the art assets and everything. We reprogrammed most of them, to some degree. But
still we had this large content pool that was a big leg up, that we weren’t developing just
for the online game.
WithinThe Sims Onlinewe were trying to have different metagames the players
could pursue based around different lot categories. So we were trying to make different
viable economic paths, for someone building a romance household or an entertainment
house or a skill house or a work house. Then we were also looking at different nested
social groups that we wanted to have in the game. First there’s you, and then you might
have a close group of friends that you connect with through the friendship web, then
you might have some longer term playmates that you bring into a household and
become roommates and that’s a larger social group, and then above that we had the
neighborhood where different households could form associations together. To this day
they’re still kind of working on the next level, which would be levels above the neigh-
borhood, the clubs, eventually evolving into a form of governance.
How did you design the game such that those social webs would work well and
not just be a big mess of people?
Well, the design changed a fair amount, but initially we wanted to have a pretty tight
linkage between who was in your social web and who you actually spent time playing
with. We wanted people to formally acknowledge who their friends were, in a
Friendster kind of a way, and then have that visible to other players. So I can find friends
of my friend or see if we had somebody in common that we both knew. And so that
became a major component of the game, people declaring friendships or enemies and
then having this structure appear, the friendship web that you could peruse, basically a
social network graph. In that we rolled in certain reward structures so that if you had
beyond a certain number of friends, you would start earning more social interactions for
your avatar. For a lot of people that became the primary game. Other people, there was
a whole other game based around the graphical topology, or the houses that people
were building. And that was more of an economic game, where players would earn
money, then spend it on their house to build a cool place that they would hopefully
attract other people to. And so it became kind of this game of who can build the coolest
house that everybody wants to spend their time at. Kind of a capitalist, economic
model. So players were competing to entertain the other players. And that was the
basic dynamic we were going for; we wanted to reward players for entertaining each
other rather than killing each other.
You mentioned before how you are unable to adjust time inThe Sims Online.
That’s a fairly critical feature in the original version ofThe Sims.
Yeah, when you’re going from the offlineSimsto the onlineSimsthe first thing you
notice is you keep trying to speed up time and there’s no button for it. Because you
spend so much time in the offlineSimswith time zipping by, getting to the interesting
parts.
438 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright