[HN Gopher] Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulati...
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Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996)
Author : DonHopkins
Score : 289 points
Date : 2023-01-29 22:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (donhopkins.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (donhopkins.medium.com)
| tigerlily wrote:
| > _" So, when I got a computer in my early twenties..."_
|
| Did Will have exposure to computing before this time? If not, it
| kinda blows the whole digital natives thing away.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| No one grew up with an iPad was involved in designing the iPad.
| The difficult things in technology are taught, not caught.
| npteljes wrote:
| I'm also among those who contest the whole digital native
| thing. I think that growing up in the information age is not
| really correlated with being good with tech and computers,
| those skills, if you can call it that even, can be picked up
| any time. It's just that people don't bother - young people
| don't bother with icky old people things, old people don't
| bother with the strange new things, everyone has got their
| excuse to not expend energy on change.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Digital native doesn't mean good with tech, it just means
| that you default to expecting things to be on a website or
| app and are usually more comfortable interacting with it in
| that form. They have simply never experienced a world where
| constant global connectivity was not a thing. They've never
| had to go to the library to find out what Timor-Leste is, and
| never had to go on a long journey without a phone to
| entertain them.
|
| It's not really a good or bad thing, just a difference. I
| think you'd usually find most younger people are quicker at
| acquiring information than average old people due to their
| familiarity with the tools, though not necessarily any better
| at turning that information into anything actionable. Most
| young people are just as useless outside their comfort zone
| as old people are.
| ihatepython wrote:
| I also don't agree with the digital native premise.
|
| However I believe that those who grew up with or experienced
| the 8 bit home computer and it's evolution to what we have
| now, they have a much better understanding of how computers
| work.
| npteljes wrote:
| I wonder how much of that belief is true, and even more
| specifically, how much of that translates to real-life
| skills. In my experience, people picked up "digital" skills
| casually over some years, are indistinguishable from people
| who "grew up" with half of their lives being lived
| digitally. And neither of these understand how computers
| work, at most, what they are familiar with are the happy
| path of how they achieve some goals using the computer /
| smartphone, and maybe basic troubleshooting.
|
| Part of why I don't think people understand the digital
| world is because it's changing fast. Both the systems
| themselves on a lower levels like hardware, and on top in
| regards to UX. Typing into a Commodore 64 is vastly
| different than a mouse-driven traditional desktop, which
| again is very different than a material design smartphone
| app. It's a lot of work to know these systems, and so, I
| think people don't know them that well, and that they
| overestimate their, and others' familiarity with them, in a
| similar way to how the Dunning-Kruger effect works.
| dagw wrote:
| Digital Native to me means you grew up when 'digital' was
| both everywhere and all encompassing. You don't have to
| understand it any more than you have to understand how hot
| water comes out of your shower or why a light turns on when
| you flip a switch.
|
| Those of us grew up in the 'before times' had to understand
| how computers worked just to make them, well work. Much
| like someone who had to dig their own well, run their own
| pipes and heat their own water probably has a much better
| understanding as to how and why hot water comes out of
| their shower.
| LordN00b wrote:
| Well we have had over 40 years of practice...
| Sharlin wrote:
| Huh, what do you mean? Will Wright was born in 1960, so he
| amounts to a "boomer" as the term is used these days, as do
| most of the great game designers and programmers of the 90s,
| who obviously couldn't have been "digital natives". But one can
| become fluent, even an expert, in a non-native language... most
| people just never do!
|
| FWIW, the idea of digital natives is problematic for other
| reasons, primarily the fact that it's being applied to today's
| kids who mostly are not any sort of native experts in general
| computing. If any generation is worthy of the term, it's the
| millennials/Xennials who were there in the era when the use of
| personal computers involved more than just endlessly scrolling
| TikTok.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| There's a digital natives thing?
| tigerlily wrote:
| Yeah the thing where schools force kids to have a Google
| account to be able to take part, and parents just blithely
| accept.
