minefield that we had to thread very carefully. And there were a lot of things that we left
out of the game on purpose. And there were a lot of things that we really wanted to have
in the game at various levels, and homosexuality was one of the things that we really
wanted to have in the game, in some way.
What sort of things did you leave out on purpose?
There were a couple of things that became somewhat issues and we did slight modifica-
tions. One of them was the domestic violence issue. When the characters get upset,
they can slap each other. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are two types of slap.
There’s one slap where they rear their arm back and thenwhackand it’s as if they’re
breaking their jaw. And there’s another one that’s kind of an insulting British Army
slap. Whenever you have people of the same gender slapping, they use the really hard
slap, like a man slapping another man or a woman slapping another woman. But when-
ever you have a man slapping a woman or a woman slapping a man, they use the polite
slap. Because before, when we had the strong-arm slap, and you had a husband slapping
his wife, it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, just from the domestic violence point of
view. And that was one of those things where we were right on the edge and being very
careful, but not losing the feature.
So it retains the emotional content without being too violent.
Right, and it doesn’t make people think about serious domestic abuse. And, in fact, it
was funny, because we also have an attack interaction. If they really don’t like each
other they can actually get in a fistfight. But because we did the fistfight like a cartoon
fistfight — there’s this big cloud and you see arms and legs poking out — no one had
any problem with that. Even if it was a man and woman, it was always so cartoonish that
it was never an issue compared to the slap. There were certain places that we just
didn’t want to go with the game at all. For example, pedophilia. And in general they
don’t kill each other. The sims will not directly kill each other, though objects can kill
them and various disasters can kill them. So, yeah, there were certain things we
decided we would leave out, certain things we wanted to get in, and others that we had
to be very careful how we treated.
With the inclusion of homosexuality, were there ever any concerns that sena-
tors who up until then had been concerned with violence would now be
outraged byThe Sims?
Actually, there was and it’s very surprising to me that it hasn’t materialized in the least.
Not at all. There has just been no reaction to that, and it just really surprised me. I
thought primarily if it came it would come from the Christian conservatives or some
other group like that. Maybe they just don’t play these games, maybe they could care
less, I don’t know. Yeah, but we’ve had absolutely no problems with that at all. We’ve
had a couple of people on the bulletin boards, probably fourteen-year-old kids complain-
ing, but you can tell their age by their spelling.
It seems like there were a lot of moral decisions you made in designing the
game. For instance, the gameplay seems to be geared toward improving your
432 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright