The Sims

During the 1980s, I employed considerable irony in self-deprecatingly referring to myself as "Zee Greatest Game Designer in Zee Universe." However, since then, Will Wright has demonstrated such a powerful combination of imagination, abstraction, background research, and design perspicacity that I have long since yielded the olive branch to him. His masterpiece, The Sims, is without doubt one of the greatest achievements in computer game design, and it has rightly enjoyed huge success.

These things said, I cannot resist the opportunity to take a few sour pot shots at this great work. I offer my complaints not to detract from the reputation of this great game but to demonstrate that even the very best of games have flaws.

The most obvious mistake was the inclusion of urination and defecation in the game. What possible benefit do these features bring to the design? They offer no interesting challenges to the player; it's not as if a character's bladder will explode should the player not walk them to the bathroom often enough. This is distracting realism: It offers nothing in terms of gameplay. It's rather like Leonardo da Vinci carefully painting the fly crawling across the Mona Lisa's face.

In contrast to this over-precise simulation, there are some ghastly errors of omission. This was most powerfully driven home to me when I played with the demo version of the game. It showed a little girl being haunted by a spook who would pop out of the walls in obvious "Boo!" behavior. The frightened child would flee to another room, where the spook would eventually find her and repeat his routine. This went on through half the night. Eventually the child wandered into her parents' bedroom. "Aha!" I thought to myself. "She'll crawl into bed with Mommy for some comforting." But no, such behavior is beyond the depth of the world of The Sims. The little girl simply collapsed at the foot of the bed and fell asleep on the floor. I was mystified. But the coup de grâce was yet to come. Morning came, Mommy sat up in bed, yawned, stretched, and stood up. She then commenced her morning routine by walking over to the bathroom for her ablutions stepping over the prostrate form of her daughter to get to the bathroom. Now, to my way of thinking, the relationship between mother and daughter deserves far more attention than such things as going to the bathroom or washing the dishes.

To be fair to Will, I must point out that the algorithms required to manage emotional relationships are much more difficult to handle than those required for urination or home maintenance. Still, the incongruity of the detailed simulation of minor details and the complete absence of information about much more important family matters leaps out at me. Perhaps Will was wise to draw a line and insist that he wasn't going to get sucked into the morass of human emotion but if so, perhaps he shouldn't have built a game about human behavior.

Nevertheless, I raise my goblet in honor of Will Wright and The Sims.