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The world according to Will
How do Sims die? How do they fight or fall in love? An interview with game creator Will Wright reveals the game's guiding philosophies.
By Daniel Sieberg
[02/17/00]

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Books
"Sex and Rockets"
When JPL co-founder and occultist Jack Parsons wasn't busy building rockets, he was chatting up the "whore of Babylon."
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[02/15/00]

Technology: View from the top
Studio technician
MPAA president Jack Valenti has never downloaded an MP3, but he could have a huge impact on the future of online entertainment.
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[02/14/00]

21st Challenge
21st Challenge No. 30 Results
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By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
[02/12/00]

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Even the kids aren't automatically compatible with their parents. Since neither of his parents was neat, I set Bobby Boozington to work cleaning the house -- practically a full-time job in itself, as his family scattered their food-encrusted plates on the kitchen floor. He started out as a well-adjusted kid, but as he was deprived of parental love and worn down by all those trips to the trash can, depression set in. Eventually, Bobby flunked out of school.

With Bobby gone, I soon got bored with Dirk and Susie, and set up another house. This time, I plopped a pair of single gals -- Chris and Melissa -- in a humble little tract house that I designed myself (note to self: shoddy materials equal ugly home), and fixed it up with a cheap TV and a big coffee pot. After sorting out some little domestic problems (Melissa's rotten cooking skills set the house on fire, and Chris broke the shower), I set to work fixing Chris up with Mortimer Goth from across the street; five or six visits and about 20 compliments later, they finally kissed. But that kiss alone took hours of play -- lord knows how long it will take to coax them into a little horizontal action.

Also Today The world according to Will How do Sims die? How do they fight or fall in love? An interview with game creator Will Wright reveals the game's guiding philosophies. By Daniel Sieburg

This game, like most Maxis games, is endless -- the possibilities are limited only by the number of Sims you build -- over time, you can even prompt them to marry and make babies. Developing a career must take months (in three days of nearly full-time play, only one of the Sims ever got promoted). And some of the interactions in the Sims became predictable. You soon figure out that if a Sim compliments a stranger too soon, he'll get rejected; and if you deprive a social Sim of friends, he'll get so depressed he'll refuse to eat or drink, and so on.

But the game is absorbing nonetheless; so absorbing, in fact, that you can waste entire days (as I did) obsessing over the minutiae of the Sims' lives -- instructing them to eat, sleep, play and clean. Monotonous, yes, but bizarrely fascinating. (Why is making a Sim clean his house more interesting, I have to wonder, than cleaning your own house?)

Even more fascinating, however, is seeing what happens when you give up trying to make your Sims happy and begin to torture them instead. That's what I did to poor Michael, a recent college graduate who I fixed up with a zebra-striped couch and a fancy computer. I refused to let him use the toilet, just to see what would happen, and he eventually peed on the floor. When flies began buzzing around the garbage on the carpet, I decided not to let him play on the computer until he'd cleaned up the mess he'd made. And as a final indignity, I removed his refrigerator and waited to see how long it would take him to starve to death. The answer: two days.

This, I suspect, will be the fate of many, many Sims on many computers around the world; in fact, Maxis condones this kind of behavior. ("We know it's hard to resist tormenting them," the game guide pleads, "but do give them a decent meal now and then.") Games like this will ultimately bring out the twisted side of human nature. We want to see tiny humans attacking each other, having sex, feeling sick and neglecting their children -- living out the malicious fantasies that we ourselves must repress every day. If everything runs smoothly, after all, there's no fun in playing God.

So, as a final, self-indicting coup de grāce, I created a new family to move into the former home of poor Michael Bachelor. This little twosome is now living with Michael's funeral urn -- they weep before it once a day -- and learning how to endure each other's foibles. The woman's name is Janelle, and she's a Virgo just like me; we'll see what happens with her new male buddy, Serge the Sagittarius. I wonder if I'll learn anything from the way they respond to being tortured by "God."
salon.com | Feb. 17, 2000

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