Supporting The Sims

As requested in the comment thread of http://imgur.com/gallery/df2iQ, here are some stories from when I worked as a phone technical support rep for Maxis/EA

In the first two weeks that The Sims was launched (right when I started working for EA), a lady called in complaining that the game just wouldn't start any more. Through investigation, the rep assisting her determined that something third-party she had downloaded for the game (she had over 2GB of downloads for The Sims - in 2000) had corrupted the save file, and the game would need to be uninstalled and reinstalled. However, the rep neglected to inform her beforehand that doing so would effectively erase her family, as the directory for the game had to be wiped for the installer to work properly. That mistake caused us four years of harassment from this hysterical woman demanding that we restore her original family, and the objects they had. First she called from her home phone, every week - until we blocked it. Then she called from her cell phone, and we blocked that. Then she moved onto her husband's cell phone. At this point, every rep on the floor could identify her by voice alone, and would refuse to speak to her. My supervisor warned her that we would report her to the police, and we eventually did have to file a restraining order against her. That was when she switched up her tactic to calling us via random pay phones around her town. To this day, if you mention her name to any of us who worked during that period, a part of us dies.

I don't even remember specifically what this broad was calling about, but about five minutes into the call, her smoke detector started going off like a Wookie losing at chess. I asked her if everything was ok, and she kept right on insisting I fix her issue. After a few moments, her dog started barking furiously, and then she began coughing. Again, I asked her if she needed to call back at a later time, but she ignored my question. Right before the call disconnected, I could hear the sirens of fire trucks arriving at her residence. No idea what ended up happening to her; when I called the number back at the end of the day (before we went home, we had to callback customers who had disconnected earlier in the day), it went fast busy and hung up.

We were located on the second floor of the main building, and at the north end of our floor was the server room for the whole campus. One particularly hot summer, the heat began causing thermal creep that weakened the heat sensors. One day, when the temperature pushed 109 outside, it was enough to finally cross the threshold of the monitoring system, and all the fire alarms in the building went off, as well as the Halon system in the server room. Real danger or not, we were still told to evacuate, and several customers were extremely put out when we told them we'd have to call them back later. An already irate guy on the phone with me demanded that I stay on the line until his issue was fixed, despite the fact that neither of us could barely hear each other under the wailing of the klaxons. I hung up on him.

Fuck the parent super hard who wanted me to explain to their daughter what death was. The kid had never even had a pet, either, so there was no basis for comparison. I even asked them if they had a parent present to help them understand what was going on, and they said their mom had specifically told her to call us. Fuck you, lady. Fuck you super hard. (I realize "but" is spelled wrong)

By contrast, this was a little girl who was complaining that it was far too easy to kill Sims, and that it should present more of a challenge. We used to get feedback on the game all the time, but this kid had detailed ways of how you should be able to really satisfyingly torture virtual people before their life ends, as if having your Sim cry and piss themselves wasn't enough demonstration of suffering. I ended up motioning my supervisor to capture the recording of the call, because it was fascinating how morbid this child was. She was suggesting mind games where you pit each of your Sims against each other years before the Saw movies came out. Occasionally we'd play this recording for new reps, telling them "this is who you are dealing with."

The only confirmed kill we had belonged to a newbie on his first day working the phones. At the end of each shift, we had to call back any customers who had disconnected and we were unable to reach earlier, to see if we could still assist them. Newbie was talking to a gentleman with a Sim City 3000 issue, when there was an audible thud on the other end of the line, and the customer ceased responding to questions by the rep. At the end of the day, when he called the number back, the man's daughter answered the phone and stated he had died of a heart attack that afternoon. We jokingly referred to newbie as "killer" for a few weeks after that.

This caller was something else. She had created a family, and one of the members had wandered off into the pool and drowned. She might have been acting, but there was genuine fear in her voice that she was responsible for a real person dying. I explained to her for several minutes that the characters in the game don't represent any real people, and that nothing bad had happened to anybody. Again, she could have been trolling, but she legitimately acted terrified that she was going to be sent to jail. After talking her down, she then asked where her money was. Confused, I asked what she meant. "Well, my Sim has made like, $30K in the past couple weeks - do I get a check, or...?" Once again, she was genuinely insistent and believed that she was due money that her Sim had earned. She got quite angry when I told her she'd be getting nothing from us.

