they spend all this time building up a family and running their lives for months, people
really start to empathize with those characters because they have invested so much
time in the creation of them. And the characters, in that sense, are a reflection not only
of themselves, but it’s a reflection of their current understanding of the game. Same
withSimCity. You can look at somebody’s city inSimCityat any time, and the design of
the city is a reflection of what they understand about the model. From their understand-
ing that was the best way to build a road network at that point.
But once they come to understand the game better...
It changes, exactly. You can go back to an old city and say, “Oh, right, that’s when I
thought highways really worked well, before I learned that they didn’t.” So in some
sense it reflects your mental model of the game.
But if you playZeldaa second time...
Your mental model doesn’t really evolve that much. You learn the surprises, but your
model of the underlying mechanisms isn’t really all that different once you’ve played
the game through.
I’m a bit curious about the disaster feature inSimCity. It seems strange that
players would want to spend a lot of time building something up and then just
destroy it with a tidal wave or a fire.
Yeah, I always thought that was kind of curious myself.
You must have anticipated it, though, since you put it in the game from the
very beginning.
No, actually, it wasn’t in the original Commodore version. I later added it, though. When
I first started showing the Commodore version, the only thing that was in there was a
bulldozer, basically to erase mistakes. So if you accidentally built a road or a building in
the wrong place you could erase it with the bulldozer. What I found was that, invariably,
in the first five minutes people would discover the bulldozer, and they would blow up a
building with it by accident. And then they would laugh. And then they would go and
attack the city with the bulldozer. And they’d blow up all the buildings, and they’d be
laughing their heads off. And it really intrigued me, because it was like someone coming
across an ant pile and poking it with a stick to see what happens. And they would get
that out of their system in ten minutes, and then they would realize that the hard part
wasn’t destroying it, but building it back up. And so people would have a great time
destroying the city with a bulldozer, and then they would discover, “Wow, the power’s
out. Wow, there’s a fire starting.” And that’s when they would start the rebuilding pro-
cess, and that’s what would really hook them. Because they would realize that the
destruction was so easy in this game, it was the creation that was the hard part. And this
is back when all of the games were about destruction. After seeing that happen with so
many people, I finally decided, “Well, I might as well really let them get it out of their
systems, I’ll add some disasters to the game.” And that’s what gave me the idea for the
disaster menu.
Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright 415