|
| Idk, maybe it's just a thing where I live.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| Oh, that's not what I understand by digital natives at all.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
| tigerlily wrote:
| I guess some educational policy wonks must've got in bed
| with big tech and appropriated the digital natives term
| as defined in the Wiki article, as a means of creating a
| fomo, allowing big tech to reach into elementary schools
| and steal childhood.
| SamBam wrote:
| Digital natives have more and more been shown to be digital
| illiterates. And I say this with compassion as a STEM teacher
| who thinks kids are great and smart in many, many ways, just
| not digitally.
|
| Besides the much-talked about problems with kids growing up in
| the age of iPads and Chromebooks, which prevent any actual
| interactions with computers, kids are even bad at the internet.
|
| I remember this as far back as 2011, when Osama bin Laden was
| killed. One of the highest trending questions on both Twitter
| and on Yahoo Answers was "who was Osama bin Laden?" A shocking
| number of people's first instinct when trying to find out
| information was not Google searching, but lazy-web asking
| complete strangers on message boards, and needing to wait
| around to find out someone's answer.
|
| Since then I've noticed this kind of thing with my students
| more and more. They can do actual research if told to, but it's
| never their first instinct.
| noduerme wrote:
| As the presenter in the first video says, Will Wright lead to a
| "real shift" in the "younger generation" about how "people think
| about computers and about computing in general". As a member of
| the Will Wright generation of 12 year old Mac programmers who
| tried to take his games apart with ResEdit and tried to make our
| own, with Perl and HyperCard, this was really resonant, really
| true.
|
| When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading
| the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only
| places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab
| after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer.
|
| He turned incredibly complex systems into games and games into
| systems, so that reading his game manuals made you think about
| the whole world.
|
| One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion
| prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual
| systems or logical rules they're playing with, and just learning
| to trick something that's already inscrutable and smarter than
| them. Mastering AI prompts or even running your own neural net
| doesn't teach anything like logic or the kind of deep, recursive
| cause and effect structure you could get from Will Wright's toys,
| or even from CK3... even if you get all your prompts perfect to
| make what you want, it teaches something much more like
| dependence on a magical oracle than, say, a toy/game/sim that
| really encourages you to deconstruct and take pleasure in all its
| interconnections that you can understand.
| emrah wrote:
| > One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion
| prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the
| actual systems or logical rules they're playing with, and just
| learning to trick something that's already inscrutable and
| smarter than them
|
| This is something I don't understand. Sure, not every kid is
| going to think about that but that's ok. We need some kids to
| think about it, probably a small subset..
|
| Back when computers were new, not every kid tried to make games
| or understand how they worked either. Only a small subset and
| that's how it is..
| adamrezich wrote:
| but the same could be said for indie games developed with
| tools like Unity or Godot--people who make games with these
| tools don't really know 100% about what's going on with the
| actual underlying systems they're stitching together to make
| a game with, but they stitch things together and create a
| game nonetheless. on its face that's fine, but as time goes
| on, "making video games" has gone from being something that
| required intimate knowledge and understanding of the software
| and hardware at the foundation of the executable you're
| running, to domain-specific knowledge relative only to one
| specific tool/framework. if you've only ever made Unity games
| and now you want to work on a more complex simulation, you
| either find yourself increasingly having to fight "the Unity
| way of doing things", or take the plunge and unlearn your
| current way of thinking in domain-specific primitives such
| that you can learn to do things at a lower level.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| The way I read OP's comment was more about _quality_ rather
| than _quantity._
|
| Put another way, I'd say that the right amount of people who
| should be learning that skill is probably zero. "Learning to
| write AI prompts" is a skill that only exists because AI
| hasn't evolved enough yet; in another 10-25 years, "learning
| to write AI prompts" will just be equivalent to
| "communicating clearly."
|
| And, yes, thinking and communicating clearly _are_ valuable
| skills that _everyone_ should learn, but that 's just the
| point -- people investing time in the "writing AI prompts"
| skill now _aren 't_ learning that. They're just learning to
| string random adjectives together, along with (at best) a
| slight bit of the iterative never-give-up spirit that comes
| with poking an inscrutable pile of matrices until it does
| what you want. [1]
|
| [1]: https://xkcd.com/1838/
| jvalencia wrote:
| I think the lament is that if people do not learn the
| logical side of things, they are unable to figure out how
| to reason about issues and errors. They are unable to
| easily go deep into topics like computer science.
