A lot of the interesting issues and dynamics within a city occur over things such as socio-economic issues or ethnic issues. But they require a much more elaborate model of human behavior.
Actually, many years ago, we had a company-wide vote for our informal company-wide mascot, and the choices came down to the Boston tree fern, beef tape worm and a llama. And somehow the llama won the vote!
Also, after people play these Sim games, it tends to change their perception of the world around them, so they see their city, house or family in a slightly different way after playing.
And every now and then people find the bugs, and they interpret those as cool failures in the Sims terms. For them it's like a treasure hunt, you know.
And so from that, I've always been fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity.
Because now it's the fans out there that are entertaining us, the developers, with their creations!
But the themes our games are about, almost everyone brings their own experience to.
Everybody has a different definition of the good side.
For me, what's a more important question is how we get at least the option of more diverse experiences in this media.
I definitely enjoy the research the most.
I find it refreshing to unplug from it for a while. You kind of forget how deeply you get embedded in it.
I think by exploring the bad side you're really just mapping the envelope of the system... you're getting a sense of how far off you can go.
I think for most people, their kind of general aesthetic with games is that the more I control this experience, the better the game is.
I think the idea of having a game based on reality is compelling right off the bat because everyone has some experience with the subject of the game.
I typically go overboard when I research new projects.
I'm not saying we purposely introduced bugs or anything, but this is kind of a natural result of any complexities of software... that you can't fully test it.
In an online community, there's this kind of social economy between the community members. Some people have status because they make cool skins or that's a good website that's visited a lot, but there's no real gameplay there.
In some sense that fear of not dropping the ball can really hurt you, in terms of not stretching and kind of going off in interesting new directions.
It used to be that you knew your neighbors and maybe your coworkers - the people in your physical vicinity.
It's gotten to the point now where I surf the fan sites everyday and download cool things the fans have created, which is really ironic in a way!
On vacation, I totally unplug. I don't bring a laptop with me.
Players like to know that they've discovered things that even the designers didn't know were in the game.
The big thing is that we have five percent or less of the hardcore players actively entertaining the other ninety-five percent.
The console games, as they come out with this new generation, will have a temporary advantage in price performance, but there are still many things you can do on a PC, more conveniently than you can do on a console machine.
The new generation of consoles has as much power to do the kind of games that we do as the PC does.
The problem is you're trying to target the current gamers, rather than lead them.
The second thing for me, probably a few clicks down, is the idea that The Sims smoothly age and have different concerns and motivations and needs at different age ranges.
The Sims is kind of an interesting case because we had all these expansion packs. We were able to incrementally add on and explore without invading the core dynamic or the core game play.
There are a lot of issues that I hope we deal with at some point that we haven't up to now, for various reasons. Some technical, and some more political.
There are several projects I have never ended up doing, for various reasons, but I still find myself researching them.
We have spent quite a bit of time considering a good space game, and I can't really say anything at this point, but we are definitely still interested in that area.
We really want to have most of the failure in a game be based on things that the player did, as opposed to things outside of the player's control.
We're experimenting with new ideas we can put into it, which makes it hard for me to say exactly when we will be done with them.
Well, I think the camera freedom is something that we've resisted for a long time and feels like probably the biggest stretch. But it has some huge benefits.
Yes... well, I used to have a pilot's license.
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