The Sims Game Design Documents (1997)

I attended this talk by Will Wright in 1996 at Stanford, and went to work on him at Maxis soon thereafter. Years later looking back and watching this after working on and shipping the game he demonstrated for the first time in public in this talk, I was surprised by how much of the important parts of the design he already had thought through and explained in this talk, including having the Sims talk with an abstract language like adults in Charlie Brown, and using the game to enable storytelling.

Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk

Jan 27, 2023 STANFORD UNIVERSITY - COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT

Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.

He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.

This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.

Use and reproduction: The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).

My notes and write-up:

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406

Lobster.rs post:

https://lobste.rs/s/fz36cj/will_wright_on_designing_user_int...

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) video games donhopkins.medium.com

DonHopkins avatar authored by DonHopkins 2 years ago | caches | 3 comments

On April 4, 1996, Terry Winograd (who I worked with at Interval Research) invited me to sit in on his HCI Group CS547 Seminar where Will Wright was giving a presentation called “Interfacing to Microworlds”, in which he gave demos and retrospective critiques of his three previous games, SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000.

He opened it up to a question and answer session, during which Terry Winograd’s students asked excellent questions that Will answered in thoughtful detail, then one of them asked the $5 billion question: “What projects are you working on now?”

Will was taken aback and amused by the directness, and answered “Oh, God…” then said he would back up and give “more of an answer than you were looking for.”

The he demonstrated and explained Dollhouse for the first time in public, talking in depth about its architecture, design, and his long term plans and visions.

I took notes of the lecture, augmented them with more recent information and links from later talking and working with Will, and published the notes on my blog. But all I had to go on were my notes, and I haven’t seen a video of that early version of Dollhouse ever since.

But only last week I discovered the Holy Grail I’d been searching for 27 years, nestled and sparkling among a huge dragon’s hoard of historic treasures that are now free for the taking: Stanford University has published a huge collection of hundreds of Terry Winograd’s HCI Group CS547 Seminar Video Recordings, including that talk and two more by Will Wright!

I really appreciate Terry Winograd for inviting me to Will’s talk that blew my mind and changed my life (it overwhelmingly and irresistibly convinced me to go to Maxis to work with Will on The Sims), and to the Stanford University librarians and archivists for putting this enormous treasure trove of historic videos online.

Guide to the Stanford University, Computer Science Department, HCI Group, CS547 Seminar Video Recordings

https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_tex...

Will Wright, Maxis, “Interfacing to Microworlds”, April 26, 1996:

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999

Will Wright, Maxis, “Games and Simulation”, May 2, 2003

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pw467bz3079

Will Wright, Maxis / Electronic Arts, “Laughing Creative Communities: Lessons for the Spore community experience”, May 22, 2009

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pd936vc7267

I uploaded the video to YouTube to automatically create closed captions, which I proofread and cleaned up, so it’s more accessible and easier for people to find, and you can translate the closed captions to other languages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk

And I updated my previous article “Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)” to include the embedded video, as well as the transcript and screen snapshots of the demo, links to more information, and slides from Will’s subsequent talk that illustrated what he was talking about in 1996.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

[Reposting this thread here, because a GamerGate incel "FAAST" just tried to vandalize this discussion by posting an incoherent angry reply and flagged my comment as undermining his self-loathing homophobic ideology, so now you can read it without his ridiculous hate speech:]

I'm disappointed The Sims 1 wasn't included on that frightened angry list of "Woke Games" the GamerGate incels were circulating around!

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/

The Sims Design Documents

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...

This is a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 3, 8/7/98.

On page 5, he wrote the following comments about same sex relationships in the game:

>The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitly going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world’s population). It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other people.

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...

This is a PDF file with a scan of the handwritten notes, and a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 5, 8/31/98.

On page 4, there is a section about Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships, which reflects Don's suggestion to change the design to support same sex relationships.

>Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships To be outlined in 9/30 Live Mode deliverable. Currently the game only allows heterosexual romance. This will not be the only type available – it just reflects the early stages of implementation. Will is reviewing the code and will make recommendations for how to implement homosexual romance as well.

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...

This is a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 7, 10/2/98.

On page 21, there is a section (same as above) about Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships, which reflects Don's suggestion to change the design to support same sex relationships.

After discussing it with Patrick J. Barrett III, we've determined that the sequence of events that led to The Sims having same sex relationships: The initial prototype implementation did not support same sex relationships, and I noticed that, when I tried to have two women kiss, the would-be-kissee slapped the kisser. So I wrote up my opinion that it should support same sex relationships, instead of resulting in homophobic violence, and proposed a straw man 2-dimensional way of modeling it. Subsequent design documents said heterosexual romance would not be the only kind available, and that Will was reviewing the code and would make recommendations on how to implement it. Patrick was hired soon after that, and was set to task implementing some social interactions. But Will didn't get back to Patrick and the production database didn't reflect his opinion by the time Patrick started working on it. But Patrick implemented support for same sex relationships anyway, but not by explicitly modeling sexual preference as property of The Sims personality -- just as a behavior that was possible at any time for any character.

spondylosaurus 1 hour ago | parent | next [–]

And the Sims 1 live demo at E3 had two female sims unexpectedly kiss!