| shagie wrote:
| > When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just
| rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because
| the only places I could play it on the disks were in the
| computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home
| computer.
|
| A copy of the manual can be found at https://retro-
| commodore.eu/files/downloads/amigamanuals-xiik...
|
| Page 149 (yes - it had a lot of pages) starts off with "An
| Introduction to Earth Science" and continues to the appendix on
| page 201. It has enough content to make a good starter for a
| grade school science class's syllabus.
| xattt wrote:
| > When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just
| rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because
| the only places I could play it on the disks were in the
| computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home
| computer.
|
| This is me, but with the SimCity 2000 Deluxe Edition and it's
| novel-like manual.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Civ II is the one that sticks in my head... always bought
| games at an egghead software 4 hours from home (and usually a
| couple days before my family would drive back anyway)
| szundi wrote:
| My funny hypothesis is that the ones who can actually make
| something out of the AI/machine learning trend are those who
| are good in this logical thinking you are talking about, not
| the ones who try to skip it on the way.
| noduerme wrote:
| I'm tempted to think you're right, but we're probably going
| to have to live through a 5 years long boom / bust of
| _illogical_ , _unthinking_ children getting in and building
| very stupid things with very powerful weapons before another
| cryptocurrency-style crash. On the whole it is not going to
| serve as a technology to even teach young coders to think for
| themselves, let alone the devastating effects it will have on
| society and human relationships in all countries.
|
| Really, I mean, force kids to learn BASIC or Pascal or
| whatever... but these AI systems cannot ever be understood by
| people who grow up taking computation for granted (and only
| learning how to tinker with them on the surface). If they
| aren't understood, they will be treated like a magic box for
| answers, and worshipped as a deity or an oracle.
|
| I don't think it is too much to say that ChatGPT is the
| Golden Calf that represented the type of lazy thinking or
| psychological projection into imagined, embodied "gods" which
| the monotheistic religions starting with Judaism found to be
| morally atrocious. And why? Because giving up one's rational
| beliefs or even one's irrational monotheistic belief in a God
| to the fantasms and stories created of idols and their
| stewards was a form of slavery from which you could not
| rescue yourself or your children.
|
| Guarding the Word presages guarding its corruption by
| machine, several thousand years in advance. And Islam,
| Christianity and Judaism are all a warning against allowing
| the machinery - even seemingly perfect technologies - to
| become a god.
|
| [edit] and FWIW I am an atheist, but that only makes me more
| concerned, as I see a new and more terrifying irrationality
| taking the place of the old. The new religion of CHATGPT will
| be much more terrifying because the entity it worships will
| be PRESENT AND ALIVE...
| another2another wrote:
| Butlerian jihad on its way ... :)
| mycall wrote:
| GPT and transformers are not the end game for logical analysis.
| Pretrained LLMs cannot capture factual knowledge from text,
| that is true. MIT is proposing a unified model for Knowledge
| Embedding and Pretrained LanguagERepresentation (KEPLER) [0],
| which can better integrate factual knowledge into LLMs.
|
| Knowledge Embeddings could be created by anyone who wants to
| better simulate a particular system, including kids, given the
| right exploratory environment.
|
| [0]
| https://direct.mit.edu/tacl/article/doi/10.1162/tacl_a_00360...
| musesum wrote:
| Will Wright taught me about "turtleducks"
|
| Met him at the Computer History Museum, maybe around 2007. He had
| a branching storyboard-style presentation with 100's of slides.
| In the middle of the talk, he asked the audience about which
| direction they wanted to explore. Based on a show of hands, he
| proceeded to branch off into a few dozen more slides. Pretty
| epic.
|
| Anyway, Turtleducks: we met later and I demoed a visual music
| synth. Was wondering if it would fit somehow into Sim-City. He
| said: "Well, what I have is a turtle and what you have is a duck.
