houses, and maybe even uploading them on the web site for people to see. Other people
that get into the game even deeper will not only build interesting families and cool
houses, but will use that to tell a story and upload it to share it with other people. And
the even more hard-core people will start editing custom skins or wallpapers for the
game and start sharing them. And then pretty soon they’ll be able to create their own
objects, custom objects, and put them on the web to share. So there are these different
levels of player involvement. And each level higher is a much smaller number of peo-
ple. But in some sense they’re feeding the people beneath them. We have something
like ten thousand homes on our web site that people have uploaded, but those ten thou-
sand homes have been viewed over one hundred thousand times.
So it’s like a pyramid scheme.
Exactly. There are like thirty people out there making really good skins for the game.
But there are probably thirty thousand that are downloading them and using them. So,
for your really hard-core, talented fans, if you give them the tools and the ability to cre-
ate content for the other ninety-nine percent, they will. And it will just benefit both
sides. It gives them an audience to build these things for, and gives the audience cool
stuff for the game that might eventually draw them in deeper. It’ll increase the likeli-
hood that these casual people eventually become those hard-core people.
So someday everyone on the planet has to be playingThe Sims.
Right, so this is kind of like the zombie scheme, where the zombies go around, and then
they start eating brains and turning the other people into zombies...Atsome
point when it’s five zombies against the world it doesn’t look too good, but once you get
a critical mass of zombies and they start converting other people into zombies
fast enough...
OnThe Simsyou are listed as just a game designer, while in the past you had
served as both a programmer and a designer. Did you do any programming on
the project?
I did quite a bit of programming in the Edith code. I didn’t touch the C code inThe Sims.
It’s probably the first project that I didn’t do any of the C coding in. I did a lot of program-
ming of the social interactions and stuff in Edith, but for the most part, even then, it was
more a question of me going in and tweaking and tuning the algorithms the way I
wanted. We had a really good team onThe Sims, a really great team of engineers. So I
didn’t feel any need at all to go into the code.
It’s not something you miss?
Oh, I kind of missed it. I enjoyed going into Edith and hacking stuff. But there was just
so much to be done on the design side that I didn’t have the time to waste programming.
Not to say that programming is a waste of time, but I was never a great programmer. I
was always persistent, and I could always make cool stuff out of computer code just
because I was persistent. I mean, I know great programmers, and I’m not one.
Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright 435