Page II: Mental lapses and warped childhoods add to the fun, explains The Sims creator Will Wright.
There are so many different psychological theories, each one of them trying to explain a particular aspect of human psychology, but none of them is formal. None of them lets you come in and assign numbers to people to predict their behaviour.
At some level, we have to turn this into a very formal science, because we have to describe it to a computer, which is actually crunching through numbers to decide what the person is going to do next. So we mash together all these theories, but 50 percent of what holds it together is our internal duct tape.
One of the big success factors for "The Sims" was the support for user-created content, which also turns out to be a pretty good business move -- having your customers do your continuing development and testing. Was that fiendishly clever thinking on your part?
At the time, I was looking at the "Quake" community. I was very impressed with all the stuff people were doing with mods, but within a fairly small group of hard-core gamers. I wondered what would happen if you could bring that dynamic into as wide a community of people who tended to be a bit more on the creative side to begin with, who didn't approach games purely as a competitive medium. But I never foresaw the level to which a community would grow around the game. I've just been blown away with what people have done with the customisation.
Do you have a favourite piece of user-created content?
There are so many. Some of the stories are amazing -- especially the really personal ones. There are a lot of very specialised sites -- sites for Christian Sims, 14th century Sims -- just about any kind of weird specialty you can imagine. There's a great one called 7 Deadly Sims, where the content is all based around the seven deadly sins -- kitchen appliances for gluttony, comfy sofas for sloth.
The game industry is as imitative as any part of the entertainment business, yet there haven't really been any Sims knock-offs. Why do you think that is?
I've been kind of surprised; I would have expected to see more of them by now. There's a few, but they aren't anywhere near the level of polish and detail as "The Sims." We went through an extraordinary amount of effort with "The Sims" to make the game simple to play ... but that belies a very deep complexity under the hood.
The hardest things for us in developing the original game were getting the behavioural engine so it could handle a wide variety of situations and getting this complex set of behaviours accessible through an extremely simple interface. We wanted anybody to be able to play the game. In terms of building an emergent simulation, in which a huge number of possibilities can be simulated with behaviour -- that's still a very tricky technical challenge. So it feels like we're still a few years ahead of the competitors. I kind of wish there were more at this point, because I think it would be good for the category to have some more socially oriented games on the market.
You achieved a number of things the game industry wants -- attracting female gamers, bringing in more casual players. Has the industry learned anything from that?
I like to think that when a creative new idea comes out and does well, other companies think, "Maybe we should find more creative, risk-taking projects." But companies look at the success of a game like "The Sims" and say, "OK, let's make our version of 'The Sims,' instead of stepping out and doing something creatively different.
What lessons have you learned from "The Sims Online" experience?
If you look at "The Sims Online" and "The Sims," they look like very similar games. If you play them, though, they're completely different. A lot of it has to do with having a persistent world -- you can't speed up time; you've only got one avatar. It's a much less creative experience than "The Sims" offline.
Probably the most important thing I've learned is that we need to find different business models for online games. I'm a pretty hard-core gamer, and I generally won't spend $10 a month to subscribe to a game. Getting a casual player who's played maybe one game in their life to spend $10 a month is incredibly hard. I think we need new models for online games that don't require subscriptions and allow more freedom than persistent-state worlds do.
Did you envision that the online world would require the level of policing that it has?
It doesn't really surprise me too much, based on what I've learned about other games. It involves pretty much the same issues the Internet has in general. When you have shared communities, there's always going to be a group of people testing the system, trying to hack it or mess with people -- what we call "griefers." The griefer problem has been around since online games started. The issue is how you deal with it. With from-the-top, police state-style, or do you let the community self-police?
So what's next? Is there going to be a "Sims 3," with Darwinian evolution built in?
Right now, we're working on "Sims 2" expansions. We've made this game even more expandable than the first. But I'm sure there'll be another generation. It's important, though, when you have successful franchises like "The Sims" and "SimCity," that you don't stop trying to create new ones. So that's going on, too. We're trying to figure out what else we can build outside the box.