| You can't just put a duck on a turtle and get a turtleduck." [Am
| paraphrasing.]
|
| Ironically, a year later, he introduce Spore -- thus, solving the
| turtleduck problem. At least, in the turtle/duck domain.
| a13o wrote:
| My go-to name for this is 'Nuts & Gum' from the Simpsons.
|
| In the show, Homer pulls down a can from the cupboard and the
| camera zooms in so we can read the product label: Nuts & Gum!
| Together at last!
|
| These two products would obviously be horrible together; a
| crumbly thing, and a thing you can't swallow. But on their own
| they're just fine.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| corysama wrote:
| Will Wright's talks at the Game Developers Conference were not to
| be missed. They were wild, fascinating and funny. He would often
| go off-topic with mini-presentations like the "Russian Space
| Minute" where he marveled at the analog computers used in space
| by the cosmonauts.
|
| It's really hard to find recordings. I don't even know if they
| are all available anywhere on the Internet.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Here are the videos of the three talks by Will Wright
| (including this one) presented to Terry Winograd's user
| interface class over the years.
|
| Stanford Library has just recently made these available!
|
| I uploaded this one to youtube and closed captioned it, and
| I'll get around to the others when I have the chance.
|
| There are a LOT of really excellent historic videos in the
| collection by many other amazing people.
|
| Guide to the Stanford University, Computer Science Department,
| HCI Group, CS547 Seminar Videorecordings
|
| https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_tex...
|
| Stanford University, Computer Science Department, HCI Group,
| CS547 seminar videorecordings, 1990-2012
|
| https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10637698
|
| From: Henry E Lowood at Stanford
|
| All,
|
| This video has been reformatted and is streamed from the
| Stanford website. As far as I can tell, there should be no
| restriction on access from off-campus:
|
| Interfacing to Microworlds, Will Wright, Maxis in SearchWorks
| catalog (stanford.edu) (April 26, 1996)
|
| https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999
|
| Two more of Will's lectures streamed from Stanford:
|
| Will Wright, Maxis, "Games and Simulation" in SearchWorks
| catalog (stanford.edu) (May 2, 2003)
|
| https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pw467bz3079
|
| Laughing Creative Communities: Lessons for the Spore community
| experience, Will Wright, Maxis / Electronic Arts in SearchWorks
| catalog (stanford.edu) (May 22, 2009)
|
| https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pd936vc7267
|
| If you have issues viewing the videos, please let me know and I
| will pass the information along to our media lab.
|
| Having had the pleasure of Will lecturing in my Stanford course
| on one or two occasions, I am glad to see that these examples
| of his thinking (and lecturing style!) are available.
|
| Please consider sending important documents to Stanford for
| preservation. We offer one of the leading collections of game-
| related archival material for research and instruction and our
| streaming services are robust.
|
| All my best,
|
| Henry
|
| Henry Lowood, PhD
|
| Harold C. Hohbach Curator for History of Science & Technology
| Collections, Curator for Film & Media Collections.
|
| HSSG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
|
| Stanford University Libraries, Stanford CA 93405-6004
|
| Web: https://people.stanford.edu/lowood/
|
| Email: lowood@stanford.edu
| samsquire wrote:
| One game I would like to see is the cloud scalability game.
|
| You simulate a cloud environment and buy servers and staff and
| rack servers and install software and try handle extreme levels
| of traffic.
| jakear wrote:
| Love the "Antique Soviet Space Junk" collection, it'd awesome to
| see the full collection digitized - great resource for intuitive
| UI development.
|
| Relatedly, I've recently been working on UI's inspired by the
| F-15 cockpit [1,2]. It's neat how on one hand the controls are
| amazingly complicated (Enough knobs and dials to fly a fighter
| jet! With 0 losses to boot!), but on the other hand you can get a
| pretty good sense of how everything operates just by reading the
| labels and diagrams painted atop them. The acronyms are a
| different story, but then that's what manuals and all those hours
| of training are for.
