The Sims Design Documents

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/

The Sims Design Document Draft 3 (1998-08-07)

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...

On page 5, Don Hopkins wrote the following comments about same sex relationships in the game:

The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitely going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to 100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world’s population). It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other people.

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The Kiss that Changed Video Games

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss...

The 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, a video-game conference held in Los Angeles, California, was a typically lavish, if bawdy, affair. Here, for three days, the world’s video-game publishers gathered to show off their forthcoming titles to press and to purchasers in an overstimulating marketing circus. David Bowie performed at one of the conference’s orbiting parties that week, and Bill Goldberg and some other glistening-skinned wrestlers grappled one another in a custom-built ring on the publisher E.A.’s gargantuan booth. Away from the action of its main stage, E.A. had stationed a humble area advertising The Sims, an ambitious social-simulation project that almost nobody outside of its development team believed in.

For E.A., The Sims, the latest from Will Wright, the celebrated designer of 1989’s city-planning game SimCity, was a legacy project, inherited when the company purchased its development studio, Maxis. The game had been in stammering development since 1993, when Wright first had the idea for a simulation that would model human behavior, not from the bird’s-eye viewpoint of his earlier game but from the ground zero of domesticity. But replicating the mundane dramas of the living room in game form had proven to be a tall challenge: The Sims was almost abandoned numerous times. “We all knew that if we couldn’t generate any interest at E3 that year, then the game would be cancelled for good,” Patrick J. Barrett III, one of the game’s programmers, told me. “E.A. did nothing to help us. They hid us away. The game wasn’t even displayed on the large screen with the other title’s trailers.” But, within hours, an unplanned, illicit kiss between two of the game’s background characters made The Sims the talk of the show.

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Player Created Content

How to make the leap from smut to art, while continuing to support smut in a plausibly deniable way that you can sell through WalMart? Don’t do smut explicitly, but put the tools to create their own “artistic” content into the hands of the users.

"Time to Penis" -A phenomenon that online game developers had been aware of for years, which didn't have a name until someone came up with TTP. It's traditionally measured in nanoseconds.

Spore Penis Monsters.

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https://twitter.com/itstheshadsy/status/1151868012707962881

Sims developer Don Hopkins released a bunch of design documents from The Sims, including this one from August 1998 with his notes about romance:

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/

It's incredible to see the internal discussion about romance in The Sims written out so strongly like this

For more background: Will Wright's notebooks from the making of The Sims (viewable at @museumofplay !) mention "same sex move-in romance" as a potential feature, but it sounds like there wasn't a plan about how or whether to implement that until Don Hopkins stood up for it here

Here's an article with additional context from Barrett's perspective about when/how same-sex relationships were added. The article mentions "going back and forth for several months" before he joined, which likely refers to what these documents are saying

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss...

https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1152266586025332736

Here's the offending "tree code" from "The Sims Steering Committee" internal release of June 4, 1998.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_2sWbsXUAA5UtO?format=png

https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1223218416393367554

The Sims turns 20 today! Here's an early pre-release version of The Sims for The Sim Steering Committee, from June 4 1998. #TheSims

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY

https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1223218212353060871

The about dialog had a "No Shit!" button, and referred to it as "Project X":

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPm-ekxXUAAqi2a?format=png

About Edith
Edith Version 666 (motb) [No Shit!]
Copyright (C) 1997, Maxis.

Project X was designed by Will Wright, and programmed by
Jamie Doornbos, Eric Bowman, Jim Mackraz, and Don Hopkins.

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Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.

Procedural rhetoric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric

Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric[1] is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.[2]

Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word. Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a game to convey a particular ideology.

[1] Frasca, Gonzalo (2003). “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge. 221–37 ISBN 9780415965798

[2] Bogost, Ian (2008). "The Rhetoric of Video Games." The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Ed. by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 117–40. ISBN 9780262693646

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SimCopter Himbo Easter Egg was a SimAntics Programming Bug

https://web.archive.org/web/19991109030656/http://www.gamesp...

Indeed, SimCopter was shipped too soon, and as a result, it launched with one of the most controversial bugs in gaming history. A homosexual programmer at Maxis objected to the use of female characters as objects of affection in SimCopter. So, he decided to protest by putting what he termed "muscle boys in swim trunks" into the game. During the game, these characters would mysteriously appear and kiss each other, but only on very rare occasions. At least, that was the idea. Unfortunately, as the programmer told Wired magazine in 1996, "My random-number generator didn't work as I'd planned," and the characters appeared with startling regularity. Upon discovery of the errant code, the programmer was immediately fired, but the transgression spoke volumes about the frenetic and fragmented state of affairs at Maxis.

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Scott McCloud

Reinventing Comics:

https://www.nextchapterbooksellers.com/book/9780060953508

“Anyone involved in interactive entertainment (games, web, etc.) should read this book. Scott McCloud has once again transcended the world of comics and tapped into much deeper issues of creativity entertainment and economics. This time he’s looking into the future rather than the past.”
— Will Wright

Understanding Comics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics

Masking, abstraction, concrete background, abstract ground, projecting the reader or player into the scene.

Show vs. Tell

Transition and Gutters

Abstract vs. Realistic

Masking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masking_(illustration)

The masking effect or masking is a visual style, dramatic convention, and literary technique described by cartoonist Scott McCloud in his book Understanding Comics in the chapter on realism. It is the use of simplistic, archetypal, narrative characters, even if juxtaposed with detailed, photographic, verisimilar, spectacular backgrounds. This may function, McCloud infers, as a mask, a form of projective identification. His explanation is that a familiar and minimally detailed character allows for a stronger emotional connection and for viewers to identify more easily.

It is used in animation, comics, illustration, video games (especially visual novels) and other media. It is common in Western graphic novels and Japanese comics and animation. The psychology behind the masking effect has been extended to rendering antagonists in a realistic manner in order to show their otherness from the reader.

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Tension Between Realistic Models and Fun Game Play

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

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.”

Discussion of all the third parties who wanted a version of SimCity that ham-fistedly taught whatever they had on their agenda. Misunderstanding the potentials of Constructionist Education. Ham-fisted attempts at patronizingly didactic pedagogy.

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Nurture -vs- Nature Debate

Can you decide to change your sexual preference? Should you be able to? What makes a game more fun? Does a game need to be realistic? What are the technological limits of the model (complexity, privacy, AI, machine learning)? Do we even know what the correct model is?

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Columbine

The Sims made its debut days before the shooting at Columbine, which triggered a moral panic over video games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre...

How did the Columbine shooting and subsequent backlash against violent video games affect the coverage and popularity of The Sims, as a counterpoint to Doom-type games?

Is The Sims a video violent game? There are numerous cruel and sadistic ways to painfully and violently kill people. Does that mean that The Sims is a violent video game?

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The Sims 4 Patch 34

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sims_4/Patch_34

The 34th patch for The Sims 4 was released on June 2, 2016. It updated the game to version 1.19.28.1010 for PC and 1.19.28.1210 for Mac. The patch allows players to customize a Sim's gender in greater depth and allows previously gender-specific assets to be used by any Sims regardless of gender.

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