things. She was drilling this into me years ago, that playtesting is probably the most
undervalued thing that any game designer can use, and you really have to do it. And I
started taking her advice and she was right. It’s just invaluable.
Whether it’sSimCityorThe Sims, you seem to have a knack for coming up with
unique and very original game designs around complex topics. I’m curious
about how you go about coming up with new design ideas.
I think every designer has a totally different technique. So I think if you ask every game
designer out there how they design a game you’re going to get totally different
answers. I guess a lot of times my own internal process is fairly opaque even to me. I’ll
try a lot of different ways to look at a subject and not get stuck into one viewpoint or one
approach. And for me the value is in a set of diverse approaches that I execute in paral-
lel. Each approach is one way of looking at games or entertainment or whatever; some
might be very analytical approaches, other ones might be very emotional or kinesthetic
approaches. And, usually, and this is the opaque part, something in my head is actually
telling me, “Oh, I’m getting better traction on this approach.” Or “What about this one?
This is a really weird way to think about it.” So a lot of times I try to imagine what’s the
strangest way for me to approach a subject or a challenge, just on the assumption that’ll
take me down a different path than most people will go down to get there. They might
end up in the same spot, but if I take a totally different approach to the problem I’m
likely to uncover some maxima that other people are not seeing. Every year I try to
give a talk at the Game Developers Conference to talk about design and process and all
of that, and I’m never quite satisfied, because I still feel like my internal process is fairly
unknown to me. That’s the only reason I really give talks, I don’t really enjoy talking at
all. I’m not really a social person, I’m a pretty introverted guy, actually. But I find that
when I have to prepare talks, in fact I’m having to dig into my own experience and
self-reflect on my own thought process. So I actually find it more valuable to myself
than probably the people who actually hear the talks, because it forces me to become
consciously aware, at least to some degree, of my internal process.
InUnderstanding Comics, Scott McCloud talks about the two types of creative
people: those who enjoy examining their process and those who don’t want to
for fear it will break.
I’m not worried about breaking it, it’s just that it’s buried down in there pretty damn
deep, and it takes a lot of digging for me to get to it.
For bothSimCityandThe Sims, you had trouble convincing anybody that they
would be popular. Do you think there are many games out there with the same
problem that never see the light of day? What do you recommend someone
with a wacky game idea should do?
Oh, I’m sure they’re all over the place. It’s kind of depressing to think about it, how
many wonderful masterpieces there are out there. For me, it’s just that I am a very, very
persistent guy. I think if you’re really, really persistent, if you really want something,
you can make it happen. It might take years. WithSimCityit was like five years to actu-
ally get the first version out. WithThe Simsit was like seven. Aside from that, based on
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