decisions it was decided we should be building an online persistent world with a
monthly subscription. So about six or eight months into the project we dropped every-
thing and went in a totally different direction to support that. Originally we were
basically designing a game that did not have a secure economy, that was based more
around the idea of custom content flowing around, and was probably even closer to an
IM [Instant Messenger] graphical chat room.
I’ve heard the game called the world’s most expensive chat room.
Actually that was one of our design goals, even with the persistent one. We were aiming
really for a very casual crowd of people that were totally different than played online
games. And so at the very basic level, we decided that if nothing else it had to be the
ultimate graphic chat room. We were actually looking at two targets. We were looking at
the AOL customers andThe Simsplayers. At the time when we started this project
there was this pretty tight relationship between AOL and EA, which isn’t such a big
deal now, but at the time it was considered a pretty major aspect of the project. In hind-
sight looking at it, I think that the game needed to be a lot more exciting and have more
obvious goal structures in it. I think also that the online subscription cost really killed
us because if you look at our player base and how many of them don’t even have credit
cards. They’re not hard-core players at all.
These are the players ofThe Simsoffline?
Yes, right. Even the AOL customers, a lot of them.
Don’t AOL customers need to have credit cards to subscribe?
Well their parents do, that’s the thing. A lot of the people who are actually spending
time on AOL are actually twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids. Their parents get AOL for
them. I, as a hard-core gamer, am really reluctant to pay ten dollars a month to subscribe
to a game like that. To get a casual player like that who has bought maybe one or two
games in their life to do that... Intalking to people it turned out to be a just huge barrier
to entry to playing the game.
Would you do the game significantly different if you were designing it now?
Yeah, I would change the game design significantly and I would look for an entirely dif-
ferent business model. Until we could find a different business model I don’t think I’d
even bother trying it.
Did you make a lot of adjustments to the game after it went live?
Yeah, we were doing it quite a bit. A fair amount of it was just tuning level things; retun-
ing objects that were in the world, reward structures, and so forth. Other parts were
actually reengineering the reward structure or the activities. We spent a lot of time on
the boards, before and after release, where we would post our early designs on the
boards and get feedback from the players, way before the feature was actually imple-
mented. And we would make modifications to the feature based on that early feedback.
We had three areas of the boards. One that was just blue sky ideas that we were think-
ing of. Next we had one for things that were in design and we were actually posting our
440 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright