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-s...

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.

[How the Language From the Sims Was Created: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGsbeTV76YI ]

So that's a long winded answer, sorry.

Yeah?

Student:

If you do do that, and people can read into what people are actually doing in the game, won't that sort of interfere with their expectations and simulation if the simulation doesn't actually meet those expectations?

If they're reading too much into it, and it's not really happening that way, won't they be sort of misled in there expectations?

Will Wright:

Yeah it really comes down what the simulation is.

That, I think, would be addressed on the game design side.

Again, I mean, just in terms of reality, I don't think there's any way I'm going to come anywhere close to simulating a person.

With a lot of tricks, I can have these people walking through the day, getting up, taking a bath or a shower, fixing breakfast, going to work, while at the same time deciding that I'm bored, I'm going to sit on the couch, I'm going to turn on the TV.

And how you make that into a game design might have a lot to do with how valid the simulation of the people has to be.

If it's a story kind of a game where you want drama to unfold at the right time, and the conversation between these two people is a crucial thing that happens before he gets really upset and does that, then yes the model would need to be a real simulation.

I really don't think we're anywhere near that though, I mean, really I think, unless you're in a very very tightly confined domain, you're going to have a hard time dealing with this open-ended simulation about people in that way.

So I think really unfortunately we're not there yet, and I think it'll be quite a long time before we are, so really we have to constrain what the user is doing.

Now maybe it's just a dollhouse, maybe all I do is I have to get two people to meet at a party, and everything else is kind of indeterminate about what they say and all that, and I'm moving furniture around.

So there are a lot of game design things we can do with this without doing a personality model.

Don Hopkins:

You're saying a multi-user game would be easier to design than an AI game, because you can use other people.

Will Wright:

Oh yeah, far easier, I think so.

Don Hopkins:

It's just the technology of communicating and time lags.

Will Wright:

This is how you're always building models of the system you're playing with.

It's easy to build a model of a stupid computer agent.

It's hard to build a model of your head, while I'm talking to you.

That's what's interesting, is trying to reverse engineer your thought process.

Don Hopkins:

Yeah, there's a lot of commercial services like Worlds Away and Habitat, things that have been done that only have other people, no robots or anything, and they're pretty successful just because of that.

Will Wright:

Yeah, people are pretty interesting.