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss...

Which generated a lot of buzz for the game, as you might expect. Maybe it wouldn't have taken off without that publicity.

DonHopkins 42 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–]

Yes, the unplanned off-the-rails lesbian kiss at E3 generated some really great press coverage! And it was also soon after Columbine, when video games were getting a lot of unfair flack and blame for causing violence and school shootings, so people were really hurting for a non-violent gender inclusive video game, both for gamers to play and for the press to write about.

Here's a great video essay by Alex Avila, who deeply analyzes The Sims, and discusses "The Kiss". The YouTube comments are exceptionally amazing and heartwarming! (Well curated to eliminate the toxic slime from hateful GamerGate incels like FAAST, too.)

Did The Sims make you gay? - a video essay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi-HWyh0Ybk

>It's no doubt The Sims is an influential video game. In this video essay, we're going to talk about its GAY influence, particularly the role it plays in queer people's identity development. Enjoy the presentation as we go over how the Sims influenced a generation in letting them live out their Tumblr dreams...

Just a few of the many comments:

Yes it did, I used to make wlw families in my Sims 2 games and make their homes lower than the ground level bc I thought it'd hide them from my parents

I DID SOMETHING LIKE THIS. I made the bedroom downstairs so when they slept, cuddled or whoohoo, my parents would not see.

Ah yes, fond memories of saving my gay in-game relationships on a separate memory card. And if that wasn’t enough good measure, being a psychopath and making my characters fight to reduce their social status back down to friends or enemies so that no one would see or suspect that they were ever married.

You were hardly made gay by the sims. You were always gay. The sims just help you discover it.

@tikimillie hey not trying to respond in a mean or hateful way, I’m pretty sure everyone commenting and the person who made the video know the sims didn’t make them gay, but it’s a joke based on anti lgbt people claiming stuff makes us gay, so this joke subverts that by claiming the thing that made us gay is a game we love.

My wife was a huge fan of The Sims and your video on its impact on sexual orientation made her laugh out loud. She would watch it over and over, always finding something new to enjoy. Though she is no longer with me, the memories of her laughter while watching your video will always be a source of comfort. Thank you for creating something that brought her so much joy. Rest in peace, my love.

I 100% made gay sims but the pattern actually started way earlier. When I was five had a pair of polly pockets who were "married" and lived in the same little pocket house. My parents thought this was very cute and were equally sweet (and completely unsurprised) when I came out 10 years later.

I was gay before but the Sims make me accept in who i am, because of how gay people in the game is treated as just normal people, it was so heart warming to see my two gay sims kiss each other in public without people harassing them

I remmeber playing my first sim game (3) alone at the age of 10 and my two characters, one rich old man and one surfer bro who started out as roommates, eventually fell in love and started cuddling on their own and at the time I was so unfamiliar with gay content in any of the media I consumed I remember being absolutely astonished that the game would let them do that at all. not in the angry reactionary way but in the "holy shit... they can just DO that????? and it's FINE???????!!!!" kind of way

When I came out to my sister, the very first thing she said to me was “……. Is that why all your Sims were gay?”

I'm one of those players that never had a problem with the sexuality system in The Sims. I never felt the need for labels, homophobia, queer history and such in my game. Equal for me was enough. More than enough, it was everything I wanted. No distinction means no hate. Everyone is normal and the same. I love queer history irl, but I long for a world where I don't need to label myself, to come out, to identify with a community and not with another. For me, not having to be different is freedom. As in, I can be as different and unique as I want, but it won't make a difference in how much people love me or hate me; I want walk down the street holding hand with my partner without people looking at us because we're not the pair they expect. Their indifference would mean the world to me. And The Sims gives me that. I don't want no labels, no hate, trauma in my game. Not the real life kind that is. Downloading extreme violence and ending families is a whole different story :)

Making my sim flirt with/date/kiss a female sim every day before quitting without saving so my parents wouldn’t find it and so it didn’t count is one of my gayest experiences

That reminds me a story of my childhood: Me and my cousin playing the sims together. Making two sims (me: a female, he: a male) and controlling them in turns. My cousin controls his sim and gets him a girlfriend from some of the neighbor households. Then he says: "Yay, I started dating her! And who are you going to date?". And I answered, without a second thought: "I am going to steal your girlfriend". He: "What? Is it even possible?" Me: "Let's try and see." And it worked, my sim successfully stole his sim's girlfriend. That's how we discovered the sims can be gay. And how I discovered I prefer girls. So I quess The Sims made me gay? :D

When I was like 7 I used to play a psp sims game and saw the option for 2 same sex sims to get married, so I tried that and was surprised to see it wasn't like a weird insulting thing. When I showed it to my grandma she just confiscated the psp and hid it for actual years which was so confusing

