very well. It’s just that I was expecting it to be more older people that would appreciate
how amazingly interesting ants are as an example of distributed intelligence. In some
sense, I was trying to use a wacky approach to show how intrinsically interesting ants
are as an information processing system. But in fact, I ended up appealing to
twelve-year-olds who just loved playing with ants.
An ant simulator seems to be a pretty strange premise for a game. Why did you
choose to do it?
I’d have to go into why I love ants.SimAntalways seemed obvious to me. I was always
wondering why no one had ever done a computerized ant farm, and I kept expecting
someone to do it for years but they never did. The time just seemed right. Most of my
games have been influenced heavily by things that I have read. So,SimEarthwas kind
of inspired by James Lovelock and the Gaia hypothesis.SimAntwas definitely inspired
by the work of Edward Wilson, who is kind of likethemyrmecologist. He’s written a lot
of books. He actually wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book the year thatSimAntcame
out calledThe Ants, which was just an amazing resource. We used a lot of his books
heavily in building the model forSimAnt. In fact, we probably couldn’t have engineered
the model without his work, as we probably could not have doneSimEarthwithout
James Lovelock’s work.
Did you encounter any resistance to doing as unique and strange a game as
SimAnt?
No, not at all. I think I met more resistance onSimEarthbecause everybody was
expectingSimCity 2and I really didn’t want to doSimCity 2, I wanted to do something
different.
SimAntseems to be a lot more of a game thanSimCityorSimEarth.
I think probablySimAntwas my slight overreaction toSimEarth. WhenSimEarthcame
out I realized at the end that, God, this is like sitting in the cockpit of a 747 in a nosedive.
That’s what it feels like to most players. So I wantedSimAntto go in the opposite direc-
tion: something non-intimidating, something lighthearted, something fun, something
where it was really clear what went wrong. Though I never could quite tell how suc-
cessful it was, one of the things I really wanted to do withSimAntwas to have the idea
that you have this light, easy to get into game, but you get more and more serious about
it. That’s why we had this little online database about ants, the little encyclopedia. And
the idea was to get people interested enough, just through the game, that they would
actually start reading this little encyclopedia and a lot of it would pertain to the
gameplay. So you could actually learn new strategies for the game while at the same
absorbing all this cool information about ants.
The game reminds me of a very strange wargame.
It’s kind of like an RTS game. InSimAntwe did some wacky things.SimAntin some
sense was very experimental. There were some weird things in there, like the mystery
button. On the interface, there’s one button that has this big question mark, and it’s the
mystery button. Every time you press that button something very strange happens,
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