Will Wright kindly asks for admirers to stop describing him as God.
“I don’t think God would deal with pulling out the garbage and cleaning the toilet,” the cigarettes joked the chain smoking. Besides, he’s an atheist.
But what is better shortcut to describe the man who created SIMS? The influential video game allowed players to act as the gods themselves, building virtual neighborhoods populated by virtual families that pay virtual accounts and complete virtual work.
Players could improve the lives of their SIMS by creating McMansions filled with plush sofas and flat -screen TVs. Or they could become vengeful and direct Simse to light fireworks inside and paddled exhaustion in the pool without leaving.
Twenty -five years later, players continue to move the boundaries. Sure, in The Sims 4 are in The Sims 4. created a health care system As a Byzantine as a real American and taught Simse how to control pistols and knives. Official expansion packages of the game offer their own strangeness. Sims can become vampires and witches. They can even play Sims.
“I’ve never really considered Sims to be optimistic,” Wright said, 65 years old. “I always thought the Sims were slightly sarcastically nostalgic for the past that never existed.”
The Sims was a quarantine for an American dream when he was released on February 2000, with Wright inspiration from biology, architecture, comics and psychology dictate the rules of your virtual house. It was an unusual design at a time when most of the target and linear and predecessor games, who created games with their own preparation, such as Minecraft, giving players ax and Carte Blanc.
Although more than 500 million people played games in the SIMS franchise, which is especially popular with women, it was originally considered a risk. Managers in Game Studio Maxis He urged Wright to focus on Simcity’s franchise, his 1989 simulator, which put the company to the forefront of American game design. “Everyone hated the idea of the Sims in the room,” Wright recalled.
The outlook was originally worse after the electronic art acquired Maxis in 1997. Some managers wanted the game to be less realistic; Others wanted to prevent it from being released at all.
But other leaders saw a promise in Wright’s vision. “We wanted to enlarge Simcity,” said Luc Barthelet, who was then an electronic art manager and brought key resources for the SIMS development team. “But we also needed to invest in designers like Will, who were very talented and did things that were different.”
Claire Curtin, who helped invent Simlish, a crazy language that spoke by the characters of the game, said the developers have improved their social system by fulfilling SIMs with needs such as hunger, comfort and hygiene. Neglecting these needs could lead to starvation, anxiety attacks and bladder problems.
“When I joined myself, there was actually no social game among Sims,” she said. “There was no love; there was no woohoo,” she said with the use of euphemism in the game for sex.
The final product included a hierarchy of needs – and a lot of shopping.
Sims was a satirical view of American consumerism. Wright repeated the grandiose demands on the postwar advertising in the furniture catalog, offered by Toasters and Sims chairs that promised to change their lives. Often there was a correlation between the price paid for the item and how much it would improve the mood of the SIM.
“You buy all these things,” he explained. “Fridges and TVs.” And all these things promise to make you happy. But at some point everyone will start to disintegrate. They become hidden bombs. ”
Sims were poorly equipped to handle these disasters. When the stove lit, the whole family crashed into the kitchen to scream in horror. They would often allow them to be absorbed by flames instead of reaching the fire extinguisher. And as soon as Grim Reaper arrived to replace his bodies of the Urns, the game basically ended.
Each disaster was carefully created. “In the early versions of the game, autonomy was too good,” Wright said. “Almost anything the player did was worse than Sims running on the autopilot.” So he filled the simulation with a small chaos to make the players feel that anything could happen. Even guinea pigs, presented as pets with low maintenance, could randomly bite the figure and leave them a deadly disease.
Wright wanted the players to feel as if they were gods who had dominated stupid ants when they were actually pretending ants, that they were gods. Even cheat codes that could change the moods of SIMS or immediately increase the funds, the developers were intentionally included to feel the players as if they broke the game.
Ants are for Wright’s Monignant metaphor that Oakland-Berkeley Firestorm In 1991 he destroyed most of his things.
“When I returned to the ashes of my house, I noticed that the only things that still live were ants,” Wright said Insect simulator He was released that year. “They changed deep into the ground to survive the fire and live from dead carcasses, what fodder could.”
Ants use pheromones to communicate with each other and leave their intelligence across the environment to indicate areas full of food or predators. Wright was thinking: could human intelligence be distributed in a similar way? Instead of ferromons, SIMS uses objects as behavioral markers (Hungry SIM could be automatically attracted to the refrigerator). It was a modular approach that allowed designers to expand the game – and its income.
“I have long since decided that the game design is applied to psychology,” Wright said.
Before the SIMS was released, developers invited people to create their own content and provide basic programming tools for the invention in the game in the game. When multiple players received software, the content creators opened the website and offered subscription platforms that provided permanent income.
“People who actually invested in the game did not play Sims,” Wright said. “They kept the website for the community.”
It was the beginning of the phenomenon of a controlled community that continued with Sims online in 2002. “Noble failure,” Wright said about the West iteration, where players could communicate with each other. Users have developed new personalities and supported the National Limit Debate free expression online. Some players operated a digital mess; Others created a mafia.
“We found out who the godfather was,” Wright confirmed as he grabbed his red lighter to fire another cigarette. “It was the main household Bellagio in Las Vegas.”
The medium community of players has learned to create new rules in the game code that goes far beyond what Wright imagined. They are largely divided into two fractions: realists and extremists.
Realists started with Creating a financial system This allowed players to apply for debit cards and receive bank loans; Included later adjustments Mowing and Funeral services. Introduced extremists Madcap violenceallowing the innocent Sims to hide in the lightning screws. Others had their bloody corpses secured behind the police tape because the journalist Sims described the scene.
“Just as we decided to carve the premises especially for our own content, players always find a way,” said Lyndsay Pearson, who was a tester to ensure the quality of expanding the original game and now oversees the creative design of franchise. .
Electronic Arts indicated that There is no plan for SIMS 5 And that Sims 4, which was released in 2014 and verified itself to play in 2022, will continue to be supported by the sale of expansion packages. Recent extensions allowed Sims the state landlord, Horse -rider and Cottagecore enthusiasts.
“We are determined to rediscover what it means to play with life,” Pearson said. “The world is constantly changing, but there is always something for SIMS.”
Wright left Sims shortly after the development of his sequel and imagined that the game would evolve into the “Truman Show” version, where “boundaries are as far as we can”. One joke between contemporary players is to create Secret basement “painting of the elves” who are locked in small rooms. Their basic needs are met while They create piles of paintings for sale For Sims who live over them.
Wright has since built more universes like SporeEvolutionary game where players helped civilization growth from microbes to galactic emperor and ”Karma bar“The TV series where viewers built ideas for the story. Its current game project, OtherIt is a transformation of personal memories of living characters using artificial intelligence.
“I never really liked the idea of working on sequels,” Wright said about Sims. “But I’m glad franchise survives and grows in different directions.”
The Sims 2, released in 2004, leaned further into the narrative. Players could create detailed stories for their SIMS, who were equipped with aspirations, desires and concern. The neighborhood was customizable and turned the spider network of social entangling, which reflected desperate women in the home and cheating wives seen on reality television.
One sim named Don Lothario had a romantic entanglement with more women, including Nina and Dina Caliente, two sisters that lived together. Lothario also planned to marry the daughter of a wealthy family whose matriarch, Bella Goth, mysteriously disappeared. Players could later find out that Bella was kidnapped by aliens and stored in a desert village called Plangown.
When the players approached this desert stop, they can discover the odd stonehenge on the edge of the neighborhood. Among the rocks is the determination of Mount Rushmore size Wright, carved with glasses to watch the creations of players.