|
| [1]: https://waltham.pages.dev, F-15's clock/timer element
|
| [2]: https://solunar.pages.dev, tide charts based on F-15 UI
| elements. WIP, still gotta figure out how to render the location
| selection -- the soviet globe UI in the OP is quite interesting.
| For now set the url's hash to your favorite NOAA station's id if
| you're really interested :)
| somat wrote:
| On the subject of controls that don't translate well, Rotary
| knobs are great as a physical device, But they feel terrible as
| a mouse controlled item.
|
| The biggest offenders are audio plugins, they tend to be very
| skeuomorphic, almost to a fault. I don't mind a little
| skeuomorphism, in fact I think it can help readability of the
| interface. But the way audio plugins take it to an extreme and
| cram as many rotary knobs in there as possible is maddening.
| widdershins wrote:
| A well-designed digital rotary knob isn't too hard to use -
| but it must be set by simply dragging up and down, not in a
| rotary motion, which is very unnatural with a mouse. They
| remain popular in audio software not just because of
| skeuomorphism (though that doubtless plays a role) but
| because they are a space-efficient way of putting lots of
| controls on a page. Audio software is usually highly
| parametric, so that's important.
|
| Even though I understand this need, I'm still very keen on
| audio software that tries to break out of the 'everything is
| a knob' paradigm when it makes sense.
| jakear wrote:
| Good point about converting linear motion to rotary for
| mouse users. I hadn't considered that as I only ever use
| touch screens and touch pads so to me the rotary is just
| fine (aka, touch the option you want).
|
| That said, it's just a radio button, would you expect radio
| buttons to activate on scroll too? For continuous numeric
| inputs I modeled the slider, and enabled scroll control.
|
| One issue there is intercepting horizontal scroll on
| touchpads is flakey and about two thirds of the time you go
| back instead of moving the thing right.
| fivre wrote:
| a lot of audio stuff is designed with the expectation that
| you'll be binding the control to a MIDI controller if it's
| important, so in that sense the skeumorphism makes a lot of
| sense. if the VST knob is just a visual representation of
| something that's bound to another MIDI-bound knob in a DAW,
| it doesn't really matter if the mouse UX is bad, since it'll
| probably only be used briefly while dialing in settings, and
| then serve as a visual UX thing after
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I think the earth thingie was one of these babies:
|
| https://www.righto.com/2023/01/inside-globus-ink-mechanical-...
| the_af wrote:
| That's... gorgeous.
|
| I get the urge to scroll it as if it was a trackball, though.
| criddell wrote:
| Could you could take design ideas from the F-15 cockpit and use
| them without being skeuomorphic? Would you end up with a UI of
| checkboxes and radio buttons? Or was the whole goal to make
| something that looks like physical cockpit control?
|
| I think some aspects, like toggle controls, are not very common
| today. Some people might have no idea what they are.
| jakear wrote:
| The fun part in developing for myself is I don't have to care
| what "some people" don't know. :)
|
| That said, I believe my toggles have a couple benefits:
| they're labeled on both sides, so it's more clear what the
| options are. And the change is immediately visible, again
| making the functionality more obvious. The "modern" toggle
| where a circle can be on either end of an elongated cylinder
| and a string of text is somewhere across the screen in a step
| down from that, IMO.
| the_af wrote:
| Very interesting article, with lots of food for thought.
|
| I find it fascinating that you can think of an interesting
| simulation with fun gameplay, but without a good UI, and that
| therefore won't work as a game.
|
| I also liked the idea that the user's mental model of the game is
| not necessarily represented by the actual code running the
| simulation. But if one "closes the gap", Scott McCloud style,
| then it's good enough!
|
| Also, I must say that I really liked SimCity (classic, the only
| one I really played) but also loved SimAnt, which the article (or
| Wright, actually) calls "too simple". I dunno, I really liked it.
| You could even play as the spider and hunt ants! You just had to
| be careful, because a single ant is prey for the spider, but a
| bunch of ants become the predators.
