Sign up for The Sims Carnival
Make some games. Details at GDC.
While Will Wright and friends work their way through the final bits of Spore, EA's Sims team is busy touching up something called The Sims Carnival, an online community built around game-creation and sharing, and is inviting people to sign up for a closed beta.
Rod Humble, head of the Sims studio, will be explaining all in a Game Developers Conference session called "The Emergent Gamer" on Thursday in San Francisco. According to EA, he will "discuss the rise of a new kind of game creator, and what this trend means to games as an art form" as he clues us all in.
But you don't have to wait for Rod - you can sign up for a closed beta now at TheSimsCarnival.com. The full thing will allow you to "create games from scratch", "build a community around your own game creations", embed your favourites in a blog or social networking site, and of course swap things with friends.
It's certainly all go at EA on the Sims front, with Humble confirming last week that The Sims 3 is in development, EA having revealed that a couple of new MySims games are also underway and that SimCity Creator and SimAnimals are due out this year.