Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26

Trying to simulate every microscopic detail doesn't necessarily translate to a fun game (or even a realistic simulation). After working with Will on SimCity and The Sims, I've written about what he calls "the simulator effect" aka apophenia (delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations), and what I call "Reverse Over-Engineering": link DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used. link >There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design. link >Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations. RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods link 5 game design tips from Sims creator Will Wright link >Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience. >Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is. link DonHopkins on June 16, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machin... Here is Will Wright's talk "Interfacing to Microworlds" from April 26 1996, which he presented to Terry Winnograd's user interface class at Stanford. I sat in on the talk, asked questions, took notes, and

Thank you! Here's some more stuff: I attended this talk by Will Wright in 1996 at Stanford, and went to work on him at Maxis soon thereafter. Years later looking back and watching this after working on and shipping the game he demonstrated for the first time in public in this talk, I was surprised by how much of the important parts of the design he already had thought through and explained in this talk, including having the Sims talk with an abstract language like adults in Charlie Brown, and using the game to enable storytelling. Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26 ▶ this video Jan 27, 2023 STANFORD UNIVERSITY - COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996. He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience. This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Use and reproduction: The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu). My notes and write-up: Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update): link HN discussion: link Lobster.rs post: link Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) video games donhopkins.medium.com DonHopkins avatar authored by DonHopkins 2 years ago | caches | 3 comments On April 4, 1996, Terry Winograd (who I worked with at Interval Research) invited me to sit in on his HCI Group CS547 Seminar where Will Wright was giving a presentation called “Interfacing to Microworlds”, in which he gave demos and retrospective critiques of his three previous games, SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000. He opened it up to a question and answer session, during which Terry Winograd’s students asked excellent questions that Will answered in thoughtful detail, then one of them asked the $5 billion question: “What projects are you working on now?” Will was taken aback and amused by the directness, and answered “Oh, God…” then said he would back up and give “more of an answer than you were looking for.” The he demonstrated and explained Dollhouse for the first time in public, talking in depth about its architecture, design, and his long term plans and visions. I took notes of the lecture, augmented them with more recent information and links from later talking and working with Will, and published the notes on my blog. But all I had to go on were my notes, and I haven’t seen a video of that early version of Dollhouse ever since. But only last week I discovered the Holy Grail I’d been searching for 27 years, nestled and sparkling among a huge dragon’s hoard of historic treasures that are now free for the taking: Stanford University has published a huge collection of hundreds of Terry Winograd’s HCI Group CS547 Seminar Video Recordings, including that talk and two more by Will Wright! I really appreciate Terry Winograd for inviting me to Will’s talk that blew my mind and changed my life (it overwhelmingly and irresistib

Here is Will Wright's talk "Interfacing to Microworlds" from April 26 1996, which he presented to Terry Winnograd's user interface class at Stanford. I sat in on the talk, asked questions, took notes, and wrote up a summary, had Will review it, then went to work with him on Dollhouse which became The Sims. After we shipped in 2000 I updated my summary of the talk with some thoughts and retrospectives about working with Will on The Sims. Stanford recently published the video, so again I updated my write-up with more information from the talk, transcript excerpts, screen snapshots, links and citations. All I had to go on for the 27 years between the talk until the video surfaced and I could finally watch it again were my notes and memory, so I'd forgotten how just prescient and purposeful he was, and I didn't remember that he was already planning on leaning into the storytelling and user created content and self and family representation aspects, and making the people speak with "Charlie Brown Adults" mwop mwop mwop speech, among many other things. Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26 ▶ this video >Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996. >He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience. >This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Use and reproduction: The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu). link Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update) link A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk! Will Wright and Brian Eno discussing generative systems at a Long Now Foundation talk: link SimCity takes a lot of short cuts to fool you. It's what Will Wright calls the "Simulator Effect": Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used. The trick of optimizing games is to off-load as much as the simulation from the computer into the user's brain, which is MUCH more powerf

:) SimAnt was the first game I played at home on a SNES, super fond memories of it. I watched a talk by Will Wright a while ago, from 96, on the development of SimAnt! It was super inspiring. ▶ this video And yeah, it's a bit of a hodgepodge of ideas. I started with a goal of helping people, not making a video game, but ultimately decided that taking the help to where it's needed made the most sense. So, now I'm trying to find ways to package up mental health help and deliver it to techie/gamer folks :)

