Lunch with: Curtis Paradis

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/02/2012 (5167 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You do stuff with The Sims and I don’t even know what The Sims is or are! They’re a family, they’re an online game … help!

To start off, The Sims is a life simulator. Basically what you do is pick your town first — you decide where you want to live. Each town is filled with different sorts of opportunities. And then you create your family — decide whether you want three kids, two kids — and you create exactly how they look. And then you move them into a house or an apartment, and you customize everything. And it’s different from the average computer game that we normally see.

How is it different? Why is it different?

Lots of people think of gamers as hard-core — they have, like, an XBox or a PlayStation — they’re playing some sort of shooting game. Whereas this game is good for the younger generation — that’s where a lot of my fans are. And yet it still it appeals to the older generation as well.

It’s not like a way to get away from the real world, but it’s a way to explore what life might be like if you were, say, a superstar, or a police officer. And the great thing about the game is that, just like in real life, everything evolves over time. So your kids grow up, your Sim ages, and eventually, your Sim will die. It’s completely evolutionary.

How did you get interested in this?

I don’t even know how old I was. I remember going over to a family friend’s, and she was playing The Sims, and I had never seen anything like it. These little virtual people were walking around in this virtual house. And she was saying, ‘Look! I can build rooms, I can place furniture.’ And then the people interact with it.

Originally, the designer, Will Wright, designed it as a virtual dollhouse. He wanted to build the houses, and then he figured, well, if we have these houses, we better put people in them to see how they interact inside of them.

House-building was what prompted Will Wright to create the game. But online house-building is where you’ve made your presence known, right?

That’s my bread and butter, I suppose you could say. I was playing around with video editing and I knew how to record in the game. And someone had said in the past that I built nice houses, so I figured, why not do it? So I recorded it, edited and uploaded it. And it just took off after that. And ever since then, I’ve been building them. I love it — I love every minute of it. I get to build the house that I dream of every month.

And what is it about the construction that you like?

In-game, it’s actually really easy to use, because this is a game built for kids. So you build walls by just dragging them along a grid system, and then there are floors, so you go up one or more floors. And putting in windows, they snap into the walls. So it’s very easy to do, and you can do it pretty fast.

But if you want to get into the detail that I do, you have to plan it out. I draw out all of my houses on graph paper first. They’re all blue-printed before I bring them into the game. There’s stuff I do before gaming, then I’m into the game playing it, then I’m out editing it and uploading it. So actually building the house is just a very small part. But it’s amazing, because even on paper, I can visualize what it will look like, and then I get to build it. And it comes to life in a 3D model that I get to not only be in and move around in, but I get to see a family live in it. There’s nothing better than that, other than actually building a real house.

You’re pursuing a career in media, and certainly multi-media, but any designs — pardon the pun — on being an architect or anything like that?

Yeah. Going back to my childhood, it was my career thing until I was probably in 11th grade. I was like, ‘I’m going to be an architect.’ Because I have been doing this forever. Ever since I can remember, I used to just draw random blueprints — ‘this is what a house would look like’ and ‘this is what a kitchen would look like.’ I mean, what kid DOES this? I remember using my Legos to build a house model. Why? I don’t know.

So this was just like a logical next step. This game allows me to do it in 3D and it allows me to do fun things with it. Architecture’s been in the back of my mind, but I don’t know where it’s going to go. I’m really enjoying the media course I’m in — it’s definitely helped me get to where I am now, and I’ve learned SO many interesting things. I really love the field and I want to stay in it.

But it’s always been in the back of my mind that if YouTube really can support me, that’s what I want to do. If I can make enough money off of the videos I’m making, and all the products I’m working on, I will create YouTube videos for a living, and I will run a website that I design and own and have full control over, and I will be one of the very few people in the world — maybe there’s five of us — who get to play ‘The Sims 3’ for a living and get to make money off of it.

So for your weekly show, how many subscribers and views have you got now?

Well, my channel is currently sitting at, I believe, 67,000 subscribers. I hope to hit 70,000 by the end of the month. And I’m currently sitting at around 20 million total video views. That’s a lot — we look at daily stats, and I’m gaining 150-ish subscribers a day, and I’m gaining 35,000 views a day.

On YouTube, if you can become quote-unquote ‘successful,’ they allow you to apply for a YouTube partnership. Once you’re accepted, Google posts ads on your videos. You earn so much for every view, so every time that ad pops up, I make a few cents. Every time you click on it, I make a few more.

So this is none of my business, but what are you looking at for revenue now?

Right now, it’s fairly small — what with school and everything, I can’t make as many videos as I would like. So the revenue’s down a little bit. But we’re still talking $17 an hour if I worked a regular nine-to-five job Monday to Friday. So it’s a pretty good job — I get more than minimum wage, and I don’t work every day. I get paid 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, no matter if I’m sleeping, eating, or hanging out with friends.

Is this at all a surprise for you? I mean, to have this sort of success at your age?

Oh yeah. I still don’t classify myself as being an Internet celebrity or being famous online. I still think of myself still as that everyday person who just posts videos. But yeah — if somebody who’s a really big gamer posts one of my videos, that makes me happy! I’m really happy to see someone else find it. And there’ve been gaming website in the past that have posted stuff about me, and that makes me a little giddy! And there’s fan videos out there FOR me — fan pages on Facebook. Where does that come from? And people, they’re so excited to be able to email me! It’s wild!

Do have a life outside of the computer? Do you feel like you’re missing out on … reality?

I see everyone else — their lives are changing, they’re moving, they’re evolving in ways I think, ‘That’d be really fun — I wish I could go do that.’ But I’m tied to these certain things, and that’s what I want to do. To a certain extent, this, I feel, could turn into something. If this gets big enough, there’s no saying I can’t go on a vacation whenever I want to, or do whatever I want. So I don’t get to live now, to the full extent of my life, but I feel that if I set this up properly, there’s no reason I can’t work from anywhere in the world doing whatever I want in the future.