SENIOR AUDIO DIRECTOR FORas told to Marion RenaultTALES FROM THE FIELD
The Sims, an animated
computer game that
debuted in 2000, has
its own unique language called
Simlish that I helped develop
from scratch. Players create
characters—called Sims—and
direct their lives by responding
to emotional cues for needs like
hunger, fun, and hygiene. The
sounds the characters make are
entirely of my team’s design.
The gameplay is freestyle,
meaning no rules dictate how us-
ers direct their Sims’ lives. Playersexplore the world and create their
own fictions. Our initial goal was
to give characters a voice without
telling their stories. If we used
real language, that could limit the
gamers’ imagination. Instead, we
had our voice actors show us a
range of emotions without
saying familiar words.
They improvised for about five
days, using phrases from tongues
they didn’t speak as inspiration
for some of their emotive sounds.
Then we spent the next year turn-
ing those recordings into Simlish.
It was stupid hard. The game de-
signers would ask for a specific
feeling for a certain duration— one
and a half seconds of sadness, for
instance— and we had to cut and
combine clips to meet those de-
mands. Eventually, though, a sort
of language came together. For
example, we created the Sim
word “sul-sul” from the actors’ re-
cordings. It became the equiva-
lent of “aloha,” a general happy
greeting. We nicknamed this first
version of the Simlish language
“baby talk” because it was so
simple and direct.
As The Sims evolved, so did
Simlish. Instead of one- syllable
utterances, words now have fairly
complex structures, and there’s a
larger emotional range. Originally,
Sims put their hands to their
faces to laugh and performed an
identical gesture to cry. By Sims 4,
which debuted in 2014, they
quietly wept over more-trivial
issues but visibly sobbed when
somebody died. The whole game
developed an emotional IQ.
Even so, I’ll never stop wres-
tling with the first task of telling
a story without recognizable
words, and creating a language
that speaks to everyone. (^) Concealed Display - $39
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Mike Valentine
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Ahead
Beside
Behind
Where’s
the radar? They tell me
every time. A detector
without the arrows is like
a car without headlights.
“
”
Trust ...V1 earns it one ambush at a time.