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DailyRadar.com Interview

Exclusive Will Wright Interview

How difficult was it to create The Sims?

Daily Radar has been playing more of The Sims than is probably healthy, but torturing those little guys is just too much fun. In an effort to understand the twisted minds behind such an insidiously addictive game, Daily Radar went over to Will Wright's house, ate his food, fell in love with his wife and moved in just to see how he likes it. While we were lounging in our boxers on his sofa, we got a chance to ask him a few questions about his latest piece of work.

Daily Radar: How difficult or easy was it to create The Sims compared to previous projects?
Will Wright: Basically, it was the hardest one by far. Kind of [for two reasons], technically trying to recreate human behavior and then trying to sell the concept to everybody. I had an amazing amount of resistance to the idea for a long time.

DR: Even after the success of SimCity?
WW: Yeah. It's just that it does sound kind of crazy, doing a game about regular life. It just doesn't sound that compelling. It wasn't until I had actually gotten a prototype up and running, where you could actually interact with people and move them around and do things that people, I think, started to get a sense of how interesting it would be.
On the technical side, we really wanted the behavior to be expandable after we shipped the game. We really wanted it to be as open-ended as we could possibly make it. And that really put some heavy loads on the behavior engine, so engineering the simulation was the biggest technical hurdle.
There's the how much do we try to simulate [problem], and then there's the how deep do we go with that [problem]. And whenever you give the user design tools, like designing the house, you have to really think hard about all the weird stuff they are going to try to do. Because the first thing people like to do in a simulation is explore the boundaries of it. So they'll sit there and push it in every weird direction they can think of just to see where it breaks down. That's the real difficulty with simulations. You have to really think about what are going to be the boundaries of that simulation, and then decide what's going to happen when you hit those boundaries.

DR: Back in the Apple II and C64 days, David Crane at Activision made a game called Little Computer People. Did you ever play it?
WW: Yeah, I had a friend who had it, and he sent it to me. Actually I got to know one of the producers on that, a guy named Rich Gold; he saw some early version of The Sims. And we talked about simulators quite a bit. I thought it was a really cute idea. Back at that point in time, just about half the games developed were really creative. All the genres weren't done to death already. It was really refreshing.
The interesting thing about [Little Computer People] was how much people empathized with this little character on the screen. I know a lot of people that got really upset when they didn't feed him and he would die. It didn't have much in the way of simulation. I think you hit the boundaries of that way too soon. But then again, with the computers that were around, it really was a great piece of work.

We really wanted it to be as open-ended as we could possibly make it.

DR: OK. To get back to The Sims, there have been some interesting gameplay decisions, but the one that a lot of people around the office have been asking is why are there no weekends in the sim-suburbs?
WW: Well, if we had done weekends, all of a sudden you would have wanted a calendar, and you would have been focused on calendar time. And as soon as we did that, you would start realizing that there are no seasons and no holidays. It would start bring up a lot of issues that we kind of dealt with, but at the expense of things we did instead. So, rather than have people focus on calendar time, I really wanted people focusing on daily time.
We structured that game such that if you have a job, you can take a day off at any time, and you just don't get paid. So you can basically structure your own weekends in the game, as you need them. You can take every other day off if you want to, but if you take two days off, you lose your job. So we wanted to keep the game more immediate.

What's the deal with all the bisexuality?

DR: Some of us have noticed that the politics of The Sims is a little...uh, liberal. For example, the characters are functionally bisexual and polygamy is a viable option. Are all you guys at Maxis really that progressive?
WW: [laughs] Well...there was one thing that we had as a design goal all along, and that was that anybody should be able to model their family. So we had long, involved discussions on how far we would go on issues of sexual orientation and violence. Those are the two big issues.
So there are a couple things we decided we didn't want to allow, like child abuse for instance. For domestic violence, we kind of have different levels of it. In other words, the men can really get into fistfights, and the woman can too. There are slap animations where you can have them slap each other. And then men can really slap each other hard, but the women have the more polite kind of "British Army" slap. So there were a lot of things where we kind of [walking] this thin line or walking though a mine field, and we were just trying to take the most prudent path through this mine field.
And the sexual orientation thing was similar. They won't exhibit gay relationships autonomously, whereas they can exhibit heterosexual relationships autonomously. But you can drive them to gay relationships, if that's what you are trying for.

But you can drive them to gay relatioships, if that's what you are trying for.

DR: Do you have any multiplayer plans for the future of The Sims?
WW: Actually I'm spending most of my time right now studying just that. I'm trying all the multiplayer games I can. But with a lot of the multiplayer games out there, I'm not exactly compelled to have social interaction with the other players. I don't mind blowing them up, hacking monsters side by side, but I don't really want to talk to these people.
I need to figure that out first. To me that's the primary thing. I need to figure out why I would want to go online and interact with total strangers.

