Daniel Sieberg

It all started when, trying to kick the tail-end of the flu, I’d stayed home from a Christmas party, fired up my computer and poured myself a glass of wine. I was researching a graduate school essay about women who are using the Web to promote a healthy sexuality and gender equality. So, I meandered through Bliss and its collection of erotica, poetry, comics and sex-positive essays falling under the description “Life beyond the mission position.” The pages are full of overtly sensual text and images, but the site falls well short of gratuitous pornography.

I also thumbed through the Web pages at Danni’s Hard Drive, where former stripper-turned-webmistress Danni Ashe promotes her brand of sexuality and the nude female form through a hugely successful e-commerce venture. The site is chock full of college girls flaunting their all-natural breasts, “amateur entrepreneurs” showing it all for the camera, and big-busted babes built of silicone. The text introducing these nude models is not the typical “XXX sluts want you to give it to them now!!!” Danni imbues the site with a friendly feel, as if she’s a mutual friend of model and viewer, arranging a blind date. She and her girls give off the image of women who truly believe they are empowered by the site, which is something I wanted to discuss in my essay.

But as I was sifting through Danni’s Hard Drive on Netscape Communicator 4.05, a revolting photo of a woman defecating on a guy’s face suddenly popped up on the screen. This was definitely not what I was searching for. However, there was no delete box and I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. I thought to myself, “Ha ha, another disturbingly amusing download trick from one of these sites.” Yet it wouldn’t go away. Then a small dialogue box sprang up, similar to a chat room interface or ICQ:

You can type in the top.

These were the first words I received from him. Still living in denial and naiveti, I thought it was just a bizarre program or advertisement I’d inadvertently grabbed.

I can’t recall exactly what he typed next, but this was the gist of it:

I can see what you’re doing. You’re looking at all that porn. You’d better stop and pay attention to me. This is for real.

Incredulous in hindsight, I still thought the box would merely disappear. The words weren’t specific enough for me to suspect that this was a live dialogue. Besides, the sites I’d been visiting weren’t the stereotypical XXX sites. I wasn’t some sleazy porn freak, I thought, trying to distinguish my academic viewing of nude feminists from someone else’s masturbatory naked-lady viewing. As my defense was taking shape in my mind, this guy really got my attention by typing my Microsoft Network password into that scary little box.

I have the power, booboo69, and I will erase your hard drive if you don’t stop looking at this smut. I can destroy all the data on your computer. Do you think you’re smarter than me??!

He demonstrated to me what he was capable of unleashing by turning the image on my monitor upside-down and sending over a sound file with his voice on it — complete with Australian accent. My very own deus ex machina. I never saw anything transferred to my computer, but suddenly it was speaking to me.

“Well, g’day. I’m your friendly hacker and I live in Australia. Doesn’t it frighten the shit out of you that I can get into your computer and send you a sound wave like this? But don’t worry, I won’t do anything wrong. But you’d better be a good boy or a good girl and not look at any dirty pictures because if you do I’ll know what you’re doing and I can see it too. I’ll catch up with you again. Have a nice day. Bye.”

Fantastic, I thought. What were the odds that I’d attract a hacker on a morality kick? I frantically typed into the chat box, trying to explain the nature of my research to him, but he didn’t care. Besides, like most anyone online, I’ve checked out a few QuickHitOfSex.com sites — and he could tell. I told him I was scared and asked him to go away. He said he had “copied files from my hard drive,” although he didn’t say which ones, and he told me he could see exactly what I was typing. By that point I was sweating buckets and shaking like a leaf — and it wasn’t the lingering flu or the wine. I was downright petrified.

I panicked and yanked out my cable modem connection. My mind was racing as I paced my apartment. How much had he seen? Did I care whether he read my graduate essays, especially the one about the psychology of hacking? Had I visited any sites that might come back to haunt me? What about my e-mail … I was using Telnet to connect to a remote university server — could he impersonate me and send messages to my friends and family? Could he find out where I live? And my brother also used that computer — was his privacy in jeopardy too? Did using a cable modem make me more of a sitting duck?