I remember the first time I ever made gay happen in the Sims. As a kid I didn't know sex worked so I made my Sims adopt their children as I was unsure of how to make them have children naturally. I learnt much later by accident when 2 of my Sims were sharing the same bed and the option came up. So the next generation of my Sims family came along. Their offspring was a girl who had a friend throughout childhood who was also a girl. As they grew into teenagehood, I realised the option to do romantic interactions was there. I was really surprised. When I clicked on them I didn't think the two girls would actually kiss. I felt really hot all over, it was so exciting. I made them kiss over and over and over. I didn't know why this kiss felt different from all my other Sims kissing. Quickly, I started to feel guilty and embarrassed (I don't know why because my family have no issues with gay things, seeing as many members are gay themselves). I forced my sim to leave her girlfriend and marry a man so they could have children, because I was desperate to have biological children. My Sims were basically always gay as I got older and older. The Sims actually helped me to realise that I was apart of the lgbtq community myself even if I didn't know it yet.

as a bisexual sims fan, i view the lack of choosing an identity, and the "utopia" of existing without having to declare a label as something that was helpful to me. to see sims autonomously love each other despite that was one of the things that helped me realise that people having to come out is just strange. And as someone who loves queer history and understanding the oppression and suppression presently and in the past i think having a game where flirting with the opposite sex is the same as flirting with the same sex. it felt refreshing to other games i also like, such as stardew valley.

When we were 9 or 10 my best friend and I made an all-female prison and since we had heard that lesbians were bad people we made two prisoners kiss, it was supposed to be wrong but for some reason it felt more familiar to me than my sim self's life with a husband and kids. So I decided to give myself a girlfriend and see how I felt, I realized this is how I wanted my real life to be as well when I grew up. Unfortunately, my mom caught me and made me delete my gf and back in the closet I went.

I'm obsessed with how well this essay was put together. The background information laid a wonderful platform to build off of and put things into perspective, and then call back to as we went and were introduced to new information. Not only that, but it created a sense of tension that led up to and really paid off around the 30 minute mark when the mirror stage was brought up. That whole section brought all the other ideas talked about into a singular, clear focus and made a really compelling argument.

From the title before watching, I thought the video was going to talk about being able to discover your identity through a private experience with a game that allowed queer expression that you might not have seen/experienced before, but damn, it went in hard with the idea of queerness coming from innately within or from external societal ideology and has seriously made me rethink a bunch of things, past just the game and even past the subject of queerness.

Seriously, amazing job. I hope you got great marks for your school essays, because I'd bet my left foot you deserved them.

[These are just a few examples. There are many more great comments on the video!]

Remember how the players were totally freaking out that their Sims were dropping dead due to them not taking good care of the guinea pig? (Not that the cause/effect relationship was at all obvious!) It was the first downloadable object for The Sims, with an actual communicable deadly virus! I think that was one of Will's twisted ideas.

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Illness#Guinea_Pig_Disease

I wrote more details about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22599872

Something Is Killing the Sims, and It's No Accident. By John Markoff, April 27, 2000.

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/27/technology/something-is-k...

The Sims Pie Menus: SimAntics visual programming language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs&t=743s

Soon afterwards, we issued a downloadable painting of a guinea pig that would immunize your whole family against the deadly Guinea Pig Virus. Kind of the opposite of the tragic clown painting, which if you looked at it would summon that poor depressing sad clown character to torment your family. (Another of Will's twisted ideas, if I recall.)

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Tragic_Clown

You could also get Poopy Pants if you ate from the buffet table when your hygiene was low. Another valuable life lesson!

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Illness#Poopy_Pants

Irk's posted some great videos with his memories and artwork:

The Sims Animation Basics Video. Stories, events, how's, why's of 2000 Game the Year by Will Wright:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXSAT-4GjNQ

>A basic Primer and stories from the Crypt on the animation of The Sims PC Game of the Year from the year 2000. Two years of heavy toil, fear of cancellation, game industry politics, real & artificial personalities, and Silly Little Computer People. How we provided scads of content over a very short amount of time to help make millions of people happy. Using old techniques of acting to give life to artificial beings. What was at the core of a phenomenon when it came to building the style and the substance of a something special. The Sims, The Sims PC, OG Sims, 24th Anniversary, Will Wright, Maxis, Electronic Arts, TS1, The Sims 1, irk, animation, fun, joke, whimsy, Eric Hedman

irk says, the Sims Livin' Large is special. for many reasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx-Fy1SENbc

Sims Unleashed Object Story My Corgi's Distant Cousin Hachiko's Statue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da4kAQRFS98

This The SIMS image helped keep the project alive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh-NOVzJ9ds

The Sims "Wild Bill" Big BBQ is not for cooking babies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvGXu4uE0kQ

Also: Juno Birch the delusional alien diva just posted this delightful tour of the re-release of The Sims 1 -- she really loves Jerry Martin's music:

The Sims is back! Juno plays the Sims 1 for the first time in forever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4A00YPJpUU

Jerry Martin's Music:

https://boombamboom.com/

How The Sims Made New-Age Jazz Piano the Soundtrack of Our Lives:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LpVUi9TQ8U

The Sims Soundtrack CHEATED. Here's how:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJMds3jT7c8