Interview with The Sims Creator

Translation... by tod_miller · 2004-09-15 18:30 · Score: 4, Funny

" that users will be able to bond better and get more emotionally attached thanks to a new 3D engine"

How to put this... higher resolution anatomically correct feminine models rendered with high resolution photographic tectures, and motion capture data from a lesbian rave.

That sums it up :-)

I like This guy, he is old skool, yet a pioneer in the game industry!

Like those bike dudes at kittyhawk, he will be remembered long after I have bit the daiseys, or kicked the dust, or pushed up the bucket... hang on...

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If this isn't a dupe... by Kris_J · 2004-09-15 18:35 · Score: 2, Interesting

... it should be. Maybe if we had more paid advertising like this story has to be, we wouldn't need the ad banners.

Re:If this isn't a dupe... by moonbender · 2004-09-16 01:27 · Score: 2, Interesting

Huh? That's a totally different story, and it was posted more than a week - ages in Slashdot time - ago. I think there were a lot more stories about Doom 3, and The Sims 2 is just (subjectively) a much better game than that, with (objectively) way more complex gameplay. It's also the successor to the best selling PC game, which alone makes it significant. The notion that this comes close to advertising is ridiculous.

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give me one too by real_smiff · 2004-09-15 20:18 · Score: 4, Funny

That's the worst pun I've seen in a long time.

Aw comeon, I thought it was alWright.

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"The Sims" as Art/Philosophy by coaxial · 2004-09-15 21:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

Perhaps inadvertently, "The Sims" seemed to me as indictment of materialism. The sims get up, take a shower and go to work to buy things. These things improve their lives. Better stoves provide better meals. Robot maids provide better more time for entertainment. Eventually you reach a point where you're buying things just to buy things.

You have all these simoleans, and you feel like you need to spend them. So you buy a plasma screen for your sims' living room. Then their bedroom. Then their dining room, and kitchen. You stick a home theater system in every room of their house. You create a family of trailer trash next door simply so your sims can make enough friends to get a job promotion, so they can earn more simoleans, so they can buy more things they don't need.

Even in light of lesbian love triangles where two of the participates hate each other so much they can't keep from torturing the other with the voodoo doll; there's something very depressing about the whole game.

Re:"The Sims" as Art/Philosophy by moonbender · 2004-09-16 01:41 · Score: 2, Insightful

That's really just one way to play the game. I agree the game reflects what you say - and why shouldn't it, effectively a better cooking equipment will give you better meals in the real world, all other things being equal. But the game really leaves it up to you to play your character like you want.

Actually, I think the aspirations in The Sims 2 are a nice way to deal with the different way people play this game. There is the materialist aspiration, making a sim happy simply by buying him things. But among others there are also the family aspiration, the romance aspiration and the knowledge aspiration.
That last one reflects the way I play my (first) character - max out most if not all skills and reach the top of the career, not because it pays more money, but rather as a goal in itself. I'm now a mad scientist and I guess all that's left is maxing out body, charisma and mechanical, then my character has "won".
Note that I have more money than I could spend (due to a job special episode that paid 50,000 credits) and I certainly don't have a TV in every room. And I don't have a seperate dining and living room and kitchen as such...

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Re:"The Sims" as Art/Philosophy by nine-times · 2004-09-16 01:48 · Score: 3, Insightful

Perhaps inadvertently, "The Sims" seemed to me as indictment of materialism. The sims get up, take a shower and go to work to buy things. These things improve their lives. Better stoves provide better meals.
What I find disturbing is the fact that "playing the game" means making your character wake up, take a shower, go to work, come home, buy things, eat, meet people, etc. So that means a lot of people are sitting around playing a game which consists of "leading an everyday life".
Couldn't these people just lead an everyday life? I mean, wanting to play Doom3 I understand. In your life, how often do you get to run around with a BFG shooting monsters?
Now, I'm not just trying to say "Doom3 rules, Sims2 sucks!" or something. The reason I bring this all up at all is that it seems like people are really getting sucked into computer games. People are spending all their time playing Doom3 and living their whole lives in MMORPGs. That's pretty scary to me already. I've watched people fail to take a shower, go to work, and meet people because they're too busy playing a game. And now they are going to not take a shower, not go to work, and not meet new people because they're playing a game that consists in pretending to take a shower, pretending to go to work, and pretending to meet pretend people?
Does anyone else find this really screwed up?
Re:"The Sims" as Art/Philosophy by MilenCent · 2004-09-16 08:59 · Score: 2, Insightful

Couldn't these people just lead an everyday life? I mean, wanting to play Doom3 I understand. In your life, how often do you get to run around with a BFG shooting monsters?

