Will Wright, the designer of SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, and other popular games from Maxis, gave a talk at Terry Winograd’s user interface class at Stanford, in 1996 (before the release of The Sims in 2000).

At the end of the talk, he demonstrated an early version of The Sims, called Dollhouse at the time. I attended the talk and took notes, which this article elaborates on.

"Over the summer i have been experimenting with the design of different world structures for an interactive game based on generative/emergent systems. I’ve basically implemented three different spacial formats, exploring different aspects of scale/dimension and extendability. Unfortunately, at present none of the systems seems to fulfil the requirements I have for a base structural format."

"Diablo and TQ and WoW and the like are deliberately designed to be annoying, forever holding the tempting carrot of less-annoying over you."