Replay: The History of Video Games

by Donovan, Tristan

  A Pattern Language consisted of 253 ‘patterns’, short principles that Alexander and his co-writers believed architects and town planners should embrace when designing living spaces.[1] “I wanted The Sims to be an architecture game that assessed what you did from a human point of view,” said Wright. “The people in The Sims were originally there to score the architecture.”

  To create the virtual people that would assess the player’s building work, who were nicknamed sims after the residents of Sim City, Wright drew on his research for his 1991 game Sim Ant. Sim Ant was an ant colony simulation based on Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning science book The Ants – a comprehensive 752-page survey of ant behaviour, ecology and physiology. In Sim Ant, Wright had modelled the secretion of pheromones by individual ants that influenced the behaviour of other ants from the same nest to create what at, a macro-level, looked like intelligent co-ordinated behaviour across the whole nest.

  “In most computer games you have a really good sense of the environment, very rarely does the player design the environment,” said Wright. “We had to be able drop a sim into any possible situation and have them behave reasonably intelligently and ants seemed like a really good model. The sims follow pheromone trails in a weird sort of way. Everything in the game is advertising what needs they fulfil and, depending on the sim’s need, they are attracted to those pheromones.”

  To Wright’s surprise the emergent behaviour of the ant-like sims proved compelling to watch: “The humans worked a lot better than we thought they would and they became a lot more fascinating to watch and interact with.” While the house-building roots of The Sims remained in place, Wright’s game became more and more about watching and interacting with his virtual people. “We had to dumb them down a bit because they were so good at meeting their needs there was no reason for the player to ever interact with the game, so we actually made them stupid so the player had a role in the game.”

  For Wright, his evolving game idea tapped right into the kind of innate voyeurism that lay behind the appeal of the reality TV shows that became popular around the time of The Sims’ release in 2000, such as Big Brother and American Idol. “I’ve always noticed, even felt myself, that people are inherently narcissistic – anything about them is going to be 10 times more fascinating than anything else, no matter how boring it is or exciting something else is,” said Wright. “In The Sims one thing almost everybody does at some point, usually right off the bat, is put themselves in the game along with their family, house and neighbours. Now they were playing a game about their life, they become the superhero on screen – even though it’s not so super. It surprised me that television went in the same direction. You wanted to see these glamorous people in exotic places, now it’s these average Joes sitting around drinking beer and arguing with their wives. That’s the voyeuristic aspect, The Sims feels very voyeuristic.”

  Wright was not the first person to investigate video gaming’s potential for voyeurism and narcissism. In 1984 Activision bought the rights to Rich Gold’s Pet Person, a software program inspired by the Pet Rock craze of the 1970s where people bought millions of named pebbles with eyes glued on. Users couldn’t interact with Pet Person. Instead they got to watch an animated person wander around a virtual house. “Pet Person came to us virtually bankrupt,” said Activision co-founder David Crane, who landed the job of turning Gold’s creation into a game. “The idea of doing a computer-based Pet Rock was a grand one, but I came to the conclusion that as a non-interactive fishbowl it couldn’t recoup its costs, so I added two-way interactivity. Now you could have an artificial life form that even communicated back to you.”

  After Crane’s improvements, players were able to interact with their virtual person by buying them food, encouraging them to write letters to you and by playing card games with them. Released in 1985 as Little Computer People, the game became a cult favourite, but a loss-maker for Activision. “The game had a small, but very dedicated following. Those who got the product were fanatics,” said Crane. “We had a letter from a grandmother who bought two Commodore 64s and two monitors so that her two grandchildren could each have a pet person of their own when they came to visit. The Commodore 64 also had an operating system bug that would damage the floppy disk where each little computer person’s personality and status was saved one time in a thousand. People got so distraught at the death of their person that I had to design a piece of ‘hospital’ software for our consumer relations department. You could send in your floppy and your little computer person could be resuscitated, complete with intact personality in most cases.”

  Activision ventured into similar territory again the following year with the life simulation game Alter Ego. Peter Favaro, a recent psychology PhD graduate, wrote Alter Ego while trying to get his career as a psychologist off the ground. “Poverty prompted me to make a game,” he said. “I was a starving new PhD in psychology who was only 26 years old and looked a good bit younger. I was so young that even crazy people were sane enough not to trust their mental health to such a baby. I lived in a small apartment in an upscale area of the North Shore of Long Island, outflanked by more mental health professionals than there are Starbucks in Seattle.”

  In need of an income, Favaro decided to make a video game that drew on his knowledge of psychology. “I wanted people to experiment with choices and outcomes they would normally encounter in life, freely and without fear of real consequences. I wanted people to see what it would be like to be the villain, the scientist, the priest or the slut they’ve always dreamed of becoming but never had the nads to follow through on,” he said.

