Hacker Cinema
The Sims
Film
Directed by Kate Herron
An adaptation of the popular computer game franchise of the same name.
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5 comments on Hacker News
Yes, it was a deliberate choice, from early on. So was the storytelling aspect that the Family Album supported by letting you take screen snapshots and write anything you want about them, then publish and share them online along with the save file. Will Wright actually mentioned both of those features in his 1996 talk to Terry Winnograd's user interface class at Stanford, which I attended (then later I went to work with him at Maxis on Dollhouse, later renamed The Sims).
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
Here's the transcript, when a student asked him about that:
https://youtu.be/nsxoZXaYJSk?t=4466
Student:
What about from person to person, you talking about the information that's contained within the objects, so there can be information in another person, that you want to interact with in the environment.
Have you looked at any reasons why you would want to do that?
Will Wright:
Oh yeah, I mean, that's that's the hard problem.
I mean, simulating ants is hard enough, when you get to people there's really no hope.
There are two issues here.
You can look at this as a technology.
It's not a product right now.
And their are a few directions this could go.
I could see this becoming, let's say, a multiplayer network MUD kind of a thing.
You might have a thousand people playing SimCity from the bottom up, each person building their own house in a big multi-user space.
In which case that issue is a little less important, because most of the people are real people, and you're dealing with puppets.
As a standalone game, which is probably our our closer target, we have to deal with the problem you're bringing up, which is how do we deal with people to people?
And it's hard, I mean there's just -- I'm sure Terry can elaborate on that more than I can.
But the best thing we can do is prop up a convincing illusion.
We don't have to be doing a valid simulation of human personality.
What we have to do is we have to put up something that's ambiguous enough to where somebody can read in what they want.
Actually in this thing what I have right now are people come up and they converse, but you don't hear what they're saying, they just gesture, and sometimes they look mad, sometimes they kind of look contemplative.
It's kind of interesting how much people will read into that.
This is kind of dynamic that we've seen again and again where something happens in SimCity and they said "oh I was running my nuclear reactor near the red line, and then there was so much smoke coming out of it, this plane crashed, and because of that, this and that happened", and they'll describe this long causal chain of events that I know does not exist.
I designed the simulation, I know that there's no linkage between the power output of the power plant, the planes crashing, but they're convinced it exists.
Don Hopkins:
They're using it as a medium to tell stories about.
Will Wright:
Yeah!
Don Hopkins:
Where they're using it as a piece of paper, to write.
Will Wright:
Yeah, that's exactly right.
There's a parallel simulation going on here in the game.
Everybody's taking a linear path through this, and they're basically, most people will attempt to understand things like this with a story.
They'll think about "I did this, then that happened, because of that", and so the story becomes kind of their logical connection, their logical reverse engineering, of the simulation that they're playing inside of.
Now on the people's side, I think we can do a lot in this as a product, by propping up that illusion of people.
Again, if this is a doll house, we don't want the dolls to be sentient things.
We want the dolls to be interesting enough to where I can play games with them.
There was actually a really interesting doll that this company came out with.
Oh, it was Worlds of Wonder, this really cool doll, I've got a couple of them after they went out of business.
It's called the Julie doll.
[The 1987 Voice First Doll: Julie by Worlds of Wonder Commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewu_NBUHePU ]
But it was like this $250 doll with voice recognition, and it said all these things.
It had just a huge amount of ROM with digitized speech in it, and so it would sit there and try and have stupid conversations with you.
And really it was kind of Eliza, or had keywords it would recognize, and give you these kind of non-committal responses.
But in the testing of that, well first of all it was a $300 doll.
Who's going to buy the kid a $300 doll?
So it was really more, it was actually the only doll I've ever seen that appealed to grown men.
Grown men love this, I mean this is a hacker's doll.
But I talked to the guy who was working this project, and he said they put this in focus groups with girls.
And they played with it for a while, and then after about a half an hour they take the batteries out, and keep playing with it.
And what was happening is that the girls were propping up this elaborate fantasy in their play, and the dolls were supposed to be a structure for that fantasy, they weren't supposed to be the fantasy.
The doll was telling them what the fantasy was, and it was conflicting with what the girls were saying, and so it was interfering actively with their fantasy and their play.
So in that regard, I think we can actually kind of take that path with these people.
