Is ‘The Sims’ movie actually a good idea?

For me and many, many others, The Sims was a key part of our childhoods. Entire afternoons were spent at friends’ houses, a group of us hunched over the one computer chair as we recreated ourselves and our friends and inevitably placed someone in a pool, only to remove the ladder.

So it’s not surprising that Hollywood would eventually peg The Sims for a film treatment. The Sims‘ developer Electronic Arts (EA) confirmed as much on Tuesday, September 18. Amazon MGM Films (a merger I had mercifully forgotten about) will head up the project. Margot Robbie’s production company LuckyChap will produce, signaling that The Sims movie is probably hoping to ride the success of Barbie.

Equally interesting is the choice of director: Kate Herron, who directed and executive-produced the first season of Loki and will be directing The Last of Us season 2. She’ll co-write the movie with Briony Redman, who she wrote an episode of the most recent Doctor Who season.

All promising credentials, but do they scream The Sims? In a series with no main characters and no storylines beyond what each individual creates in their own games, what does “screaming The Sims” even mean? I mention all these dry crew matters because they bring up an interesting question: What will The Sims movie be like? And what do we want it to be like?

An open canvas

Adaptations come in many forms. There are projects like The Last of Us, which seek to translate the events of a game into a series. There are projects like The Super Mario Bros. Movie or Barbie, which anchor themselves in the use of their iconic, household name characters and create a new plot around them.

The Sims doesn’t fit comfortably in either of those categories. As much as it might hurt to hear this, Bella Goth or her brother Michael Bachelor don’t hit as universally as Steve in the upcoming Minecraft movie. They feel like inside jokes.

The manager of the The Sims franchise, Kate Gorman, told Variety the film will be “lore heavy”—which could mean anything. Are we talking about the lore behind how someone comes to be a Sim? Behind characters like Bella Goth, or why the Grim Reaper comes around?

Like Minecraft, the defining experience of the The Sims is customization. The game is unique to each individual who plays it, which means for a Sims movie to be good, it would have to be very surreal. Like, I want a horror movie which takes place in one house and where the family slowly realizes someone is controlling them. (EA, if you steal this idea, this article is published and dated—you might as well hire me.)

Someone like Kate Herron definitely feels capable of delivering a movie that thinks outside the box like that. It’s more a matter of whether the Hollywood machine—and EA—are brave enough to let the creatives be weird.