|
| Finally, for all of its technical achievements, I never really
| liked The Sims or any of its variants. It seemed impressive but
| what is the gameplay? Seemed like a variation on tamagotchis, and
| so I never got the urge to really play it even back when it was
| all the rage.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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
| irresistibly convinced me to go to Maxis to work with Will on The
| Sims), and to the Stanford University librarians and archivists
| for putting this enormous treasure trove of historic videos
| online.
|
| Guide to the Stanford University, Computer Science Department,
| HCI Group, CS547 Seminar Video Recordings
|
| https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_tex...
|
| Will Wright, Maxis, "Interfacing to Microworlds", April 26, 1996:
|
| https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999
|
| Will Wright, Maxis, "Games and Simulation", May 2, 2003
|
| https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pw467bz3079
|
| Will Wright, Maxis / Electronic Arts, "Laughing Creative
| Communities: Lessons for the Spore community experience", May 22,
| 2009
|
| https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pd936vc7267
|
| I uploaded the video to YouTube to automatically create closed
| captions, which I proofread and cleaned up, so it's more
| accessible and easier for people to find, and you can translate
| the closed captions to other languages.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
|
| And I updated my previous article "Will Wright on Designing User
| Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)" to include the embedded
| video, as well as the transcript and screen snapshots of the
| demo, links to more information, and slides from Will's
| subsequent talk that illustrated what he was talking about in
| 1996.
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Thank you, this is amazing! The various "sim" games were
| discussed quite a bit during my master studies in Interaction
| Design - as were your pie menus, by the way :)
|
| PS: the update on the medium blog post accidentally says
| 2013-1-27 instead of 2023-1-27. Small but confusing typo
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Thank you! The year in the title was totally different too --
| I am REALLY not into knowing what year it is!
| recuter wrote:
| I always love reading your comments, thank you very much.
| _448 wrote:
| This is what passion for a domain looks like, and also your
| respect for others is really admirable!
|
| And your efforts to not only share all the information but to
| go further than that and proofread and cleaned it so that it is
| accessible to others is highly respectable.
|
| Thank you for sharing this information with us!
| Donckele wrote:
| Thank you for the links and the youtube upload!
| ido wrote:
| Thanks a lot! And it's amazing students had such an opportunity
| - students here get to hear people like _me_ instead (I think
| pretty highly of myself but I'm no Will Wright!)
|
| It would be like having Carmack come over to talk about 3d
| rendering (in the 90s no less)...
| amitp wrote:
| Wow, thank you for this!
|
| I got to see Dollhouse in late 1996( _). Having loved SimCity,
| SimEarth, etc., I admit I didn 't "get it" when I saw
| Dollhouse.
|
| I had plans this morning but I'm going to watch these videos
| instead :-)
|
| (_) in part because of my gamedev web site, and in part because
| I was working on a sim game and Maxis lawyers didn't want me
| calling it SimAnything
| DonHopkins wrote:
| At the time I was actually pretty skeptical about how hard it
| would be to get the AI to work plausibly (and so was Will,
| but somehow he managed to do it), and I though an online game
| like The Sims Online would be easier. But leveraging the
| player's imagination and supporting storytelling was key.
|
| Will mentioned a "Braitenberg Machine":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle
|
| >A Braitenberg vehicle is a concept conceived in a thought
| experiment by the Italian-Austrian cyberneticist Valentino
| Braitenberg. The book models the animal world in a
| minimalistic and constructive way, from simple reactive
| behaviours (like phototaxis) through the simplest vehicles,
| to the formation of concepts, spatial behaviour, and
| generation of ideas.
|
| >For the simplest vehicles, the motion of the vehicle is
| directly controlled by some sensors (for example photo
| cells). Yet the resulting behaviour may appear complex or
| even intelligent.
|
| The Braitenberg Vehicles:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-fxij3zM7g
|
| What I didn't realize until I saw this video 27 years later,
| was that Will already had the idea of the "Peanuts Adult
| Voices", and the importance of storytelling.