And all we have to do is deal with them at a very local kind of a state machine, Braitenberg Machine kind of level, and say that they're angry, and they're hungry, and they're sleepy.
[Braitenberg vehicle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle ]
And then we can actually do some things where maybe they have a little, what you might call, structural ambiguity about what they're actually saying.
One of the thoughts I had about this project in particular is that you'd see the people go up and they talk, and there would be some kind of a flavor to their conversation, but it would be more like Peanuts.
When they did the TV show of Peanuts, you'd hear the adults talking, and the adults would always be like "mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa", or soft, or loud.
[Peanuts' Teacher Calls Out Charlie Brown & Linus - "Wah Wa Wa Wah Wa Wa" - 1969: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxC_AjFxS68 ]
You can tell if they're mad, or angry, or what, but you wouldn't hear what they were saying.
You'd have to read that into it.
I think this is the area where we sidestep the issue, just because as a commercial company we have to ship a game, we're not doing a research project.
So that's a long winded answer, sorry.
[How the Language From the Sims Was Created: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGsbeTV76YI ]
Speaking about something I needed yesterday, how about an app that lets you brick up or nail plywood to windows and doors?
Zombie Proof your home safely from inside!
Also a graffiti spray paint tool for vandalizing, with in app purchases for paint cans, bricks, cement, trowels, plywood, crowbars, nails, hammers, and nail guns.
Of course then you'd have to write a zombie simulator to break down your doors and windows, and knock holes in your walls that you have to patch up.
To that end, SimFreaks and SimSlice just released this tour-de-force indie Zombie Sims Expansion Pack for The Sims 1 -- check out the nice rusty corrugated walls and zombie movie posters, and interactive chum barrels:
https://zombiesims.com/gallery.html
While I was working on the original version of The Sims 1, there was some crazy talk about a movie. I dearly hoped that nothing would ever come of it, since it couldn't possibly be anything but terrible. Fortunately it seems to have been canceled!
http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/The_Sims_%28film%29
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1482462/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims#Other_media
>Producer John Davis revealed on an interview that he is taking inspiration from John Hughes's 1985 film Weird Science for the movie adaptation.
>"What they realize is that they can scan their world in, because this is the most lifelike, real Sims game ever. As they are playing this, they are all of a sudden realising [that] what they are playing on the game is having an effect on the real world. So in effect, through the game, they are able to control their world. It's wish fulfillment, and obviously it turns against them."
How could that possibly not bomb in the worst possible way?
I imagine they would have had to bury the DVDs in the same hole as the ET cartridges.
Will's talks and interviews are all fascinating and well worth watching, taking notes, and studying. It's interesting to see how the projects he was talking about at the time turned out years later. I'll also link to an excellent interview with Chris Trottier, one of the designers on The Sims, who is an absolutely brilliant designer who worked Will on The Sims and Spore, who according to Will can manipulate the very fabric to Time and Space, and is a pretty good designer, for a girl: https://web.archive.org/web/20131117041434/http://pickleodeon.com/testimonials.html
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http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/9
Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games
A summary of Will Wright's talk to Terry Winnograd's User Interface Class at Stanford, in 1996. Written by Don Hopkins.
Will Wright, the designer of SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, and other popular games from Maxis, gave a talk at Terry Winnograd's user interface class at Stanford, in 1996 (before the release of The Sims in 2000). At the end of the talk, he demonstrated an early version of The Sims, called Dollhouse at the time. I attended the talk and took notes, on which this article elaborates. I was fascinated by Dollhouse, and subsequently went to work with Will Wright at Maxis for three years. We finally released it as The Sims in 2000, after several name changes: TDS (Tactical Domestic Simulator), Project-X (everybody has one of those), Jefferson (after the president, not the sitcom), happy fun house (or some other forgetable Japanese placism).
At the talk, he reflected on the design of simulators and user interfaces in SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt. He demonstrated several of his games, including his current project, Dollhouse.
Here are some important points Will Wright made, at this and other talks. I've elaborated on some of his ideas with my own comments, based on my experiences playing lots of SimCity, talking with Will, studying the source code and porting it to Unix, reworking the user interface, and adding multi player support.
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http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/35
The Future of Content - Will Wright's Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005
What I learned about content from the Sims. ...and why it's driven me to procedural methods. ...And what I now plan to do with them. Will Wright Game Developers Conference 3/11/2005
Notes taken by Don Hopkins at the talk, and from other discussions with Will Wright.
