house and we could always add new things, even Trojan Horse things, into the house.
Such as the guinea pig object.
Yeah, the guinea pig object is an example. Actually, in the design we were thinking that
they should get sick, and we had planned to do sickness, but we just ran out of time. But
then we realized, “Hey, we could just make that a download.” Of course, nobody’s going
to download sickness, so we hid it in the guinea pig. It’s funny, because some of the
early reviews of the game said, “It’s got all this stuff, but it doesn’t have sickness. I
don’t know why.” Of course, those are probably the same people that complained when
we gave it to them. The reason we’re releasing this language is that eventually I want
the users to start making these things.
And you made it simple enough so that you wouldn’t have to be a hard-core
programmer to use it?
You’d have to know how to program, but you wouldn’t have to be a hard-core program-
mer at all. I mean, this is a much simpler language than Visual Basic.
Doesn’t it bother you that, with a tool like that, the game is never completely
“done”?
Yeah, I think, again, if you go back to the hobby model, hobbies are never done. They’re
just a continually growing thing. And they grow pretty much as a function of the amount
of people involved in it and how committed they are. And the more powerful tools they
have, the stronger the hobby itself becomes, and it infects more people.
I also read a quote from you where you said: “The real long-term attraction of
The Simsis as a storytelling platform.” Now, when most game developers talk
about stories in games, they’re talking about them in thatZeldasense. To those
people, something likeThe Simsdoesn’t have any story at all.
There’s a big distinction
between Zelda and The
Sims. You’re creating the
story inThe Sims;inZelda
you’re uncovering the
story. In some sense, the
stories are just one aspect
of player involvement.
There are actually all
these different levels.
Some casual people will
just play the game a few
hours and have a good
time and put it down.
Other people will play it
longer, and get into
designing really cool
434 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright
The Sims