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Sims in the hands of an angry God
Why are we so eager to torture the beings we've created? The latest game from Maxis opens a window into the psyche.
By Janelle Brown
[02/17/00]

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[02/16/00]

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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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[02/14/00]

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[02/12/00]

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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.

Also Today Sims in the hands of an angry God Why are we so eager to torture the beings we've created? The latest game from Maxis opens a window into the psyche. By Janelle Brown

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.
salon.com | Feb. 17, 2000

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