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Interview with The Sims Creator
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has just posted an interview with Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, in conjunction with the launch of The Sims 2. In it, Wright explains that users will be able to bond better and get more emotionally attached thanks to a new 3D engine. He also makes special mention of the 7 Deadly Sims as one of his favorite user-created sites."
" 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...
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Aw comeon, I thought it was alWright.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
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.
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.
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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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
My cats ate my karma. They also wrote this comment.
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?
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.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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...