schedule, but done everything a lot worse. I figured I would much rather do the house
really well than do everything poorly. Which I think is what would have happened, real-
istically, knowing how projects go.
So your advice to game designers is to focus their designs?
You also really have to understand what the core of the fun is going to be in the game.
And if you’re adding this stuff just so you can put more bullet points on the back of the
box, but it’s not actually making the game more fun, it’s totally wasted effort. There’s
an old Japanese saying that I love, and it’s about gardening: “Your garden is not com-
plete until there’s nothing else you can remove.”
So you think that adage applies to game design?
Oh, very much. If you look at the amount of stuff we took out of this game, it would
probably surprise you. Like the needs, for instance. You know, we have the eight needs.
At some point it was twelve, and then it was ten, and then it was eventually eight. We
were actually much more concerned with simplifying the game than we were with
expanding it. And our interface. Our interface went through eleven iterations — total,
complete redesigns of the interface. And each one ended up dropping a button here, a
button there, or we found ways to combine functionality. I really thought thatThe Sims,
if it was accessible, would appeal to a very wide audience, but it had to be incredibly
accessible, through the interface. It couldn’t be your standard strategy game interface,
or we would turn off most of our customer base. So we went way out of our way to do
that interface. Most people don’t even realize how elegant parts of it are. I mean, parts
of it are still fairly clumsy, but there are some things that we really sweated over, that
are minor, minor details, but ended up making a huge difference. A lot of it is minor
things that add up, like the pie menus. You can either click, drag, and release an object,
or you can click, release, move over, and click again. So we’re basically mirroring the
Windows functionality that most people are used to.
Having the 3D head come up and respond, look in the direction you move the
mouse. The fact that every single bit of text in the interface has embedded help. A lot of
people don’t realize this, but you can roll over any word down in that interface, and it
will actually highlight as you roll over it, and if you click it comes up with a pretty elabo-
rate explanation of what it is. So we did a lot of embedded help. And things like that just
add up. There’s no one thing that really makes it work. We probably ran a hundred
playtesters through this thing in the last year of development. And these were things
where one of the other designers or I would sit down and watch them play it for an hour
and write notes about all the mistakes they made and misconceptions they had. So we
did a lot of playtesting on the interface. If it turns out that five people made the same
conceptual mistake that you rotate by doing this, or they were trying to drag an object
by doing that, then we would try to figure out a way to solve that without breaking it for
all the other people.
Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright 429