I was harsh on EA the other day, and I stand by most of my comments. Theme Park is a disgrace to the memory of Bullfrog’s classic, the handling of Tetris was ridiculous, Origin is still a load of old wank and the company’s insistence on using it rather than established networks like Game Center and OpenFeint is just plain arrogant.

However, they have got one thing right recently, and that’s their latest iOS release: newest entry in the The Sims family The Sims FreePlay.

The Sims has been undergoing quite a few changes over recent years. First The Sims 3 brought open-world gameplay to the series. Then the World Adventures expansion gave the game a (very light) sense of narrative and some dungeon-crawling, puzzle-solving gameplay. Then Ambitions allowed us to follow our Sims to work for the first time in quite a while. Late Night brought new social interactions, Generations fleshed out the gameplay of various underused life stages and Pets brought, err, pets.

Meanwhile The Sims Social launched on Facebook and proved enormously popular despite not actually being that good. The Farmville-esque mechanics of “get your friends to help” seemed somehow more appropriate in the setting of The Sims, however, and there was a very, very mild hint of asynchronous multiplayer as you occasionally saw what your friends had done while they visited you the last time they were playing. I saw many people who didn’t typically try Facebook games giving The Sims Social more of a chance than they would normally. Ultimately, though, it was an exercise in extracting as much money from you as possible, with a wide variety of in-game items only purchasable through the premium hard currency of SimCash. It also uses the immensely irritating (but profitable) “pay to play” system of slowly-recharging “Energy”, only allowing you to perform a certain number of actions in a set time period.

Yesterday, The Sims FreePlay launched for iOS devices. There have been several previous The Sims 3-branded iOS games, but none of them have been that good, somehow missing out on the magic of the PC originals, much like The Sims Social. The Sims FreePlay takes a radically different approach to the whole series, however, and one which fits ideally with an iOS player’s lifestyle.

There’s one simple, fundamental change which has occurred to make this possible: make it real-time.

The Sims has typically operated with vastly accelerated time, so we can witness their birth, growth, life and death over the course of a few days rather than a lifetime. And in gameplay terms, this has fit the series well — part of the appeal of The Sims 3 in particular is building a dynasty of Sims who have grown to dominate the town in which they live. If you had to live out their lives in real-time, this would lead to a lot of downtime.

However, think about when you pick up your phone. You do it during a lull in conversation, when you’re on the toilet, when you’re bored, while you’re watching a TV programme that you’re not really interested in but your significant other wants to watch. The Sims FreePlay is designed for these situations. Pick it up and there’ll be something to do for a few minutes, whether that’s collecting money from your Sims, sending them to work, forcing them into a party situation or gathering them all together for a collaborative gardening effort. Once they’re busy doing whatever you’ve told them to, you can leave them to it — for hours at a time, in many cases.

The game experience is tied to a social game-style levelling system, but this isn’t a social game. There’s no visiting neighbours, no helping friends with quests (which begs the question why it requires an Internet connection to play, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment), no Energy system — just you and your Sims. Or, specifically, when you start, your Sim. Singular.

When you start the game, your town will be empty aside from the Sim you created. As you complete tasks and get your little person to engage in activities, however, you gain XP. The longer an action takes, the more XP you get. As you level up, you unlock the right to have more Sims in your town — though bringing them in either costs Simoleons (money) to build the house, or Lifestyle Points (earned through completing goals, reaching “relationship milestones” and numerous other criteria) to build a prefabricated “theme” home. Both of these currencies can be purchased with real money if you desire, but, crucially, you’re not nagged to do so (unlike in Theme Park, which gives you a quest teaching you how to purchase premium currency — shameless much?) and you can earn both through normal play if you’re patient enough. If you’re determined to play for free, you’re going to have to think carefully about your time management and what you want your slowly-expanding army of Sims to accomplish, because once they start a task, it can’t be stopped except by expending your finite supply of Lifestyle Points to “rush” finishing it.

This actually adds an interesting degree of light strategy to the gameplay. If one of your Sims has a large variety of garden plots that could potentially prove profitable, you’re going to need to enlist the other Sims in the neighbourhood to help out, because one Sim can only plant and tend one plot at a time, and needs to be present for the entire period of the seed’s growth — up to 24 real hours in some cases. This means if you have a garden with, say, five plots, you’ll need five Sims to be able to take full advantage of it — and while they’re doing that, they can’t be doing anything else. It becomes an exercise in weighing up whether it’s worth committing a Sim to a lengthy and potentially profitable project, or whether you’d rather take a more active role in their life and guide them through a number of smaller tasks. Do you send them to work for six hours, thereby guaranteeing a nice paycheck, prospects for promotion (leading to more money in the future) and the ever-important XP? Or do you leave them behind looking after their house?

This shift in focus away from managing the needs of an individual Sim (or family) to overseeing the entire community works well for the series. It’s a markedly different experience from, say, The Sims 3 — but we already have The Sims 3 so why reinvent the wheel? What we have in The Sims FreePlay is a game you can pick up for a couple of minutes at a time, set your little people off doing something and then safely forget about until a Push notification pops up reminding you that Pete Davison has finished his bath. In this sense, it’s a bit like Nimblebit’s Tiny Tower, a simple but effective game which has proven enormously popular, even among those who typically decry this style of simplified sim (no pun intended) as being “rubbish” — myself included.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about The Sims FreePlay in the context of EA’s recent actions is that the company appears to be experimenting. It’s undergone a considerable period of expansion in recent years, gobbling up a large variety of studios from all sectors of the “games industry” at large — ranging from triple-A developers to social game specialists. The different approaches taken by its most recent titles make it very clear that the company is trying to find the “best” (i.e. most profitable) approach to move forward. We have the subscription model (Tetris — not the first game I would have picked to try that model on), the “gouging whales” model (Theme Park and its $70+ rides) and the “patient people play for free” approach of The Sims FreePlay.

It’s fair to say the publisher pissed off a lot of people — including me — with Tetris and Theme Park in particular. But, as they say, we learn from our mistakes — if there’s any justice, The Sims FreePlay will prove the most popular of EA’s recent titles and show them that this is the way to treat iOS and casual players: with respect, not expecting them to pay to play, but offering them the chance to if they do happen to appreciate the game in question.

EA’s still got a long way to go to prove to me that they’re not money-grubbing bastards who care more about their bottom line than the goodwill of their player base(s). But The Sims FreePlay is a good start.