Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Technology

Review
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]

Dot-com addiction
The resolution of a few domain-name disputes offers some breathing room in the crowded Net name arena. But is it enough?
By Damien Cave
[02/16/00]

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."
By John Geirland
[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.
By Damien Cave
[02/14/00]

21st Challenge
21st Challenge No. 30 Results
Cloudy crystal-balling: When techno-predictions go awry.
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
[02/12/00]

Complete archives for Technology

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

It's not that Wright, 40, isn't satisfied with his own existence. In fact, he's sitting pretty after selling more than 7 million Sim games -- and releasing his newest title, the Sims, in 14 countries this month. An elaborate Tamagotchi-style neighborhood that allows players to manipulate their virtual inhabitants any way they see fit, the Sims is a natural extension of Wright's ongoing fascination with architecture and city planning. Wright, who was born in Atlanta, has been working on the Sims on and off for seven years but says he has no intention of stopping now. He has a raft of wacky ideas that he plans to surreptitiously incorporate in the game through the Sims Web site over the next year.

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?

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

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.

Next page | Weapons, nudity, communicable diseases? What's next for the Sims?