Through discussions with some Net-savvy friends, I soon learned about hacking tools for “script kiddies,” such as the Cult of the Dead Cow’s Back Orifice 2000, which allows a hacker to take control of machines that run Windows — executing applications, reading and transferring files, even restarting or locking up a computer. It gives its user more control of a remote Windows machine than the person at the keyboard has. I also discovered that Trojan horses are nasty beasts — malicious, security-breaking programs disguised as something benign like a screensaver or a game. They run in the background so you don’t know they’re there — until some hacker exploits them to take control of your computer.

I also became aware of the apparent fact that I make a more appetizing meal for hackers since I have a solely Windows environment. As the Back Orifice 2000 site puts it: “Being vulnerable to Trojan horse programs is an inherent flaw in the Windows architecture (by no means unique to it, of course), that software can be executed on a system without any form of user intervention, approval, or feedback. The features of Windows that keep the user from being overwhelmed with information regarding the workings of their computer, are the same features that allow Back Orifice 2000 to keep itself hidden from view.”

Detective Bruce Headridge of my local Organized Crime Agency, a provincial policing group partly dedicated to cracking down on computer crime, told me that the hacker likely infected my machine by invisibly fastening a Trojan horse to an attachment file that I downloaded somewhere along the line. Or I might have picked up the Trojan horse elsewhere and the hacker pinged a random list of IP addresses until he came across my infected machine. (I get randomly hacked out of millions of users but can’t win $10 in the lottery.)

Thanks to this experience, I now know that, in addition to being quick, my cable modem has a static IP address. Headridge explained that my logged-in address is always the same and if, like a typical user, I leave my computer on all the time, I am an easier target. It was a simple numbers game: Because I was permanently online, he said, my chances of being found by a hacker were higher than those of someone who dials in with a modem and has an always-changing IP address. Once he knew my IP address and a Trojan horse had opened the door for him, Headridge said, the hacker probably used Back Orifice 2000 to gain control of my computer.

Eventually, I discovered the Trojan horse by searching my hard drive. It was sitting there, like a festering, mocking tumor, and even my latest anti-virus program couldn’t delete it. The anti-virus program I’m using, eSafe Desktop, recognizes the name of it is win32.Back Door.G6, though in Microsoft Windows Explorer, the name comes up as mtmtask, an executable file. The date stamp on it corresponds to when the hacker showed up, leaving me wondering how it got there and what to do with it. A security consultant at a store in town said if no anti-virus program will remove it, then reformatting my hard drive is the only solution — not exactly something I was eager to do over the holidays.

Probably the worst part of this ordeal came when I realized I had only myself to blame. I am usually quite careless when I receive attachments like Elf Bowling or the addictive snowball fight game, opening them without scanning for viruses. But I don’t think I’m the only one. Most of my friends and colleagues act similarly, all in the name of expediency. But e-mail attachments often have a long history to them, after traveling through cyberspace from user to user; I’ve now begun to think of them as a shared needle.

Today, I am arming myself with more technical knowledge in an effort to protect myself. I got brave, went online, installed the ConSeal Private Desktop which protects Windows users from Trojan horses with a personal firewall, and learned about all sorts of security measures. The hacker from down under had managed to disable my Norton anti-virus software and was audacious enough to instruct me to get a more recent version. Now I have five anti-hacking programs running on my computer — the Guard Dog from McAfee barks when there is a security breach — and I still feel like I need more. I’m worse than the guy who wears three condoms.

I did phone my ISP, Rogers Cable, which is one of Canada’s largest cable television companies, and reported the incident. At first, I assumed the company could just block him somehow. But technical representatives told me that I needed to ascertain the hacker’s IP address before they could stymie his attacks. They suggested that I purchase BLACKIce Defender, which silently monitors communications between your computer and the network. “I don’t know what else you can do, man, but good luck,” they encouraged. “I’m sure it’ll all work out in the end.” In spite of this sanguine and cavalier attitude, I was more than just a little reluctant to go online and poke around anti-hacking software sites when he could be there waiting for me. You just don’t walk up to your enemy unarmed and kick him on the shin. (Subsequently, executives at Rogers have made a concerted effort to investigate the situation and the origins of the Trojan horse.)