|
| It wasn't until later that those nebulous ideas actually
| crystalized into the design of the unique expressive but
| unintelligible "mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa" Simlish language, or
| the storytelling design of "The Sims Family Album" and "The
| Sims Exchange", where you could take screen snapshots, write
| text in picture albums to make stories, upload and share your
| stories as well as your entire house and family, being an
| actual part of the game design.
|
| The design of The Sims Family Album and story publishing
| features were also inspired by the success of live online
| chats with the fans, while playing the pre-release game with
| a virtual webcam that took screen snapshots and uploaded them
| to the web server and into the chat (like an early crude
| version of Twitch), so the fans could make suggestions and
| comments in chat and see what happens in the game seconds
| later.
|
| From the transcript:
|
| 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 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 plant, the planes
| crashing, but they're convinced it exists.
|
| Don Hopkins:
|
| They're using it as a medium to tell stories about.
|
| Will Wright:
|
| Yeah!
|
| Don Hopkins:
|
| Where they're using it as a piece of paper, to write.
|
| Will Wright:
|
| Yeah, that's exactly right.
|
| There's a parallel simulation going on here in the game.
|
| Everybody's taking a linear path through this, and they're
| basically, most people will attempt to understand things like
| this with a story.
|
| They'll think about "I did this, then that happened, because
| of that", and so the story becomes kind of their logical
| connection, their logical reverse engineering, of the
| simulation that they're playing inside of.
|
| Now on the people's side, I think we can do a lot in this as
| a product, by propping up that illusion of people.
|
| Again, if this is a doll house, we don't want the dolls to be
| sentient things.
|
| We want the dolls to be interesting enough to where I can
| play games with them.
|
| There was actually a really interesting doll that this
| company came out with.
|
| Oh, it was Worlds of Wonder, this really cool doll, I've got
| a couple of them after they went out of business.
|
| It's called the Julie doll.
|
| But it was like this $250 doll with voice recognition, and it
| said all these things.
|
| It had just a huge amount of ROM with digitized speech in it,
| and so it would sit there and try and have stupid
| conversations with you.
|
| And really it was kind of Eliza, or had keywords it would
| recognize, and give you these kind of non-committal
| responses.
|
| But in the testing of that, well first of all it was a $300
| doll.
|
| Who's going to buy the kid a $300 doll?
|
| So it was really more, it was actually the only doll I've
| ever seen that appealed to grown men.
|
| Grown men love this, I mean this is a hacker's doll.
|
| But I talked to the guy who was working this project, and he
| said they put this in focus groups with girls.
|
| And they played with it for a while, and then after about a
| half an hour they take the batteries out, and keep playing
| with it.
|
| And what was happening is that the girls were propping up
| this elaborate fantasy in their play, and the dolls were
| supposed to be a structure for that fantasy, they weren't
| supposed to be the fantasy.
|
| The doll was telling them what the fantasy was, and it was
| conflicting with what the girls were saying, and so it was
| interfering actively with their fantasy and their play.
|
| So in that regard, I think we can actually kind of take that
| path with these people.
|
| And all we have to do is deal with them at a very local kind
| of a state machine, Braitenberg Machine kind of level, and
| say that they're angry, and they're hungry, and they're
| sleepy.
|
| And then we can actually do some things where maybe they have
| a little, what you might call, structural ambiguity about
| what they're actually saying.
|
| One of the thoughts I had about this project in particular is
| that you'd see the people go up and they talk, and there
| would be some kind of a flavor to their conversation, but it
| would be more like Peanuts.
|
| When they did the TV show of Peanuts, you'd hear the adults
| talking, and the adults would always be like "mwa mwa mwa mwa
| mwa mwa", or soft, or loud.
|
| You can tell if they're mad, or angry, or what, but you
| wouldn't hear what they were saying.
|
| You'd have to read that into it.
|
| I think this is the area where we sidestep the issue, just
| because as a commercial company we have to ship a game, we're
| not doing a research project.
|
| So that's a long winded answer, sorry.
|
| Yeah?
|
| Student:
|
| If you do do that, and people can read into what people are
| actually doing in the game, won't that sort of interfere with
| their expectations and simulation if the simulation doesn't
| actually meet those expectations?