Not too often, though judging by the hundreds of games devoted to that premise, it's a common fantasy.

But anyway there is a degree of screwed-upedness in becoming that addicted to computer games. But I don't see how it's related to The Sims itself.

The true addicting power of a game is unrelated to its presentation or theme. Nethack is one of the most addicting games known to man, after all. The presentation gets the player in the door, so to speak, gets him started playing, but after that what makes a game addictive is the interaction between his mind and the design.

The very, very best games are interesting for multiple levels of involvement.

1. At first, they're fun to play.

2. As the player plays more, they get interested in doing better, and figuring out tricks that conserve resources. The original visceral thrill of the game begins to fade as the player becomes interested in playing well. This is essentially an involvement with an abstract process.

3. The player discovers elements of the game that had never occurred to him before, and uses them to greatly refine his approach. Really involved gamers may even devise artificial tests and "records" for himself, such as speed runs.

4. Eventually he reaches a point where further optimization of his play yields no further benefit, and interest begins to wane. Hearing about new strategies on the Internet may cause interest to spike again for a short time.

What's important to note about this process is that, beyond the initial contact between player and game, the player is basically optimizing an abstract process. This is almost like an academic pursuit. The same human drive that pushes a mathematician to create and prove theorems is at work here.

I don't think it even matters what the process is, anything can be fashioned into an addictive game, if the player can be persuaded to work through the "interface" phase and become addicted.

Why the Sims is not elite ... by 2TecTom · 2004-09-15 22:10 · Score: 2, Interesting

Ok, so the game has sold a bizillion copies, yes it's big game. However, it's not considered seriously by the "leet". Why? IMHO, I think it's simply that there's no mad skillz involved. It's simply too shallow. In fact, in some ways, when compared to SimCity, The Sims is even less challenging.

It's a shame really because it could be so much more. I'd be interested more if The Sims was more of a character engine than just a single game. It would be cool if we had a way to develop characters that was as evolved as the way we display them in 3D. If Will was as far advanced as John Carmack is in 3D, the inner and interpersonal depth and authenticity would rival a real experience. Think bots as good at interacting socially as they do with a shoddy!

Then Will and the mod community could extend this and enable the engine to plug into other games in order to suport complex characterizations. But why stop with games Will, plug into everything, IM's, desktops, forums, web communities, etc. Let a Sims engine, or some other more Open Standard project, become the Avatar standard. It would be most excellent to create bots which could respond based on certain 'dispositions'. I'd like to have a semi-intelligent reception bot screen my calls for instance. Couldn't a Sim handle that?

Not only that, but let's say you made this psycologically accurate. Could you model a relationship in order to find real solutions? For instance, could you use it to model the arguments you have with your spouse, in order to experiment with how far you could go before they leave you?

Anyways, I digess ...

By the way, Will, when I can I put my Sims in my SimCity, on my SimPlanet with my SimFarms and SimTowns and then connect them to SimWorld? Oh, and when can I wander around it all in 3D?

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Re:Why the Sims is not elite ... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-15 23:44 · Score: 5, Insightful

Doesn't matter in the slightest whether or not the Sims appeal to the "leet". The "l33t" are increasingly an utter irrelevance in the world of gaming. Much as a small group of FPS and RPG players might like to see themselves as a genuine elite in the gaming world, ultimate arbiters of what's hot and what's not, the simple fact is that they aren't.

The "leet" scorned Counter-Strike for a long time, claiming that it was inherantly "less skillful" than the truly elite games such as Quake. When the general gaming populace basically proved that it didn't give a damn about this, and made Counter-Strike the most successful online FPS ever, the "leet" first whinged a lot, then mostly adopted the game as their own and pretended they'd never looked down on it. The idea of a relatively small circle of players (who, in my experience, generally conform to the most negative of the gamer stereotypes) with far too much time on their hands being genuine trendsetters for the audience of what is, these days, fast becoming a mainstream entertainment medium is laughable.