DR: Why can't SIMS do things like go to the market or go to the movies or even something as simple as go over to another SIM's house?
WW: That goes back to defining the boundaries of the simulation. We could have put in something where you actually went and saw their work. But we would have to do a lot of the stuff that we do currently but at a much lower level. In other words, we would have to lose a lot of features. So we made a decision that we were going to do the domestic side of the house really well and leave the rest of it offstage.
In terms of visiting each other's house, you can, but only by running the other family and then inviting them over. We thought about that quite seriously, but we decided this wasn't as fun as being the host and having much more control options. So it really comes down to there is only so much we could do, and we had to pick and choose our fights.

DR: Sure. But what about the graphic engine? It has the very familiar SimCity 2D, sprite-based engine. But was there any temptation to got to 3D engine or would that limit expandability too much?
WW: It doesn't really limit expandability. It has a lot more to do with editing and user-interface. We really wanted the editing of the house to be simple and intuitive, very much like SimCity. As soon as you start having to move a free roaming camera around, that gets very hard to do.
Also, there were a lot of technical and user-interface issues. The camera you have right now has three levels of zoom and four rotations, so there are a small number of options. If you could move the camera around wherever you want to, you get into all a lot of issues of situation awareness.
One of things I did a while back was that I went out and bought most of the decent home-design programs that were on the market. And I spent a lot of time playing with those, and it's interesting because even the easiest to use of those is quite difficult to edit. There seems to be a very firm relationship between ease-of-use and resolution. So, if I have a design package that lets me place things down to an inch resolution, it's much more difficult to use than something that lets me place things down to a foot or a meter.
So if you try to recreate your house with something like Broderbund's 3D Home Architect, you can do it more accurately than you can in The Sims, but it will take you over ten times longer. It is interesting, because I think a lot of people are buying those programs for fun, because if you look at how many they sell, it's tremendous amounts. And I know not that many people are designing their own homes. So I think a lot of people are buying those as toys, but those programs are designed to take a lot of fun out of it.

So, how cruel are you to your SIMs?

DR: The Sims has been very popular with everyone in the office but especially with women. Was this a conscious effort on your part, or did you design a game that you were interested in and hope that it would have broad appeal?
WW: I would say the [latter]. Although, all along, I was hoping this would appeal more to women than a lot of games. I don't think that the game is geared to women, but that it is a little more balanced compared to most games. One of the things about it is that there are a lot of different activities you can engage in. Some people totally get into the [SIMs] and that's all they care about. Other people, like little boys, will spend the whole time designing the house, and they almost never go into live mode. Other people are totally into the shopping. I think it's more than just about having a game with a broad range of approaches.

DR: Well, as a follow up, do you think the industry as a whole has done enough to reach out to women, or is it too focused on male-centered games?
WW: I think it's too centered on testosterone games. But I enjoy those too; I loved Half-Life, and I play Tribes a lot. But there are so many people doing those so well, and there are so many other potential genres that no one is even touching, that I love to see some of that talent exploring other types of games.
I really enjoy first-person shooters, but there are obviously several groups out there that really know how to build those things well. So I would see that we have a surplus of expertise in that area and a deficit of expertise in a lot of other areas that could be just as cool.

Well, there is one thing I have a lot of fun with...

DR: Here at Daily Radar, our favorite way to be cruel to the SIMs is to build an enormous hedge maze and then put the fridge at the end of that maze just to watch them pass out from exhaustion. What's your favorite way to inflict suffering on your SIMs?
WW: [laughs] Well, there is one thing that I have a lot of fun with. I use the pool tool to design a Pac-Man maze. Then I put one man and two women in the pool and then I take the ladders away so they couldn't get out. I would then make both the women madly in love with the guy, then I would only drive the guy, and I wouldn't control the women. So I had to keep him away because as soon as one of them caught him and kissed him, I would lose. It did an amazing job of recreating Pac-Man. I actually copied down a Pac-Man maze, and their routing is pretty good. So they'd be zeroing in on the guy and I'd be trying to drive him with the "go here" clicks. It was just like playing Pac-Man!

DR: Now that The Sims is on the shelves, what games are your trying to get caught up on?
WW: Well, like I said, I'm checking out a lot of the multiplayer games right now. I've been playing Everquest, Tribes and will probably try Quake III soon. And I am really looking forward to Team Fortress 2.

DR: Cool. Thanks for the time Will.
WW: No problem.