|
| If they're reading too much into it, and it's not really
| happening that way, won't they be sort of misled in there
| expectations?
|
| Will Wright:
|
| Yeah it really comes down what the simulation is.
|
| That, I think, would be addressed on the game design side.
|
| Again, I mean, just in terms of reality, I don't think
| there's any way I'm going to come anywhere close to
| simulating a person.
|
| With a lot of tricks, I can have these people walking through
| the day, getting up, taking a bath or a shower, fixing
| breakfast, going to work, while at the same time deciding
| that I'm bored, I'm going to sit on the couch, I'm going to
| turn on the TV.
|
| And how you make that into a game design might have a lot to
| do with how valid the simulation of the people has to be.
|
| If it's a story kind of a game where you want drama to unfold
| at the right time, and the conversation between these two
| people is a crucial thing that happens before he gets really
| upset and does that, then yes the model would need to be a
| real simulation.
|
| I really don't think we're anywhere near that though, I mean,
| really I think, unless you're in a very very tightly confined
| domain, you're going to have a hard time dealing with this
| open-ended simulation about people in that way.
|
| So I think really unfortunately we're not there yet, and I
| think it'll be quite a long time before we are, so really we
| have to constrain what the user is doing.
|
| Now maybe it's just a dollhouse, maybe all I do is I have to
| get two people to meet at a party, and everything else is
| kind of indeterminate about what they say and all that, and
| I'm moving furniture around.
|
| So there are a lot of game design things we can do with this
| without doing a personality model.
|
| Don Hopkins:
|
| You're saying a multi-user game would be easier to design
| than an AI game, because you can use other people.
|
| Will Wright:
|
| Oh yeah, far easier, I think so.
|
| Don Hopkins:
|
| It's just the technology of communicating and time lags.
|
| Will Wright:
|
| This is how you're always building models of the system
| you're playing with.
|
| It's easy to build a model of a stupid computer agent.
|
| It's hard to build a model of your head, while I'm talking to
| you.
|
| That's what's interesting, is trying to reverse engineer your
| thought process.
|
| Don Hopkins:
|
| Yeah, there's a lot of commercial services like Worlds Away
| and Habitat, things that have been done that only have other
| people, no robots or anything, and they're pretty successful
| just because of that.
|
| Will Wright:
|
| Yeah, people are pretty interesting.
| amitp wrote:
| Braitenberg vehicles are fascinating.
|
| The doll story reminded me that there's tech out there that
| is _expensive_ and _hard_ in a way that makes engineers
| happy, but there could be some other much simpler tech that
| makes the end users happier.
|
| Example: AT&T kept advertising about how they're working on
| video phones (hard tech: latency, bandwidth, cameras,
| screens) but all I really wanted was SMS (easy tech by
| comparison)
|
| Example: Twitter is using some fancy statistical or machine
| learning model (hard tech) to _guess_ that I 'm interested
| in peru, deadpool, university of alabama. And I have to
| _guess_ that it thinks that I 'm interested in peru because
| I was reading about the guano war (I'm not particularly
| interested in peru in general), and that I'm intersted in
| deadpool because a friend of mine wanted to watch a
| deadpool video on my tablet (I'm not interested in deadpool
| myself), and that I'm interested in the university of
| alabama because I was reading about alabama's role in the
| Apollo missions (but I'm not particularly interested in the
| university of alabama). They're doing something hard that
| frustrates me, when they could've done something easy like
| _ask_ me, and I would 've been happier with the results.
|
| I like that in games, we can do something simple and let
| the player's imagination/apophenia invent the rest. I
| enjoyed a recent paper[1] about Caves of Qud generating a
| plausible history to fit the events the player has seen so
| far.
|
| [1] https://www.freeholdgames.com/papers/Generation_of_Myth
| ic_Bi...
| gardenmud wrote:
| Very cool! A lot of this tech _still_ is fascinating today.
| Well... visually not so stunning, of course, but in concept and
| execution.
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