  To gather the information that would underpin the options and situations in Alter Ego, Favaro interviewed more than a thousand people to work out what made them tick and what life decisions, really affected their lives. “I did this for a year and I was quite a lunatic about it,” he said. “I interviewed people to get a feel for what people thought were important events in their lives, then I embellished them to make them entertaining and emotionally evocative. One of the things that I found odd was that the vast majority of people were quite eager to talk to me – a complete stranger – about highly personal and sensitive topics. If I were a smarter man I would have been able to predict that some 25 years later people would clamour to publicise, without the promise of anonymity, the details of their personal lives on YouTube and MySpace.”

  Alter Ego put players in control of a virtual person, making decisions at key junctures in their life to see how their situation and personality evolved from birth to death.[2] The game pulled no punches with its choices, which sometimes delved into sex, drugs, violence and other controversial subjects. “Activision supported everything I wanted to put in the game and nothing was removed. When the marketing department expressed concern over the violence and sexuality, which in my mind are necessary to portray an accurate cross section of life experiences, the only thing I had to accept was a parental warning on the packaging,” said Favaro.

  While, like Little Computer People, Favaro’s experimental game gained no more than a cult following it did touch many people’s lives. “I have received hundreds of letters and emails from people saying that playing Alter Ego was a life-changing experience for them,” said Favaro. “That’s fine and flattering, but I never intended it to be that way. I am always shocked when people talk about how much they’ve learned about themselves from playing Alter Ego.”

  The poor sales of Little Computer People and Alter Ego largely killed off similar experiments and boded ill for The Sims. With no backing from Maxis’ management and a little funding, Wright continued to work on his doll’s house game even though there seemed little prospect it would be released. In 1997, however, the prospects for Wright’s project changed dramatically.

  The turning point was Electronic Arts’ decision to buy Maxis. “Electronic Arts was doing due diligence, deciding whether to buy our company or not,” said Wright. “They were originally thinking about bu
ying Maxis for Sim City, but some of the Electronic Arts executives saw The Sims and went ‘what’s this?’ because we didn’t even tell them we were working on this project. They got very excited by it.” Keen to see The Sims released, Electronic Arts bought Maxis and immediately handed Wright the money and larger team he needed to complete the game.

  By the time Electronic Arts came to the rescue, Wright had developed the game’s concept further in response to Id Software’s 1996 first-person shooter Quake. Quake had marked the end of the Romero-Carmack partnership that had taken Id Software to the apex of the video game industry, but it also marked a significant step forward for the modding ideas the pair first pioneered in Doom. It came with its own programming language – QuakeC – that allowed players to not only create maps for players to fight in but offered enough flexibility for them to build whole new games on the back of the Quake engine. QuakeC accelerated the growth of the modding culture that Id had already encouraged with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. By the end of 1996, within a few months of Quake’s launch, a team of three fans had produced one of the first mods to gain recognition as a great game in its own right: Team Fortress.

  Designed as a multiplayer game Team Fortress divided players into competing teams composed of soldiers of different abilities who battled each other in a number of matches such as paintball-style ‘capture the flag’ missions and escort games where one team has to guide a VIP through the level while fending off assassination attempts from the opposing team. Team Fortress became one of the most popular mods ever made and by 1999 professional game developers Valve had teamed up with its creators to remake it as a commercial game.

  Quake also introduced another feature that, to Id’s surprise, would spawn another outbreak of player creativity. Since death matches had proved to be a highlight for many fans of Doom, Id thought its players might enjoy the option to rewatch their games afterwards and added a game-record feature to Quake.[3]

  It didn’t take long for Quake fans to find an alternative use for the record feature. A group of players called The Rangers were first to tap into the feature’s hidden potential. “We had an internet relay chat channel of our own and had many members and non-members alike sitting there chatting one night,” said Heath Brown, a co-founder of TRangers who played online as ColdSun. “At the time we were making videos of our skills to show the masses and a member named Sphinx jokingly said ‘we should create a movie or something’. He laughed as if the thought was silly, but several of us went silent as the wheels began turning. I felt a chill go up my spine. I’m a very creative individual and I thought this would be a cool way to show some of my stories and ideas to people.”

  The Rangers set about trying to use Quake’s record function to create a brief test movie that they called Diary of a Camper, a 100-second short telling the story of the killing of a ‘camper’ – the term used in online games to refer to players who camp out in advantageous positions on a game map. They decided the camper in the film would be Quake designer John Romero. “Back then we actually played every day on the Id Software Quake servers doing beta tests and fragging other elite clans that hung out on those servers with the developers typing messages in the console.[4] John Romero left Id to make Diakatana and at the time there was some hard feeling from those of us close to Id,” explained Brown.

  Diary of a Camper’s story was paper-thin and The Rangers never intended it to be anything more than an experiment; a way to see if the idea of making a movie within Quake was possible. Despite its primitive nature, The Rangers put the recording online while they got to work on their first proper Quake movie: Ranger Gone Bad. To their shock, Diary of a Camper became a sensation among Quake players. “Our website went crazy,” said Brown. “Suddenly there were a lot more Quake players wanting to join the clan. There was excitement to see what we would do next and even a little jealousy and mean comments from other clans who said we weren’t Quake players, just movie makers.”