I didn't actually like The Sims much myself; I got pretty bored after the first few hours. However, it was probably the most significant development in gaming in recent years, more so than Doom 3, Farcry, Warcraft 3 or any of the other games which the "leet" might reasonably be expected to approve of. Why was it so popular? Largely for all the reasons you claim it was a failure. It didn't need the twitch-skills of a attention-deficient 9 year old Korean school-child to get the most out of it. You didn't need to spend hours memorising the optimal patterns and build-orders. You didn't need a postgraduate degree in economics. Your average consumer, male or female, could pick it up, play it and enjoy it. Dying was almost impossible, there was no retarded saves-policy, so you could stop playing at any point (handy if you hear the baby crying in the next room, or a friend drops by) and start again from exactly where you left off. In short, it combined an experience that was accessible to a person who wouldn't self-define as a gamer, but which had many of the addictive qualities which make RPGs and their ilk so popular, such as genuine character progression and the sense of a persistent world (even if this was only an illusion).

This is the future of "mainstream" gaming. This is the kind of audience that's going to attract the big publishers, due to the immense and as-yet largely untapped profit potential. The "leet" are perfectly welcome to go on bouncing around the same old Quakeworld maps, figuring out that perfect jumping technique for moving 0.000001mph faster (apparently to some warped minds, this counts as "depth"), just don't expect anybody to pay them the slightest bit of attention.
Re:Why the Sims is not elite ... by Chess_the_cat · 2004-09-15 23:49 · Score: 3, Insightful

I think it's simply that there's no mad skillz involved.
I fucking hate games like that. Games that are so hard you throw the controller through the window isn't what I'm looking for.

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Re:Why the Sims is not elite ... by neglige · 2004-09-16 00:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

If Will was as far advanced as John Carmack is in 3D, the inner and interpersonal depth and authenticity would rival a real experience.

This is IMHO not quite an appropriate comparison. In no way I want to belittle the achievements by John Carmack, but to my mind improving a graphics engine is also supported by next generation graphic cards which allow for more complex eye candy.

Improving on the "inner and interpersonal depth", on the other hand, is not supported by advances in hardware (yet) but requires a better understanding and 'reproduction' (for lack of a better word) of mental processes. In short: real-life Sims need real-life artifical intelligence. And research in the AI department has been rather slow over the last decades. I guess it will happen, and then we will see smarter and more realistic sims.

But then again, maybe not:

Wright's learned even more from fans' interactions with The Sims -- lessons he's now applying to his robotic creations: like not making the machines too life-like.

"One of the reasons The Sims seem so realistic is because everything in the game is somewhat abstract. You see icons of what a Sims is talking about, not the exact words," Wright said. "It invites the player to come in and imagine the details. To pour personality into these empty vessels. If we gave The Sims too much detail, the illusion would break."

From Wired News

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Re:Why the Sims is not elite ... by moonbender · 2004-09-16 01:56 · Score: 3, Interesting

Why? IMHO, I think it's simply that there's no mad skillz involved.

Whatever. Maybe they're not "mad skillz", but try telling a friend of mine whose (virtual) wife just died and who can't get his toddler to learn to walk that this is an easy game. I found raising two toddlers and one infant at the same time quite strenuous myself. The Sims can be a quite challenging game if you're willing (or careless enough) to create challenging situations.

The Sims is not considered leet because it did sell a lot of copies, because it appeals to the masses and the masses are per definition non-leet. The Sims is not considered leet because it doesn't try to hide the fact that it's essentially a virtual doll house - although it's really quite similar to most CRPGs (minus the fighting) who do try to hide that fact. Think of it as doll house versus action figures. (Key notion I just got.) Or perhabs rather Lego versus action figures, because like Legos The Sims is just an extremely open and creative game.

[W]hen I can I put my Sims in my SimCity

In a very halk-baked way, you already can. I assume SC4 doesn't support importing The Sims 2 characters, though. What I found very interesting that The Sims 2 actually supports importing SimCity 4 areas. Not the city itself, just the terrain with some streets and bridges, but still. Allows people to make use of SC4's great terraforming engine to create The Sims 2 neighbourhoods.
And as for SimPlanet, man I would love to see a Sim Earth remake. I think it was the first Sim * game I played (in English, without knowing a word) and it was awesome. It's really a shame they never made a sequel. I always dreamed of that SimCity in SimNation on SimEarth design you mentioned when I was playing the original SimCity and SimEarth.

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Great post by superultra · 2004-09-16 00:41 · Score: 4, Interesting

Perhaps inadvertently, "The Sims" seemed to me as indictment of materialism.

