all these very good selling games that were not 3D. In fact, if you look at the top-selling
games, a minority of them are 3D. So now the idea that consumers would accept a
non-3D game is a given. There isn’t this idea that it has to be 3D whether it makes
sense or not.
I very much enjoyed the way the characters talk inThe Sims. Was that a
disk-space limitation, or did you go with the gibberish speak in order to leave it
open to interpretation to the player?
Even if we had had five CDs worth of recorded voice, that stuff would have gotten really
repetitive. And my biggest concern was that it didn’t get repetitive and that you didn’t
hear the same string over and over and over. In fact, we recorded hundreds and hun-
dreds of voice strings, each one with different emotional nuances. And we decided that
the voice was entirely for the emotional content: you could tell if the person was flirta-
tious, upset, laid back, or tired by the tone of the voice and the cadence. But the way it
works out is, because you don’t get the semantics, because you’re not hearing the
words, you naturally sit there and imagine the words fairly fluidly. But the emotional
context you get very easily. You know: “Wow, she sounds pissed.”
So, yeah, I’m actually really happy with the way that worked out. You hear them
talking over and over and over, but it’s very hard to hear the exact repeats. Because in
fact you are hearing a lot of the waveforms repeat eventually. But we actually designed
that language so it was very hard to detect. And that was a long slow process, figuring
out how to do that. Originally, we were planning to use a real language, but a really
obscure one that people didn’t understand. And we did a lot of tests with Navajo and
Estonian. And they were still too recognizable. Even though you wouldn’t understand
the language, you would still recognize that, “Oh, that was the thing I just heard.” A lot
of it had to do with the number of hard consonants in an utterance, and also the cadence
and rate at which it was going. It was a long process to get that figured out.
It seems remarkably progressive for a game to include the homosexual possi-
bilities thatThe Simsdoes. Why did you choose to allow that?
One of the things we knew
that a lot of people were
going to do with this game
was model their real fam-
ily. And the last thing I
wanted to go in and do was
say, “Oh, we’re not going
to recognize your family.”
So we wanted to give peo-
ple a reasonably, fairly
open-ended way to con-
struct whatever family
they came from or could
imagine or wanted to play
with. But we were dealing
with an ethical and moral
Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright 431
The Sims