I used to consider myself fairly well-informed about technology, but I was obviously only scratching the surface. Now, I’m paranoid about where I get my information; I question the source of a forwarded e-mail and I wonder who could be lurking online. I guess if any good came of this, it’s that I got an education, but I can’t pretend it’s been fun. I only hope I’ve learned my lesson well enough and that I’ll never again have to hear that unsettlingly calm Australian voice cutting in to tell me that I’m being watched. Sic ‘im, Guard Dog.

Graphics have come a long way since you started designing games. I was just looking at an old Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark game and our hero looks like a little rectangle running around on an Atari. Now, you can see Jones’ face. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot more realistic. Do those changes in the technology inspire you to make your games even more real?

Actually, I’d have to say that it’s the opposite for me. What inspires me is how much people were able to read into that little rectangle. You only have to give people the briefest, most tentative scaffolding to hang something on and they’ll build an elaborate narrative and fill in the gaps with their imagination. We humans are so good at that. And that was one of the things we were really trying to leverage in the Sims. We were trying to present everything at a certain level of abstraction so that anybody could come in and personalize the story just through interpretation. We can do a lot of really cool stuff with graphics and sound, but that’s not where the magic happens.

The Sims characters can get into arguments, or slap each other. What sorts of considerations did you make about the extent of violence or realism in the game?

We were basically going through a minefield, and we had to thread our way through it taking the most prudent path. We didn’t want to avoid violence entirely … [but] there are certain aspects of violence we didn’t want to touch at all, like child abuse. The domestic violence issue was a really thorny one. In fact, you’ll notice that if you have a male slap another male, it’s a very physical slap. But if you have a male slap a female, it’s much more of an insult, kind of a British army slap with a glove. We made some hard calls there. In some sense there had to be failure states in these directions and we had to represent those failure states. But we tried to keep it at an almost cartoony level. When they actually fight, if you have them attack each other, it looks kind of like Road Runner, with the cloud of dust and the arms and legs sticking out.

What other moral dilemmas did you encounter?

Well, the two biggest issues we faced were violence and sex and how realistically we treated each one. Our initial release is worldwide in 14 different languages, so we were dealing with totally differing moral standards across cultures. We tried to figure out the one thing that we could do that is the safest in the most countries while allowing the most possibilities. The other side of this is that we wanted to keep this game as open-ended as possible. Some people are going to want to make their Sims fight or they’re going to want to see more of a sex type of thing.

And will every country be receiving the same version?

Yeah. So I can predict that the Americans are going to be much more fixated on the sex aspects than the Europeans [laughs]. And you know, in Germany, oddly enough, they felt the violence should be more than what we had in the game. Basically, we wanted to stay as morally or ethically neutral as possible. But there were some things we didn’t want to touch, like pedophilia.

It’s fascinating that a computer game, which allows you to create a reality, ends up making people look at their own reality.

Absolutely. There’s a funny kind of double standard, with people focusing in on certain aspects of the game like same-sex relationships or violence. In about 60 percent of the games out there, the point of the game is to kill. You kill other people and you very rarely hear moral discussion about that. I think it’s kind of funny.

What were the considerations, if any, to including homosexuality in the game?

It gets back to the design goal that anybody should be able to do a reasonable interpretation of their family. We tried to make it so that the Sims won’t do this autonomously, unless you start pushing them in that direction. If you have a man start flirting with another man, it potentially gets the [characters] over the hump and they could become lovers.

Do you expect people to portray themselves in the game, creating a reality similar to their own to see what happens, or will they make a world that has nothing to do with their own lives?

I’ve seen a lot of people in testing start out by doing their own family, but very quickly they’ll diverge, into either a fantasy of what they would like to see their life turn into or this voodoo doll thing, like “Let me see if I can kill myself” or “What happens if my sister gets sent off to military school?” We wanted people to read a lot into this by giving them the right level of ambiguity. We were trying to facilitate as much interpretation of the story as possible.