The indie game Tiny Life is an homage cover of The Sims, played in the key of The Sims 0 -- like Little Computer People, 1985, one person and his dog living on one floppy disk. It has in soul what it lacks in resolution, and soul was always the hard part. link Playing Tiny Life for the first time! link One important premise of Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics is that you can trade resolution for identification and empathy. Lower graphical resolution is not just pixels swapped for soul as if it were a compromise, it's the mechanism that produces the binding. Every specific a face carries is a specific that can contradict the player, so subtracting detail buys the player room inside the character. A photorealistic face is somebody else's; a six-pixel face is yours. link Scott's point is that when the world is concrete but the person is iconic, the player wears the person while believing the place -- which is what The Sims did with mumbling low-poly people in carefully detailed rooms, and what LCP did with one man drawn in a handful of pixels whom players named and worried about for forty years. He calls the effect "masking": link) Little Computer People Review (Commodore 64): link The Sims wouldn't exist without This | Nostalgia Nerd: link That is why "soul over resolution" is not a hedge about the graphics, it's a claim about what the graphics are for. Will Wright, Maxis, "Interfacing to Microworlds", Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford, April 26, 1996, previewing the Dollhouse prototype that became The Sims: ▶ this video 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 there 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 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 plan

Terry Winnograd is a user interface researcher and professor at Stanford, who has a regular user interface seminar: link Stanford University, CS Dept., HCI Group, CS547 seminar videorecordings, 1990–2012 (collection SC1217). Terry Winograd's open, recorded, one-guest-a-week public seminar. 339 talks catalogued. link Many of the videos are now online, including this 1996 talk by Will Wright, who gives a retrospective of SimAnt (too simple, but kids love it), SimEarth (too complex, but professors love it), and SimCity 2000 (just right). Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26 ▶ this video In response to a student's direct question about his current projects, Will seemed momentarily taken aback before deciding to reveal something genuinely groundbreaking: *Student:* What projects are you working on now, and if you'd rather not talk about that, what projects or models had you considered before that were kind of interesting that you didn't do? *Will Wright:* You mean like what systems have I considered modeling? *Student:* Right. *Will Wright:* Oh, God... *Student:* And also what systems are you currently working on, if you if you can talk about them? *Will Wright:* Okay, well one thing we're working on, is a — we've been kind of interested in our company for a long time about the idea of data portability. Really, let me back up just a little bit here, and this might be a little bit more of an answer than you were looking for, but… He then proceeded to demonstrate an early prototype of what would become *The Sims*, at the time called "*Dollhouse*." "This is a game I call *Dollhouse*. And if this looks familiar, it's because I've just loaded a *SimCity* file into here. Okay, so what we're seeing is a *SimCity* file, but now at this point I can actually zoom down to the street level." More info and transcript: link Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update) A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk!

Will Wright gave postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, and previewed an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims). SimAnt was too simple, SimEarth was too complex, SimCity 2000 was just right, and Dollhouse (The Sims) was what he was working on next. Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update) link link Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26 ▶ this video Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996. He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience. This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.

Have you played around with Sims-like plug-in objects, which include the knowledge of how to make the characters use themselves? The important thing is that you can plug in new objects without reprogramming the people. Sims objects (including characters) have a list of "advertisements" of possible interactions (usually shown as items on the user control pie menu, but also including invisible and special orchestration actions). Each enabled action of every live object broadcasts its character-specific scores to each of the characters, adjusted to each character's personality, current stats, location, relationships, history, optionally tweaked by code. Then to keep the sims from acting like perfectly optimized robots, they have a "behavioral dithering" that choses randomly between the top scoring few advertisements. Here's a video of "Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26" where he shows an pre-release version called "Dollhouse" and explains the design: ▶ this video Jamie Doornbos gave a talk at GDC shortly after we released The Sims 1 in 2000, "Those Darned Sims: What Makes Them Tick?" in which he explains everything: link Transcript: link Yoann Bourse wrote this paper "Artificial Intelligence in The Sims series": link In The Sims 4 it's all been rewritten in Python, and has more fancy features, but it still uses the essential model for objects and advertisements. The Sims 1 used a visual programming language called "SimAntics" to script the objects and characters, including functions that are run to score advertisements for each character. But with LLMs you can write scoring functions and behavioral control in natural language!

Another more constructive way to frame "de-professionalization" is "prosumerization", focusing more on the gain to consumers than the loss to professionals. I was lucky to work on a AAA game called The Sims from 1997-2000, at the end of the era when a small team could make a product like that (the teams for The Sims 2-4 were enormous in comparison). We didn't have the resources to ship a demo, so instead we focused on creating tools for user created content, releasing "SimShow" before the game was released to enable users to create and preview skins, so after it was released there was already a big collection of skins available (many that we could not have published ourselves like the Star Trek skins). So the fans were already producing content and sharing them on web sites themselves, before the release. link)/SimShow link Then we released "Transmogrifier" to make custom objects, which was widely accessible because it only required inexpensive easy to use tools like Microsoft Paint or Photoshop, instead of requiring expensive and enormously difficult to use 3D editor tools like 3D Studio Max (Blender wasn't an option at the time). link link Yahoo Groups were instrumental in enabling fans (kids, adults, even elderly) to make objects, share them, and help each other learn how to use the tools. The great thing is that Sims mods gave people a purpose and motivation to learn powerful tools that would serve them well in many other aspects of life. I knew a grandmother who learned to use Photoshop just to make furniture for her grandchildren to play with. Will Wright talks about the interrelationships of tool builders, content artists, web masters, story creators, collectors, browsers, and casual players, and organizes them into an ecological pyramid with many casual players at the base, then fewer collectors/browsers, storytellers, content artists, webmasters, and finally a few toolmakers at the apex. SimFreak and SimSlice are a couple of prolific successful webmasters and toolmakers who met through the Sims community and got married, and are still producing some of the most amazing collections of integrated Sims objects like ZombieSims, and also working on projects with Will Wright's Gallium Studios: link link link link Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996) (donhopkins.medium.com) link link Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26 ▶ this video Will Wright's Design Plunder (With Slides) link

