 |
|
As the old saying goes, one man's hell is another man's heaven, and in many ways, Will Wright is an example of both those ideas embodied in one man. On one hand Wright doesn't want The Sims Online to take over his life. He has too many ideas he wants to explore, including his galactic colonization game, which he talked about in our 1999 Behind the Games story, and even a tactical weather simulator. (Imagine trying to create a storm and getting inside a real thundercloud.) But that trepidation about not wanting to be boxed in as the "Sims guy" is counterbalanced by the huge potential of The Sims Online to grow into a fascinating sociological experiment. "Will's a sandbox kind of guy, and we're giving him the biggest sandbox he's ever seen," explains Gordon Walton.
 | 
Some of the key members of the Sims Online team gather for a group photo. |
Wright admits he is tremendously excited by what The Sims Online could eventually grow into. "I'm really looking forward to the SimCity side of things--like letting players build the roads between communities and seeing how political structures evolve out of the cities," he says. "We have a club structure coming later, and we're hoping that can evolve into a government for each city." One day, Wright predicts that there may be an elected set of representatives in the game who could tune the economy themselves and police the world. Beyond that, there are many other wild ideas about what The Sims Online could become. "Who knows what the emergent behavior is going to be?" asks Chris Trottier, Wright's codesigner, who often gets far less attention than she deserves. ("I couldn't have done this game without Chris, whereas she could have done this game without me and done a great job at it," suggests the always humble Wright.)
"What if your Sim character could get thrown in jail? What if we had a full legal system in the game?" wonders Trottier. In many ways, the first iteration of The Sims Online is the starting point that will be expanded on for years to come.
Wright, however, cautions that he wants to let players decide how to evolve the world. "All of this political stuff has to come from the bottom up," he posits. "We can't do it from the top down and dictate structure." Instead, players need to build covenants with each other and establish the conventions of the world over time. "Totally planned cities don't work," Wright explains. "It's sort of like the Utopian society movement, where there were these guys who went off and started building planned cities. For the most part the cities were total failures." With The Sims Online, Wright believes the community will form in a way similar to the one formed around Slashdot.org, the popular technology news site. "There's no central editor on Slashdot, but it's a collection of readers who have evolved it into a great site for news." Ultimately, The Sims Online could turn into a similar self-governing world, and Wright and his team could sit back and watch it evolve over time. "I can't wait to be surprised by what people do in the game," says Trottier.
| 
Will Wright knows that he will be observing and working on The Sims Online for the rest of his life. |
The greatest aid in letting players customize the Sims Online world will come with the introduction of custom content, a postlaunch feature. When that feature is implemented, you will be able to upload your own skins, wallpaper, and objects to completely customize your online characters and homes. "Eventually, we want each city to be completely unique," says Luc Barthelet. While custom content introduces concerns about mature themes and copyrighted material, everyone admits that's the next big evolution for The Sims Online. In the interim, new features will be introduced every week, and already the game includes hundreds of hidden objects on the game CDs that will not be unlocked for months to come.
|
|
|