Sims players are bizarrely obsessive. Even though the game is just pixels (and low resolution ones at the time), Simmers (our name for players) would become devoutly attached to their little fictional families. 99% of the issues the game had would ultimately require a U/D/R (uninstall, delete, reinstall); people begged and pleaded that we weren't going to delete their Sims. After a while, as a courtesy, we'd back up their saved folder, but cautioned that using those files would pretty much leave them stuck with the original issue they called us about, but few people cared. One caller, who sounded like a teenage girl, offered to blow me if I promised that her family would be ok after she reinstalled. We all grew to anticipate the abject horror and anguish in callers voices when we informed them that they'd have to start all over from square one.

About half of the calls we got were from bored/lonely housewives, and there were a significant number of them who started getting "friendly" over the phone. On at least one call, a woman offered to recreate in-game the rep she was talking to, and then asked what they'd have their Sim do to her. There are a lot of deeply unsatisfied wives out there in this country. We had several women who would call every other week, just because we would pick up and talk to them. They'd concoct some new issue in-game, or intentionally corrupt their save, because they knew we had to stay on the line with them during the uninstall, reboot, and reinstall. The majority of them were harmless, just lonely. We knew most of them by name, and learned far more personal details about themselves and their lives than strangers should.

Because our CRM database was utter shit, and took forever to pull up customer's information, we had lots of time to kill on calls. This usually resulted in friendly chats with players. On a number of occasions, they asked what the most bizarre thing was that players did. The majority of Sims players (based on caller statistics) were either children, or bored house-wives. It may sound tame, but for almost all of the middle-aged women, they were meticulous about recreating everything about their IRL lives in-game. You'd think this would be a fun opportunity to design some god-awful mega-mansion, and buy your Sim all the shit you'll never actually afford for real, but no. They were fascinated with duplicating every detail of their clearly warped lives on the computer. They'd re-enact gatherings they had with their friends. They'd see what their Sim cooked for dinner - and then make that for their flesh and blood family (if they weren't addicted enough to point of neglecting their actual family) It was even more telling that a lot of them made themselves a social goddess in-game; you could tell that they were definitely not the queen bee in their friend circle, and this was their chance to be on top of their world. I'm convinced that a psychological study of Sims players would yield some fascinating results.

The way the development of The Sims worked was thus: the core team at Maxis developed the concept, and how it should work, and then a hefty team of devs actually wrote all of the code. When the first game was finished, as was EA tradition, most of the devs who worked on the program were let go. When it came time to create an expansion pack, the company hired all new devs, who had to reverse engineer how the code to the orginal game worked. A lot of times, they couldn't figure out what piece of code did what, and ultimately just wrote new duplicate code. Then when they published Living Large, the dev team was again cut. This continued for nearly every expansion pack. This was why the game and expansion packs had to be installed in a very specific order; the order in which the expansion pack came out. The installers were rigid, in that they only accepted the way that the previous (and not proceeding) expansion pack would modify the .exe. For example, you could install The Sims and then House Party (the second expansion pack), but if you wanted to add Living Large (the first ep), you had to uninstall the entire mess, and then reinstall IN ORDER. This was compounded by a bug in the installer for Hot Date that would at times fail the install, and thus corrupt the .exe for the game - meaning you had to start all over from the beginning. But wait! There's more! Not only would it corrupt the .exe, it would ALSO fail to remove the Windows Registry entry that said Hot Date was installed - so when you started over, and tried to install again, you got an error message that said The Sims couldn't be installed - because it was already installed. This meant we had to walk customers through a RegEdit over the phone, which was harrowing, and I'll cover that in the next story below. But the .exe for the game was modified and re-written so many times, I'm kinda surprised that it didn't develop sentience after a while.