I'm in the very early process of integrating Snap! with Micropolis (open source SimCity), so you will be able to do all that stuff Alan Kay and Brett Victor talk about. The Snap window is off the left side of the screen, and you can drag it over the map. I just snapped it in last night but haven't hooked it up to the simulator yet, that's what I'm working on now: link It also has a cellular automata machine simulator ("Space Inventory") that you can toggle by pressing the space bar. Thanks to HN user lioeters's PR, we've also just added 8 alternative tile sets that you can switch between with the - and = keys! Once I've hooked up the city drawing tools, they will also let you draw into the live or paused cellular automata tiles, and even unleash disasters like tornadoes and monsters and earthquakes on the abstract tile patterns, that draw into the tiles themselves, so you can play with the tile map like KidPix! More discussion of Micropolis development plans: link An example of what I mean about KidPix drawing with SimCity tiles (without the drawing tools hooked up yet, really just a cellular celebration of the newly added tile sets): link Integrating Snap! with Micropolis enables procedural circuit bending: link >Circuit bending is the creative, chance-based customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low-voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators. >Emphasizing spontaneity and randomness, the techniques of circuit bending have been commonly associated with noise music, though many more conventional contemporary musicians and musical groups have been known to experiment with "bent" instruments. Circuit bending usually involves dismantling the machine and adding components such as switches and potentiometers that alter the circuit. Will mentions Braitenberg machines in his 1996 talk, "Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26", in response to questions a student asked about modeling interpersonal interaction and I asked about storytelling: ▶ this video 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 w

I played a big game of Project Highrise (and of SimTower too) just recently, to immerse myself in the games and make them fresh in my mind before working on porting. I think Project Highrise is great! But in the same way I also appreciate the original SimCity 8-bit pixel graphics, and low-tech graphics in The Sims 1, I think SimTower still stands on its own as a game that can still be thoroughly enjoyed. Especially once we develop an SDK to enable user created content, that lets you add your own rooms and people, and program them with JavaScript, thanks to the way emscripten + embind lets you subclass and implement C++ classes in JavaScript, calling back and forth between the core C++ game engine and the JavaScript user interface and plug-ins. The YootTower repo README quotes some info about TowerKit that was used to develop many expansion packs for The Tower II that were only released in Japan, and I plan on making a more flexible modern version of TowerKit in the form of a Yoot Tower SDK that lets you dynamically script and download extensions in JavaScript instead of modifying and recompiling C++ code. link link >What's Tower Kit? >Tower Kit is optional software for The Tower II. In The Tower II, you can select the stage where you want to start the game using the concept of a "map." The Tower II package comes with three maps: "Shinjuku Subcenter," "Hawaii Diamond Head," and "Kegon Falls," and the "Tower Kit" adds these maps. By installing this tower kit, a new stage game will begin. Tower kits don't just add more stages. Each map has new features, allowing you to play a completely new game. >Please try the "Tower Kit" which allows for infinite variations. >A love story between you, the person in charge of the Liberty Island redevelopment project, and two men and women who are your subordinates. Your work will have a subtle influence on the course of your love life. The Tower II is the first attempt at a crossover between redevelopment and love, set in New York. What is the ending...? I did a similar thing for Micropolis/SimCity more than a decade ago, but with Python and SWIG, instead of emscripten and embind, so you could program your own agents (like PacBot, who follows the roads and eats traffic) and zones (like the Church of Pacmania, which worships and attracts PacBots, and causes lots of traffic to feed them). Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo: link A demo of the open source Micropolis Online game (based on the original SimCity Classic source code from Maxis), running on a web server, written in C++ and Python, and displaying in a web browser, written in OpenLaszlo and JavaScript, running in the Flash player. Developed by Don Hopkins. Source Code: link HAR 2009 talk: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity: link Church of PacMania: link PacBot: link link Back when I was porting SimCity to Unix in the early 90's, Maxis gave me the source code to SimEarth too, but I never had the chance to port it, and don't have permission now unfortunately. I'd love to make a modern version of SimEarth and SimAnt too, but neither of them were as successful or engaging a game as SimCity. Will Wright discusses SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000 in this 1996 talk he gave to Terry Winnograd's user interface class, and also demonstrates