The biggest complaint I’ve seen aboutSimCity, and I’ve seen this mostly from
other game developers, is that since it is not a game and there aren’t any goals,
it doesn’t hold the player’s attention very well.
I think it attracts a different kind of player. In fact, some people play it very goal
directed. What it really does is it forces you to determine the goals. So when you start
SimCity,one of the most interesting things that happens is that you have to decide
“What do I want to make? Do I want to make the biggest possible city, or the city with
the happiest residents, or the most parks, or the lowest crime?” Every time you have to
idealize in your head, “What does the ideal city mean to me?” It requires a bit more
motivated player. What that buys you in a sense is more replayability because we’re not
enforcing any strict goal on you. We could have said, “Get your city to 10,000 people in
ten years or you lose.” And you would always have to play it that way. And there would
be strategies to get there, and people would figure out the strategies, and that would be
that. By leaving it more open-ended, people can play the game a lot of different ways.
And that’s where it’s become more like a toy.
Simulations in gen-
eral give you a much
wider game-space to
explore. There are proba-
bly no two cities in
SimCitythat are identical
and created by different
people. Whereas, if you
look at a game likeZelda,
I’m sure there are tens of
thousands of savedZelda
games that are identical.
Computationally you can
look at this as the
phase-space of the sys-
tem, or how many
variables does it take to
describe a current state of
the system. Another way of looking at that is it’s how much creative exploration the
player is allowed. How unique is your game from my game? In some sense that implies
a certain level of creativity available to you. In some situations that can also be inter-
preted as how many different ways there are to solve a given problem. So if we start
with the same exact city that has a lot of traffic, there are a huge variety of ways that we
can attack that problem successfully. In a lot of games there’s a locked door and until
you find that key you’re not going to be able to unlock that door.
So it provides the player with a lot more variety.
There’s a lot more variety, but also, because every player can take a unique approach,
they can be more creative. And the more creativity the player can realize in a game, the
more empathy they tend to feel with that game. Especially you see that inThe Sims.If
414 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright
SimCity