For those who don't know, the Windows Registry is an extremely delicate component of Windows that can render your OS useless if you fuck with the wrong keys. There was no undo function in Win98's registry editor (the OS most of our customers used at the time), meaning any changes you made were permanent. On any call that required a RegEdit, we had to notify our supervisor, and the call was then recorded. Then we warned the customer that any changes they make that we did not expressly tell them to specifically do could damage their system, and that EA assumed absolutely zero responsibility for any issues the customer experienced as a result of us walking them through altering the registry. We also made backups of their registry before making any changes, but under no circumstances were we to assist with a customer reloading from a saved registry - they'd have to call their manufacturer or Microsoft for that. On a number of occassions, customers would mindlessly begin deleting keys here and there, even though we didn't tell them to, because they thought they were cleaning up files on their computer. They weren't. We warned them.

The second most frequent question. Officially, we didn't support the use of any cheat codes, because they were mostly for the developers and testers to be able to access different parts of the game without having to play for longer than necessary. But the use of cheat codes came with a caveat; to use them, you had to put the game in development/test mode, which meant that the game engine wouldn't function quite normally. That's why a lot of times, peoples Sims started acting way bizarre or in-game functions would break - you had to know how to disable the dev mode in order for the game mechanics to work properly once you had given yourself enough wealth or whatever. This was because the dev mode logged EVERYthing that happened in game from that point on, in order to debug whatever was going on, and it meant that the save file ballooned to massive file size proportions, and would eventually corrupt. By the time most players contacted us, there was nothing that could be done. Eventually, the expansion packs and patches resolved that issue as well, but for the first few years, using cheat codes almost certainly meant your game was hosed.

This was the odd case where a male was attempting to play The Sims. He complained that he could only get about five minutes into the game, and then his computer would shut off. Thinking that maybe the .exe was corrupted (usually the case), I had him uninstall the game, back up his saves, and then restart the computer. When it came back up, the installer was only a few minutes in when his computer shut off again. Puzzled, I asked him to turn it back on - and this time his computer shut off as soon as his desktop loaded up. He was furious that we had "destroyed" his computer, but I asked him to touch the side of his computer, to which he shouted "Goddamnit it's hot!" One of his CPU fans had died, and most tasks he did on his computer weren't enough to trigger the thermal runaway that was causing his computer to turn off. Nevertheless, it of course was still "our fault" that the game made his cooling system fail.

This one was puzzling at first. The girl kept insisting that every time she wanted to play The Sims, she had to install it again. From what she was describing, the game installed ok, and would run fine, but the next time she went to play, the game wouldn't be installed. After nearly an hour of troubleshooting, I finally figured it out - when she was done playing the game, she usually turned off her computer. She turned off her computer by UNPLUGGING THE POWER CORD FROM THE OUTLET. When The Sims is installed, it usually required that you reboot your computer - most players ignored that. The reason was because Win98 registry wouldn't permanently commit the new registry keys for The Sims until the registry was closed out during shutdown, and the changes were saved. Since she was simply removing the power from her system, it never recorded The Sims as being installed. Quite frankly, I was impressed that her computer would even still boot, as she said that was how she "shut down" her computer EVERY DAY.

The Sims Living Large had a notorious bug; the sad clown. In a last-ditch effort to cheer up a super depressed Sim, you could purchase and place a painting of a sad clown, which would manifest an NPC clown, who would just cry and NEVER leave. There was one solution: you had to take the painting, and place it in a room with no windows and one door, and line the room with fireplaces. You had your Sim light a fire in one of the fireplaces, and then leave the room, after which, you removed the door. Very rapidly, the entire room would be engulfed in flame, and so would the painting - which would cause the sad clown, wherever he was, to spontaneously combust and start shrieking in pain until he died. That was literally the only way to rid your house of this pest, until a patch finally addressed the issue by removing the clown when you sold the painting. But before it was patched, we had to ask kids calling in for this issue for their parents, lest people accuse EA of advocating setting people on fire.