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http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/31
Sims Designer Chris Trottier on Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion
The Armchair Empire interviewed Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims and The Sims Online. She touches on some important ideas, including "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion".
Chris' honest analysis of how and why "the gameplay didn't come together until the months before the ship" is right on the mark, and that's the secret to the success of games like The Sims and SimCity.
The essential element that was missing until the last minute was tuning: The approach to game design that Maxis brought to the table is called "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion". Before it was tuned, The Sims wasn't missing any structure or content, but it just wasn't balanced yet. But it's OK, because that's how it's supposed to work!
In justifying their approach to The Sims, Maxis had to explain to EA that SimCity 2000 was not fun until 6 weeks before it shipped. But EA was not comfortable with that approach, which went against every rule in their play book. It required Will Wright's tremendous stamina to convince EA not to cancel The Sims, because according to EA's formula, it would never work.
If a game isn't tuned, it's a drag, and you can't stand to play it for an hour. The Sims and SimCity were "designed by accretion": incrementally assembled together out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet forming out of a cloud of dust orbiting around star. They had to reach critical mass first, before they could even start down the road towards "Tuned Emergence", like life finally taking hold on the planet surface. Even then, they weren't fun until they were carefully tuned just before they shipped, like the renaissance of civilization suddenly developing science and technology. Before it was properly tuned, The Sims was called "the toilet game", for the obvious reason that there wasn't much else to do!
http://www.armchairempire.com/Interviews/chris-trottier-the-sims.htm
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This builds on the basic idea behind pie menus, which is to exploit Fitt's Law, by lowering the target distance by centering the menu around the point of contact, and increasing the target area by basing the selection on the direction of movement instead of hitting a small absolutely positioned target. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts_law
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus, Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Computer Science Department University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 20742. Presented at ACM CHI'88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988. http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/100
I've applied pie menus to various applications including tools like window managers and text editors, and games like SimCity and The Sims, which uses pie menus for controlling the lives of the simulated people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu
Since the direction of motion, which selects the pie menu item, is independent from the distance of motion, you can use the distance as a parameter. Here's a demo and an article showing various kinds of pie menus I've developed:
Pie menus from "All The Widgets" CHI'90 Special Isssue #57 ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review. Including Doug Engelbart's NLS demo and the credits. Tape produced by and narrated by Brad Meyers. Research performed under the direction of Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Pie menus developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins. http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/AllTheWidgets.mov
The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus -- Dr. Dobb's Journal, Dec. 1991. There're Fast, Easy, and Self-Revealing. Copyright (C) 1991 by Don Hopkins. Originally published in Dr. Dobb's Journal, Dec. 1991, lead cover story, user interface issue. http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/98
Here's a more modern implementation in Unity3D: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMN1LQ7qx9g
The multi finger interface is obviously a very nice touch that this interface brings to the tablet (if you'll pardon the pun ;). I like to call touch screen pie menus "finger pies", in a nod to the Liverpool slang term from the Beatles' "Penny Lane": "a four of fish and finger pie". ;) http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=115
"ConnectedTV" is a finger controlled Palm app that David Levitt and I developed more than a decade ago for the Palm (without multitouch of course): a handheld personalized TV guide integrated with a universal remote control, which you could reliably operate with your fingers instead of the stylus that most Palm apps required at the time. Here is a review than mentions the single handed finger touching and stroking interface:
ConnectedTV: TV Guide + Remote Control, Geoff Walker, 2/2/02. http://www.pencomputing.com/palm/Pen44/connectedTV.html
"On the Palm, the application user interface is simple. The application checks the clock on the Palm and displays the names of all the TV programs for the current 15-minute window. The program buttons are large enough to easily hit with your finger. For easy identification of programs that are about to start, one corner of the button is clipped. To tune the TV to a selected program, you just tap the button. To display more information about a program (i.e., the blurb from the guide), you do a downstroke on the button. The downstroke is a result of the program menu buttons being implemented via "pie menus" (see www.piemenu.com), which makes it very easy to use the application with one hand."
"For instant access to frequently used functions, the application remaps the Palm’s hardware buttons to Power, Mute, Volume Up/Down, Next and Back. At initial release, the program will include support for TiVo and some brands & models of VCR, as well as the ability to program it for other brands. Management of "Favorites" (e.g., flagging favorite programs with their first run/rerun status) is planned but may not make the first release."
