The Sims 3: John Buchanan

The first is called SimFriend, which is an application available from The Sims 3 website, that allows you to choose from up to 120 different Sims, each with very different personalities. You'll then engage in a one-on-one email relationship with that Sim - they'll ask you particular questions that are pertinent to parts of their life, and you'll have a chance to respond as to what you think they should do.

The thinking behind that application is down to the ability in The Sims 3 to build millions of different personality traits for your Sims, so the response you might get from your SimFriend might be quite different - and delightful - than what you expect.

The second trial experience is call SimSocial - it's a Flash-based application that's turn-based, and does a wonderful job in a light way of introducing you to the core attributes of The Sims. Through this experience both new and current players are able to get a taste of what the attributes of the broader Sims is about, so they'll be excited to go get the full experience from The Sims 3.

We're actually working with Facebook right now to have that as one of their applications, and it'll live on our official Facebook page for both normal users and Sims fans on Facebook to be able to enjoy.

So while SimFriend focuses mainly on current players, SimSocial gave us a chance to speak to both new and current players.

The third trial experience is what we call SimSidekick - and that's exactly what it is, your sidekick to the worldwide web. The idea here is that both new and current players can choose from up to six Sims, each with different personality traits, who would then follow them to any website to see what sort of response they'd have.

So if I went to bbc.co.uk, or cnn.com, that Sim would respond to that site - so the Sim knows what type of site that is - and can respond specifically to one of the key partner sites like MySpace or Facebook, while at the same time being able to respond to other sites that are in a particular category.

If a Sim went to the BBC, CNN or Yahoo, it would read that as a news-type site and respond in an interesting way to tie into that particularly site.

Let's say we go to a sports site - maybe ESPN - and we've chosen Alex, he's our sports enthusiast Sim. You take him there and he'll start to jump up and down and grab a 'Number One Fan' sign, because he's on a site that he's very excited about.

It's actually been quite phenomenal - we've been tracking what fans have been saying through Facebook and Twitter, as well as other social network sites, so we can gather information and see how many people out there are using them.

For example, SimSocial now has over 200,000 users playing that trial experience, and that's a number that's doubled within the last week. We're really excited, and we think that will go up exponentially.

There are four key ways that will enable that to happen. The first is that all consumers, when they buy an official copy of The Sims 3, will immediately be able to download an entire second town called River View. So the moment you register your game you'll get it - so your experience is already expanded when you start to play the game.

The second way we're doing that is that this is the first time, certainly for The Sims but maybe in the industry, that we have a simultaneous launch of The Sims 3 Store, which is an online site for people to be able to buy objects and place them in the game. You'll receive 1000 Sim Points to be able to purchase those items when you register the game.

Exactly. The third piece is that we'll consistently update The Sims 3 Store with new objects for people to be able to buy and download - consistently engage our players with new content in order to drive them back to the Store to further their experience of The Sims 3.

A part of that will be The Exchange, which has been around for a few years, and that's a location for the fans of the game to upload content they're created to be able to share with the world. That's been unbelievably successful for us - we've seen over 100 million downloads from The Exchange over time.

The final piece, which is incredibly important for us, is that we're expanding the players' ability to create their own content with what we call the Movie Mash-up tool - one of the beautiful pieces of our brand is that it enables everyone to build, create and share whatever story they want to tell.

We've seen over 11 million videos posted on the EA YouTube channel specific to The Sims over the last eight years, and we want our fans to be able to extend that experience of showcasing their experience by creating movies.

The Movie Mash-up tool is truly one of the easiest tools you'll see - it's a point-and-click way to capture content, emotion and your game experiences. Then with the push of a button you'll then be able to upload that not only to The Sims 3 website, but also to social and video networks around the world.