Maxis pushes the social gaming boundary again come June.

The Sims 3, which drops on June 2nd, will have greater social connection features for players and an in-game town to buy/sell items. This means players can not only share their creations, as they have been doing in Sims 2, but they will have an easier time sharing their personal stories from their game. Maxis will provide players with a Movie Mash up tool for players to create their own videos in the game (which I assume will be more robust then the video capture capabilities in The Sims 2); another machinima friendly tool I hope. Players can embed those videos on social network sites or blogs and it looks like other content will be available to share too.

The in-game town for buying and selling items will be a place for players to show off their creations. A Gamer Daily article says the “downloadables, including updates, patches, community content, exchange content and other media will be accessible via the easy to cruise Game Launcher.” Maxis is also building some search and filter features into the game, with some recommendations features to top it all off (W00T).

The Sims is the biggest selling series of all time so having these social features is to their benefit. Though, I’m wondering if the reason that The Sims series is so popular is due to their social features. It is not even an MMO (well not anymore), these are players who are playing a single player game. Maybe some other game developers should start looking into building integrated social features into their next game … just a suggestion.

Watching The Daily Show tonight filled me with joy. They did a report from inside of Grand Theft Auto 4 (which came out today). I have not been keeping up-to-date on the whole machinima scene but I really wished more people would try doing greenscreen within video games. A project at Georgia Tech is looking at using Second Life for augmented reality but I don’t think we have to go that far. I realize that perspective and lighting is usually a problem (and the fact you can’t manipulate anything in the virtual world) but how hard would it be to record a scene in WoW and insert real life people that look like their walking in Orgrimmar? You could even use an omni-directional treadmill painted in green for the full effect.

I think I’m just ranting because I don’t have time to work on machinima stuff.

P.S. I was just looking at some machinima on Youtube. Look people I know the medium allows for rapid development but start normalizing your audio. Whenever I start to watch a machinima that sounds like they used a cellphone on a windy day to record their audio I stop watching, I don’t care how hilarious your “let’s make fun of video games” joke is.