Comment by DonHopkins

Here is Will Wright's talk "Interfacing to Microworlds" from April 26 1996, which he presented to Terry Winnograd's user interface class at Stanford. I sat in on the talk, asked questions, took notes, and wrote up a summary, had Will review it, then went to work with him on Dollhouse which became The Sims. After we shipped in 2000 I updated my summary of the talk with some thoughts and retrospectives about working with Will on The Sims.

Stanford recently published the video, so again I updated my write-up with more information from the talk, transcript excerpts, screen snapshots, links and citations.

All I had to go on for the 27 years between the talk until the video surfaced and I could finally watch it again were my notes and memory, so I'd forgotten how just prescient and purposeful he was, and I didn't remember that he was already planning on leaning into the storytelling and user created content and self and family representation aspects, and making the people speak with "Charlie Brown Adults" mwop mwop mwop speech, among many other things.

Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk

>Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.

>He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.

>This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.

Use and reproduction: The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk!

Will Wright and Brian Eno discussing generative systems at a Long Now Foundation talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqzVSvqXJYg

SimCity takes a lot of short cuts to fool you. It's what Will Wright calls the "Simulator Effect":

Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.

"Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.

The trick of optimizing games is to off-load as much as the simulation from the computer into the user's brain, which is MUCH more powerful and creative. Implication is more efficient (and richer) than simulation.

Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”

During development, when we first added Astrological signs to the characters, there was a discussion about whether we should invent our own original "Sim Zodiac" signs, or use the traditional ones, which have a lot of baggage and history (which some of the designers thought might be a problem). Will Wright argued that we actually wanted to leverage the baggage and history of the traditional Astrological signs of the Zodiac, so we should just use those and not invent our own.

The way it works is that Will came up with twelve archetypal vectors of personality traits corresponding to each of the twelve Astrological signs, so when you set their personality traits, it looks up the sign with the nearest euclidian distance to the character's personality, and displays that as their sign. But there was absolutely no actual effect on their behavior.

That decision paid off almost instantly and measurably in testing, after we implemented the user interface for showing the Astrological sign in the character creation screen, without writing any code to make their sign affect their behavior: The testers immediately started reporting bugs that their character's sign had too much of an effect on their personality, and claimed that the non-existent effect of astrological signs on behavior needed to be tuned down. But that effect was totally coming from their imagination! They should call them Astrillogical Signs!

The create-a-sim user interface hid the corresponding astrological sign for the initial all-zero personality you first see before you've spent any points, because that would be insulting to 1/12th of the players (implying [your sign] has zero personality)!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffzt12tEGpY

    From: "Gavin Clayton" <gavinc@eidosnet.co.uk>
    Newsgroups: alt.family-names.sims,alt.games.the-sims
    Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2000 2:59 PM
    Subject: No other game has done this...

    > Hi... no need to reply to this cos it's just a whimsical thought :-)
    > 
    > When I first got the game I tried to make my own family, trying to get 
    > their personalities accurate too. When making myself, my dad and my 
    > sister, I attributed points to all the personality categories, and I 
    > found I had points left over. But when I made my mum I ran out of 
    > available points and was wishing for more -- I wanted to give her more 
    > points than are available. It made me realise for the first time in 
    > years how much I love my mum :-)
    > 
    > Now what other game has ever done *that*? :-)
    > 
    > Gavin Clayton