  Diary of a Camper acted as a proof of concept for thousands of Quake players who realised that with the recording feature and the power of QuakeC they had a miniature animation studio within their game that allowed them to harness of the infinitely flexible 3D world of Quake to create films. Soon hundreds of people were using Quake as a desktop movie studio. Eventually someone coined a name for the burgeoning game movie scene: machinima. “We called them Quake movies,” said Brown. “Machinima must have been termed by someone more educated than a bunch of game junky Quake-addicts. Great name though.”

  Machinima blossomed into a global movement, aided in its growth by game developers who started adding features to their games that were designed to make the production of such movies easier. “The machinima community has really turned into something special,” said Brown. “The work being done now is titanic in comparison to what we did. They even have an awards ceremony each year, just like the Oscars.”

  The explosion of modding and machinima within Quake and later first-person shooters, had a direct influence on Wright’s approach to The Sims, which, thanks to its house building, already had player creativity at its heart. “I was really impressed looking online at games where players were going in and getting more creative involvement,” said Wright. “I came across the Quake community that was doing custom skins and machinima. We just loved the idea that players could modify almost any part of the game and so we made these tools to make it easier for them. What with The Sims being about a doll’s house in some sense, we wanted players to feel that almost anything in there could be at some level modified.”

  While Quake encouraged players to redesign their gun-wielding space marine characters, Wright’s team created tools that allowed players to create new clothes for their sims and design new wallpaper patterns. The Sims team became hooked on the idea of breaking down some of the barriers that used to exist between player and creator. As well as creating tools so players could make their own content for the game, the team – at the suggestion of Luc Barthelet, who Electronic Arts had put in charge of Maxis after the takeover – linked up with Sim City fans online to exchange ideas about the game and spread the word. “The Sims was our first effort to build a community and help build it rather than let it accidently happen,” said Wright. “We did a lot of things with the community that really paid off and were kind of experimental.”

  Wright’s team carried out live demos of the game over the web and asked viewers to suggest what should happen next in the hope of conveying what people would be able to do in the game while gaining some insight into how people would play it. “We had the game running and twice a second it would send a screenshot online. Players would ask can you make them do this? They were remotely playing the game through us to get a sense of how open ended the game was,” said Wright. “Most of these fan sites were really starved of content, but because we were sending out these images, they were capturing them and using them to build up parts of their website. For example ‘Here’s the whole story about how The Sims go to the bathroom’ based upon these screenshots they were capturing. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, but we got the original few hundred people to very much be the evangelists for the next 1,000 people and the next 10,000.”

  By the time The Sims launched in February 2000, the internet buzz that began with those fan demos was at fever pitch. Some fans had even spent the weeks leading up to the launch designing clothes and wallpaper patterns for their sims-to-be, using tools released by Electronic Arts in advance of the game itself. “The Sims was a success from day one, mainly because of the community we built before,” said Wright.

  The Sims’ mix of creativity, voyeurism and humanity tapped into an audience far beyond that of normal video games. It displaced Myst as the biggest-selling PC game of all time and estimates suggest more than half of the people who bought The Sims were women – a huge proportion for a traditionally male-dominated entertainment media.

  The way players used The Sims was also unusual, but reflected the trend towards user-gene
rated content seen in Quake and other first-person shooters. “People used the game to tell stories,” said Wright. “It was something we anticipated, but it was even more successful than we thought. You could take screenshots and add text to tell stories. We put a feature in so by clicking on one button in the game it would upload to the web on our server, where anyone could read your story. That was far more popular than we thought it would be – before we knew it we had 100,000 stories.”

  For many of the players who created photo stories using The Sims, the game became a means of self-expression. “Inherently The Sims is a toy and people play with it and, at some point, they get wrapped up in the characters and start directing the story,” said Wright. “There’s a transition from open play to more directed narrative, for some people it goes from a form of entertainment to a form of self-expression. Most of the stories have some message to convey. There was one woman who wrote about how her sister was in an abusive relationship and how she managed to get out of it eventually. You feel she wanted to write that story because she wanted other people to realise they could get out of these relationships. This is the kind of person who would probably never write a book or short story or anything else, but she has, with The Sims, been able to convey this message that really had a strong resonance with her to a wider group.”

  Quake and The Sims took the concept of games that encouraged user-generated content into the mainstream of video gaming. The blurring of the boundary between player and creator would have a powerful influence on the development of video games during the 2000s. Every first-person shooter on the PC began to include modding features and by the late 2000s it had even spread onto consoles via shooters such as 2007’s Halo 3. The Sims 2 sought to develop player storytelling by including machinima-influenced video making tools.