns puzzle pieces. Observation: Scenarios framed as critical fiction, such as "The day the battery ran out after a storm”, evoked immediate emotional responses. S. initially stated, "I’d be scared. I’m scared of storms". However, the hypothetical situation also prompted her to think creatively and draw upon different types of knowledge. She moved from an initial, impractical idea ("Charge") to considering using a candle for light and attempting to make fire to cook. While her idea of making a fire inside a big box with cardboard was met with concern ("Oh dear, your house would burn down", commented by N.), it illustrated creative problem-solving within the scenario. |
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References: |
https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/the-sims-freeplay Nordic Urban Mobility 2050: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1btwOVxL2mp7pTTOdQBHSph6fspR6Ogkn |
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Extra: |
The next step is to merge this game with Energy-Model Maker and exclude the Sims from the game, because it’s digital and not easy to integrate with every youth participant, while replicating it with its physical duplicate. The upgrade will be to build 3D props of energy transition tools to the model-making game, so that they can visualise and understand the complex transition terms better. |
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Engagement with more-than-human entities |
The Sims Free Play platform acts as a digital more-than-human mediator, creating a hybrid space where youth navigate between digital simulation and real-world energy systems. The game itself becomes an active participant in knowledge generation. The "battery running out after a storm" scenario positions energy storage systems, weather patterns, and electrical grids as central actors that directly affect human life. The storm and battery become characters with agency that create crisis situations. Fire, candles, cardboard, and cooking materials emerge as more-than-human entities that youth must negotiate with in their problem-solving. S.'s progression from "charge" to "candle" to "fire-making" shows her thinking through relationships with different material agents. |
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Interpretation as “retracing”, that is what we can learn from these activities when we think about data generation for our own research |
S.'s immediate fear response ("I'd be scared") shows how fictional scenarios can access genuine emotional knowledge that might be suppressed in rational discussions. The emotional response becomes valuable data about how people actually experience energy vulnerability. The progression from "Charge" → "candle" → "fire-making" demonstrates how scenario-based methods can trace participants' thinking processes in real-time, revealing layers of practical knowledge and creative problem-solving that emerge through sustained engagement. The "day the battery ran out" approach demonstrates how speculative scenarios can elicit both emotional and practical knowledge simultaneously, creating richer data than purely hypothetical or purely experiential methods. The multi-week, puzzle-piece progress tracking shows how research can benefit from sustained, gamified engagement that allows knowledge to develop over time rather than capturing single-moment insights. The shift from focusing on Sim characters to real family contexts reveals how research methods need constant calibration toward participants' lived experiences to generate authentic responses. |
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Advancement to PD (under at least one of the headings: re-tracing, reconnecting, re-imagining, re-institutioning). |
re-imagining |
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Sample, extract, case study, or description. |
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UwG4RxQX1379dYLZbl0_YjxKSJ2Xoyhc/view?usp=sharing |
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Is there a toolbox (in development ) that you can share on this practice? |
Digital platform integration:
Physical/analog components:
Methodological frameworks:
Process insights:
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