Celebrating 25 Years of The Sims: Alice Lo Deeks

For the past 25 years, our team has poured its passion into deep, thoughtful, and authentic experiences that reflect life’s many possibilities (as well as a few fantastical possibilities we wish existed). But life, as it turns out, is pretty darn big, which is why we’re constantly introducing new content and features to expand The Sims universe into a story-telling platform that’s representative of its player community. 

As part of our ongoing birthday celebration, we’re talking to our team members about the most meaningful projects they’ve been a part of since joining The Sims family and exploring the ways in which their unique perspectives have informed the features and updates we’ve added over the past 25 years. This time we’re talking to Associate Experience Design Director Alice Lo Deeks about her team’s most massive and meaningful update: the main menu.

What was your first role on The Sims, and how has it changed over time?

I've been here for seven years. When I joined, the team was much smaller. I started out as a senior experience designer. I worked on some features for the Get Famous Expansion Pack, and then eventually I became the lead experience designer and was basically the pack lead for Discover University. I worked on features like CAS stories and the first scripted onboarding tutorial.

Eventually I became the experience design director on The Sims 4. Now that my role has changed, I do a lot more design strategy, research strategy, design team mentoring, working with cross-discipline leads to align on vision, and general team planning. So a lot of what I do now isn't necessarily player-facing but really helping drive for the best player experience and enabling the team to do their best work.

What’s the first thing you worked on?

When I first started, I worked on the fame progression system and the reputation system for Get Famous. It was good timing because I was working on things from beginning to end, so I really had time to onboard, to think about things deeply and see how the team was thinking about these systems and how they could work with the rest of The Sims 4.

What’s the most meaningful thing you’ve worked on and why?

One memorable project was the Summer of Music event. This was really our first foray into live service, and introducing events… that was brand new not only for the team to dream up but also to execute. While limited in time and resources, we learned a lot along the way, and I'm really proud of what we were able to accomplish.

Additionally, I'm particularly proud of how our team worked together and approached the redesign for the main menu. We spent a lot of time researching and listening to community sentiment to identify the pain points and main pillars that we used as the guiding lights for how we approached the redesign. We aimed to refocus the design of the main menu for a more personalized Sims experience, making it feel more focused, accessible, visually captivating, and inviting so you would feel a sense of being welcomed back. That's one of the reasons we really wanted to showcase players’ households front and center – that’s what matters most to the players.

When I heard players echo some of the stuff that we were really thinking deeply about, it was really nice to feel validated that they saw what we were trying to do. It was really heartwarming because I felt like they really understood our intention.

How does your personal experience help shape your work?

I grew up playing The Sims, and when I played The Sims 4. I would craft my own household and try to tell my own stories with pets. So I was fairly familiar with it, but I wasn't familiar with the nuances of every little system. This is a running joke even now, as everyone's worked on this for a very long time: it's so deep that there are little things that even we don't know about, right? So when I would, for example, watch other streamers play, I would find out new ways of playing the game myself.

As Experience Designers and gamers, we practice a lot of empathy for our players. Understanding what players want and how they play our game really helps myself and our team create the best player experiences. We’re always reading comments, we’re always seeing how players react, and doing lots of research and testing.

How important is it for Maxis to allow players to see themselves in The Sims?

I think that's extremely important. Like, who doesn't want to see themselves reflected in a game? Even if it's situational – like being pregnant or going through transitions or different stages of your life – all that's really meaningful to be able to recreate and tell stories about. I spend a lot of time on accessibility. It's small things from contrast color and font sizes to bigger features like being able to have UI scale and sliders for better readability. All of that is important.