GDC 2001 Game Design Keynote: Will Wright's "Design Plunder"

"A sly, witty portrait of America."

That was the description given to Maxis designer Will Wright's Sim City and The Sims as he took the stage before a crowded auditorium at the San Jose Civic Center Friday morning.
He began his talk with a favorite quote by Jack London -- "You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club" -- and said it had become a sort of personal mantra to him.

Wright discussed the two ways that designers approach a design problem with the use of a tree model -- the designer will approach it top-down, with many different options and requirements (including aesthetics and design) while the craftsman is more interested in the bottom of the tree, answering more simplistic requirements such as functionality and economics. But many times design can become disconnected from its purpose, as was the case with the Bronx Development Center for handicapped children, a sparse, aluminum structure that was initially intended to be a warm, inviting environment for the children to visit. Although the building won numerous design awards, it had to be continually upgraded to meet safety standards with its windows and railings. "The same sort of disconnection often happens in game design," Wright said.

He advocated a somewhat "in the middle of the tree" approach to game design, balancing economic and functional needs with aesthetics and artistic one. "But the designer has many more places where things can go wrong," Wright said. Aesthetics will mean nothing if the thing doesn't load properly." Wright encouraged designers to work in other mediums besides games to spark their creativity. As an example, he showed the robots he constructs with his daughters, and his designs toy construction sets.Wright went on to discuss the fact that there are multiple feedback cycles of increasing time increments (10 seconds, 10 minutes, one hour) for people, with successes and failures for each cycle. These cycles are vital for game designers.

	Will Wright gives game design tips.

 

"If the game isn't interesting and engaging in the first 10 seconds, then it's not going to be fun," Wright said. "That's why console designers spend so much time on the controllers."
These cycles were the basis of the architecture of Sim City and The Sims, and Wright gave the following hierarchy for the games' design: Basic Control, Needs, Job/Skill Economy, Social/Friends, and Family. "The success in one of these categories is the factor of whether the player can move on to the higher levels of the game," Wright said.

Wright went on to say that he thought that the failures were the most interesting aspect of the game, and responsible for the mutation of gameplay that has appeared. There was originally a bug in the game that caused characters to burst into flames - and people loved the fact that spontaneous human combustion existed in the game. Wright called the beginning of the modifications to The Sims environment the "Calvin factor," referring to the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes" where Calvin has created hundreds of tiny snowmen, only to imagine himself as a large dinosaur devouring them all. "Put in a bulldozer, and people started attacking the town with it," Wright said. "Subversion is a big part of the game's success. That's why we put in the natural disasters."

Wright charted The Sims' word-of-mouth spread, jokingly referring to it as a sexually transmitted disease, beginning with hardcore game players who told their girlfriends, friends, and families about the game, and who in turn boosted knowledge of the game to the point where the mainstream media picked up on it, bringing in casual game players. He discussed evolution, and the creation of The Sims with various evolutionary landscapes in mind - happiness, gameplay, and marketing. In these landscapes, the peaks are the goals that users are working towards standing for their successes. These landscapes came to be the deciding factors of The Sims' characters' behaviors in terms of what the players would ultimately be working towards, and repeat playability.

Wright claimed that he learned a lot of lessons from Japanese gardens in terms of their design, and said that game designers should be looking towards them for design lessons. "At first, (the gardens) were created for the geography of the land," Wright said. "They were designed to simulate nature, and warp time and space for the observer. Over time, the design submerged until it was unrecognizable - like any good user interface should." Wright said that his favorite quote was, "Your garden is not complete until there is nothing left to remove." He changed the interface to The Sims over 10 times, making it as simple as possible.

Wright spoke at length about abstraction, and how important he thought it was to The Sims' replayability. The characters in the game speak to one another in iconic work balloons, allowing continual interpretation from player to player, where actual dialogue would have become stale.

Wright said that up to eight months before The Sims shipped, the developers began planning events to create both a fan and developer base. Live web cam events where players could watch gameplay and make requests of the Sim characters was one of the more successful tactics used to generate buzz about the game, until on release day, there were 50 fan sites devoted to the game, and a mountain of content ready to be downloaded by fans.
"One year after shipping," Wright said, "we've sold 3.5 million units of the game."

Wright discussed the diversity of what players do with their simulated characters -- players have crafted complicated relationships among The Sims, created elaborate homes, futuristic towns, and even given them super powers. There are over 600 Sims sites on the Internet, with an avalanche of content that allows players to customize their worlds from the wallpaper of the homes, to making the characters nude, to changing the tiny wine bottle labels in their kitchens. Every week a particular Sims fan site is spotlighted, which Wright said draws away up to 90% of web traffic from the official Sims site.

Wright went on to talk about the next step for The Sims brand -- Sims Online, where the players goals and the measure of their success will involve how much time other players spend on each others' lots. "Players can construct elaborate homes, businesses, and nightclubs," Wright said. "Of course, we're expecting bordellos and the like as well." In Sims Online, cliques and social circles will be the hub of game play, and it will feature a "six degrees of separation" feature that will allow players to see immediately who their closest friends and enemies are.
Interactive storytelling is another interesting side effect of The Sims and Sim City's design. Players have submitted their elaborate stories to Sims.com in a competition, with winners ranging from the elaborate weekend ski-trip (involving ghosts of dead lovers), to the odd hating of Starbucks (not the chain, just one Starbucks in particular), to the true story of a woman's abusive relationship.

"It really meant something to me that a player had used this medium to tell their story, and share it with others," Wright said.

Wright finished his talk with encouragement to the attendees to ignore the advice of others, and trust their own instincts."Self-confidence and determination are the most important things in game design," Wright said. "There were only two ideas I had that people told they thought sucked, and that was Sim City and The Sims. Every other idea I had they all thought was great, so that should tell you who you should listen to."