Quite an intriguing statement, and you're probably right. But I think that Wright's design is open enough that, theoritically, your goal could be to have a happy sim in a small house with a limited number of objects. It could very well be done. Perhaps the game is designed not so much as an indictment but as a reflection. We think that happiness comes from material, so we obviously think that that's the way the Sims works. Maybe Sims 2 doesn't have to be that way. In Sims, you didn't have to either. It was certainly more difficult, but you could depend on other Sims for happiness instead of objects. Not at unlike a modern American society.

Besides, we're back to the whole sand house/doll house things. What kid do you know of spends their time building a shovel instead of a massive dump truck, or how many Barbies buy a reasonably priced used Ford escort instead of a corvette?

Re:Great post by klmth · 2004-09-16 01:19 · Score: 3, Interesting

Actually, as it turns out, the game heavily emphasizes physical needs in the beginning of you character's career, but as the game progresses, the shift turns towards social needs. So in effect, it forces you to turn towards other Sims for happiness.

genre cliches by mausmalone · 2004-09-16 00:42 · Score: 2, Interesting

Instead of genre staples such as lobbing grenades or casting spells, the game asked players to get excited about tasks such as personal hygiene and interior design.

Okay, it's got no grenades or spells, but it's not in a war or fantasy genre. Sims is a micromanagement game, and it has all the cliches of a micromanagement game. In fact, it all comes down to maximizing profit and minimizing losses. In this case, maximizing your character's happiness.

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Maybe I just don't get it by DeDmeTe · 2004-09-16 02:22 · Score: 2, Interesting

Really.. c'mon, what makes this game so much fun? I tried to play Sims 1 when it came out.. I just couldn't get into it. To much micro-managment and not enough "fun". However. my wife LOVED it. She spent countless hours playing that game... she'd play while talking to her girlfriend on the phone (while her girlfreind was playing) and they'd talk about what was happening with their sims. Jesus... it's pretend life. I finally had to uninstall it so she could get back to her chores :-) (that was a joke) Anyway... I just don't see the entertainment value in this game.

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Soap Operas, Movies, TV Series... by Khyl'Dran · 2004-09-16 04:02 · Score: 3, Insightful

Not so screwed up as it seems. Spending your time watching what your Sim will do when he finds out that his wife is cheating on him isn't entirely different from spending time watching "Friends" to see who will stay with who. The difference is that the Sims is an interactive form of entertainment while TV is not. But they are both entertainment, and both represent ways to escape from your day to day life and to identify with the problems of your day to day life as well. Many people don't make alter ego's of themselves in the sims to go and meet pretend people, but when they do, its the same thing as watching a TV series and identifying with one of the characters.

Anyways, a lot of people who spend time playing the sims, if they didn't have sims, they'd look for other forms of escape, such as TV, etc...

Re:Soap Operas, Movies, TV Series... by nine-times · 2004-09-16 04:47 · Score: 3, Insightful

The difference is that the Sims is an interactive form of entertainment while TV is not. But they are both entertainment, and both represent ways to escape from your day to day life and to identify with the problems of your day to day life as well.
Well, I find it disturbing, too, sometimes when people identify a little too much with TV. Like when people care a little too much if Ross and Rachel end up together?
But where I think Sims is worse, perhaps, is that by being interactive, not only do you get emotionally invested in this little fiction, but you feel like you are accomplishing things. There's a really weird phenomenon that psychologists are studing: With books/movies/TV, people do get emotionally invested, but in a fairly passive and removed way (usually). However, in computer games, some people (actually a fairly large percentage of avid gamers) start to feel like tasks they perform matter. People start to think that, if they don't fend off the aliens, somehow this will have negative consequences.
So, it does get to be like when people really really want Ross and Rachel to get together, but they end up feeling like it's their responsibility to make it happen. They become almost afraid to stop playing, as though they're letting the characters down.
It seems to me that this is potentially more dangerous than TV, since people begin to derive a great sense of accomplishment from completing tasks that don't actually have an effect. They feel like they've saved the world, when the world, in reality, is no better off. In the case of the Sims, they spend an awful lot of time completing their daily chores in this digital world, bettering their digital characters, while their house and themselves remain a mess.
Anyways, a lot of people who spend time playing the sims, if they didn't have sims, they'd look for other forms of escape, such as TV, etc...
And this has a lot to do with my point. People are "escaping" from their real lifes by leading a poor digital imitation of an ordinary life. If your life is really so bad, isn't all that time and energy and attention better directed towards improving your real life?

Speaking of cliches... by Dmala · 2004-09-16 04:11 · Score: 2, Funny

I, for one, sincerely hope the game succeeds in getting (some) players excited about personal hygiene.

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Interview with The Sims Creator

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