Most Palm apps required a stylus to operate, because their interfaces required a lot of precision and visual feedback. But it was quite easy to accidentally lose your stylus in the couch cushions in the dark living room, so pie menus made it possible to control the Palm in a dark room with your fingers, which was unusual at the time (long before the iPhone).
ConnectedTV used big multi-purpose buttons that you could reliably operate with your finger, supporting up to five complementary functions for taps and strokes up, down left and right, with immediate audio and visual feedback during tracking.
The directional strokes worked very nicely with complementary sets of commands that remote controls tend to use like changing volume up and down, changing channels next and previous, liking and ignoring programs, paging up and down, moving forwards and backwards in time, etc.
David Levitt wrote up a summary of how it worked:
iPhone Lovefest - How Don and I Invented Stroking vs Poking https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=106220169912
On a recent Sunday, journalist Steven Levy hosted an iPhone Lovefest at Sylvia Paull's Berkeley Salon, and more than a hundred of us showed up. I realized some of us had quietly helped invent something historic, and I spoke briefly about it that day, but first I did a little demo.
More than a dozen developers brought iPhone applications to show off; a camera and projector showed the crowd each little screen. I went up last, commenting that with its sensor, the iPhone had the same motion sensitivity as the Wii's legendary game controller, and tapped mine on the table. As it tumbled from my hand there was a nasty cracking noise and the audience saw this: Gasps and shrieks were soon followed by laughter, a woman shouting "I have version 1.0 of that!", and relieved applause. I explained that the iPhone application draft I was showing was called iBustedIt, the cracking sound and image were triggered by motion, and Levity Novelty aimed to make it available by April Fool's Day. Only it turns out Apple considers this kind of trick an impersonation of its fine software and doesn't allow it in the App Store - so my apologies to those of you who planned to trick and shock your friends with iBustedIt. (Eventually I learned Ms "I have 1.0!" is Ann Greenberg, whose iPhone glass is actually cracked that way and still works fine.)
As the laughs died down, I noted how easily we can miss major technology transitions, not realizing what's actually new. When I developed software for the Palm in 2002, every handheld application required a stylus: to operate the tiny on-screen buttons you had to use both hands and poke them with a little stick. Remember?
Back when my old company ConnectedMedia created ConnectedTV - a Palm app showing personal TV listings that let you change the TV channel by touching the screen - I considered the poking interface unacceptable. Requiring a stylus would mean a nerds-only experience no consumer could love. Unless you could operate it with a thumb - and with one hand - it could never compete with a remote control.
So the on-screen buttons had to be much larger, with each screen elegant and simple. Only, most screen space was needed for TV listings and show descriptions. My ingenious friend and partner Don Hopkins realized that we could repurpose the Palm OS screen 'stroke' detection capability - previously used only as a way of entering characters - into a kind of short cut: if you stroked the button, its label would change with a click, and then if you lifted your finger it would perform the function shown. Since you could easily stroke up|down|left|right, we could stash up to 4 helpful shortcuts under each finger-sized screen button.
To prevent accidental channel changes, we also required you to stroke down on the TV show name or description to watch it. It worked perfectly. Of course, this is a predecessor of the swipe today's iPhone needs so it can't be unlocked accidentally as you carry it.
Users adored ConnectedTV, calling it "addictive". Handheld Computing called it "one of the most impressive Palm OS applications we've ever seen." It was more responsive, more personalized (stroke to set a Favorite show), and less obtrusive for browsing than the TV's on-screen guide.
Sony paid us to make custom 'skins' for their sweet CLIÉ line of Palms for cable TV trade shows, and then offered to bundle ConnectedTV with the CLIÉs, pre-installed. However, soon Sony Japan dropped Palm OS and discontinued the whole CLIÉ line. Still, our stylus-free interface had provided a peek at the strokable handheld future.
Stroke replaces Poke Just a few years later, no popular handheld device uses a stylus. The iPhone has expanded the idea further to support animated scrolling and multi-touch pinching.
Is there really such a big difference between poking with a stick - occupying both hands - versus being able to stroke, rub, caress with a finger, and even pinch? Um, ask your mate. Such quiet GUI software innovations help us fully enjoy, literally embrace and yes, love our technology.