Our department manager had discovered early on in his role that for every dollar he didn't spend out of the department budget, he'd get that dollar in his end-of-year bonus. Needless to say, he spent almost nothing for our team. In the year 2000, our workstations were still all 486 machines, with at most 64MB of RAM, which was insufficient to run 99% of the games we supported. Each queue had their own PK machine (Product Knowledge) that barely met the minimum spec for us to be able to familiarize ourselves with our software. Anytime a customer reported some odd behavior about a button or function in-game, we'd have to put the customer on hold, wander over to the PK machine, fire up the game, try what they were doing, and then go back over to our computer to continue the call. What was even worse was that our shitty Oracle-based CRM software was hosted on a 386 computer with only 16MB of RAM, with a 10MBit Ethernet card, to serve data to 70 reps. If a customer called in with a case ID from a previous call, it would legit be about 10 to 15 minutes before their case would actually come up on our system. Things all changed one day when one of the hi gher-ups brought some guests on a tour through our department, and was appalled to discover that we had such outdated computers to work on. From then on, we had shiny new Pentium II systems that we all put to work playing Counter-Strike with on our lunch break.

Seriously, the most annoying question. Literally EVERY caller asked it at some point. It wasn't even that they asked why the Sims weren't speaking "english;" it was that some people had so little exposure to anything outside their circle that they genuinely mistook the Sim language (which was utterly jibberish - literally, the sound designer took normal dialogue and randomly chopped it up) for an actual real-world language they didn't know.

We had a number of computer illiterates call us up for assistance - and I never minded a single one of them. People take it for granted now that most people know how to use a computer, but in 2000, computers were still primarily the domain of nerds and hardcore gamers. A significant number of callers were either seniors who had never really interacted with a computer, or little kids who were still learning. None of them bothered me. I was more than happy to teach them how to at least get the game running and fix their issues. In just about every case, they were the customers who were best at following directions. The worst callers were the know-it-alls who had just enough knowledge to cause damage, and would refuse to do what you asked them to, or had to question everything you were telling them. No, sure. Tell the guy who knows The Sims literally inside and out how what I'm making you do won't fix your issue. Uh huh. I'm sure being in IT and building networks for major companies makes you a total expert on how this particular video game works. If the customer started to say "Well, I know for a fact THAT won't work because..." you knew it was going to be a very difficult and annoying call.

Anyways. Those are all the stories I can recall just off the top of my head. On most days, our call board was in the red (meaning we had more than 10 calls waiting in queue), which meant there was very little if any respite from the onslaught. For years after I worked there, anytime I saw a copy of The Sims at Target or any other store, I'd cringe and feel pity for whoever was going to have to eventually answer calls from the person that bought that copy.

But working there was not all bad. On Fridays, the phones shut down at 3pm instead of 5pm, and we'd have the weekly staff meeting to go over new games/patches coming out and what we needed to know. After that was beer o'clock, and EA had an employee lounge with a pool table and tons of free-play arcade games. We'd all get toasted, BBQ up some meat, and then go back upstairs to duke it out against each other in Counter-Strike or Codename Eagle until we all sobered up enough to head home at 1 or so in the morning. Our department was split between two sides of the floor, so we had two clans organized for any campaigns in first-person shooters.

On the Maxis side (the dark side, we kept the lights off), it was the Maxis, Origin Systems, and Westwood Studios queues. On the light side (so named because that side of the building always faced the sun) were the Janes Entertainment, EA Sports, and Old Titles queues. Old titles were where every new rep usually had to start off, because one of the most common calls was having to walk customers through making a boot disk to run old DOS based CD-ROM games. If you could help somebody make a boot disk, you proved your mettle. We also had a CAT lab (configuration and testing) that was the one thing our manager had to spend budget on - every single possible piece of hardware currently on the market could be found there, so we could test any hardware combination imaginable if we ran into a particularly vexing tech issue with a game.

Every Weds, the warranty team (who were in the middle of the two halves) would come around and everybody got to pick a free game out of the warranty returns. Most of the games returned were because the customer didn't meet the system spec for the game, and we'd offer them a game in trade that would run on their computer in exchange for the game they sent in (most retailers refused refunds on opened software). For a spell, I had at least thirty copies of each of all our games, and over the years since I've been dropping them off at Goodwill as I come across them.

The best moment working there was when the Maxis queue got to visit the Walnut Creek headquarters of Maxis, tour the facilities and met Will Wright, and I got to tell him how obsessed with Sim City 2000 I was in high school. He signed my original copy of the game, and if I can find it (I've moved houses a bunch since then), I'll post a photo of it sometime.

Hope you enjoyed!