The Sims: Livin' Large Preview - Part 3: Will Wright Q&A
The third and final installment of our Livin' Large preview series is an interview with Maxis cofounder Will Wright.
For the past two weeks, we've been running in-depth previews on the upcoming add-on for The Sims, Maxis' extremely successful real-life simulator. Called Livin' Large, this expansion pack adds a number of enhancements to the original game, including three new interior decor styles, 50 new jobs, ten additional neighborhoods, and more than 120 new simulation items for your Sims to buy and interact with. Our previews have covered most, if not all, of the new features to be found in Livin' Large. As an encore, we sat down with Maxis cofounder Will Wright, the man largely responsible for The Sims, to talk about his role in the design of Livin' Large, his inspiration for The Sims' unique brand of gameplay, and the future of Maxis.
GameSpot: When was the first time you came up with the idea for The Sims? Was it inspired by anything?
Will Wright: Well, when I first started thinking about this game I was envisioning a game that was more focused on the architectural side of things. This was around 1993, before I worked on SimCity 2000. I was very impressed with a particular book, A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Later, as we got the behavioral model for the people running, things began to change. The Sims were so fun to mess with and control that the game became more focused on their lives.
GS: The premise behind a game like The Sims is relatively simple. Why do you think nobody has endeavored to make a "life simulator" before?
WW: Because it's hard? Some of the simplest-looking things in The Sims (like cooking a meal) are really very complex when you consider how many different situations we have to deal with. There are an infinite variety of kitchen configurations the player can design and a large number of social contexts [that] can occur - the whole family attracted to a group meal at the same time, sitting together and then conversing over dinner, etc. And this is maybe just 2 percent of the total behavioral code. This is what is known in the computer industry as a "defensible" technology (supposedly it will be hard for others to re-create this because it was so hard for us to create it).
GS: What else was hard in designing The Sims? What was your largest hurdle?
WW: Modeling the human behavior was probably the hardest part. Of course there are very restrictive limits to what we can do with today's technology. Today I would say we have what might be called a "human flocking" level of behavior. We can simulate fairly convincing behavior at a distance but not face to face yet.
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