The Sims Online has been in the news recently. There's an article in NewsWeek as well as one at Time.com. The Time article writes a bit on how the first Sim idea was born:

"The founding father of this brave new world is an affable, bespectacled, 42-year-old polymath named Will Wright. In 1981, after five years of bouncing around three colleges without graduating, Wright decided to try his hand at writing a computer game. He called it Raid on Bungeling Bay. "It was basically a pretty stupid fly-around-in-a-helicopter-and-shoot-people game," he admits. The object was to fly over various islands and bomb them back to the Stone Age. But Wright became fascinated with these tiny islands. He found himself spending hours giving each one a detailed, working infrastructure tiny people in tiny factories loading products onto tiny ships. "Pretty soon," he remembers, "I figured out I was having a lot more fun creating these little islands than I was bombing them." Eureka: the original Sim. Wright had discovered a new way to have fun."

Both reads are quite interesting, but not too short either. More this SimDay is on the SimCity front: there are some new Desktop Images (640*480, 800*600 and 1024*768) and 9 new screenshots. Also, there will be another SimCity 4 chat next week, this time about the 'Region Play' feature. You can chat with producer Sean Decker. The chat will start tonight at 11pm British Time (Midnight in Europe, 3pm PST). Get your questions ready to ask. About last week's chat: you can check out the transcript right here.