What were your influences for this game?

There’s a really good book called “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud. It’s all about comics, but it turns out that a lot of the lessons he talks about are very applicable to what we were doing here. He talks about how when you’re designing a comic book, the really interesting stuff happens “in the gutter,” which is in between the panels of a comic. Because the panels are basically these moments in time — these brief instances that a writer presents — and then the reader is actually connecting the dots.

A good example is a panel that has a guy with an ax sneaking up on another guy so it clearly looks like an ax murder. Then the next panel is just a skyline with “Aaaaagggghhhh!” written across it. He was pointing out that the cartoonist didn’t really say that the ax murderer killed the guy. It could be that he tripped over the table and he’s upset that the guy got away. Or maybe it was the other guy yelling because he got chopped up. What you’re imagining in that gutter might be really gory or it might be really exciting or tragic or whatever. But it’s the interpretation that you’re bringing.

Based on your history with SimCity, you know that most people’s first impulse with these games is to see what kind of chaos they can cause.

Oh sure. That’s totally natural — the first thing you want to do is establish the boundaries of the simulation, so you want to push it as far as you can in each direction and find out where you hit a wall. In some sense, when you’re playing the game you’re trying to reverse-engineer the simulation in your head. In general, we’ve kind of designed our games to allow people to be destructive. We just make it very easy for them to get it out of their system. And they realize that the challenge in these games is the constructive side, not necessarily the destructive side.

And that’s presumably where the longevity is too.

I think the longevity for this project is going to be a bit different than something like SimCity, though, because of something we noticed about halfway through development, and that was the power of the narrative. We were not writing a story, but anybody playing this game could not help but imagine a story as the game progressed. You know, one of the modes is the camera mode where you can actually take snapshots as you play, and capture them and put out a Web page, like a photo album of what happened to the family.

The coolest thing about this game is that … you’ll be able to write a really elaborate little story just by playing the game — and then upload it to our Web site where other people can read it. If they like the family a lot, they can even download the family.

I have to say, I thought the voices of the Sims were amusing. They kind of reminded me of the teachers or adults in “Peanuts.”

I think they were going for the same thing we were. They wanted you to imagine what your parents would say to you, which was different from everybody else. So when the parents were going “wah wah wah wah wah,” I was imagining my mother saying, “You know, that’s not a toy” or whatever the things are that your parents would say to you.

How many ways can Sims die?

Well, it’s not fixed. One of the things about the design of this game is that we’re going to be expanding it continually with downloads from the Web site, and we’ve already got new ways to die currently being constructed here. We’re doing a lot of “Trojan horsing.” So we’re going to have objects to download that look totally innocent, like a nice new lamp. But in fact the lamp might include some dynamic totally tangential to the lamp that people don’t realize. It’s only when they put the lamp in that they realize this new social element has appeared in the game.

Like what?

Like sickness, for example. We could easily do a communicable disease in a lamp that your Sims could potentially die of if it’s not treated. What we shipped is probably going to end up being about 30 percent of what the game is by the end of the year. There’s so much we wanted to do, but we knew we just couldn’t manage it all in a reasonable time frame. So whenever we came across something like that we made sure that our underlying engine could be expanded in that direction.

There are no weapons in the game, are there?

Not yet.

What about adjusting the soundtrack?

Any of the music in the game can be replaced just by dropping MP3s into a certain directory. What a lot of people are doing is putting their favorite music in the stereo for their Sims to dance to.

Do you ever feel like you’re playing God?

We’re playing meta-God here by deciding what’s in the game, but we try to pass off that responsibility to the player and say, “Here, you play God.” But we are in some sense a metalevel above that. Potentially, other players can create things to add, and at that point we’re basically giving up control. For instance, you can redefine the skins on the characters. There are a lot of Web sites that have skins that you can download. Some of these are famous people from TV or film, but we knew all along there is nothing we can do to stop someone from doing naked skins — all they have to do is download those and their Sims walk around naked all day. Everyone is narcissistic at some level, so having a game about your life can be a powerful concept.