$ sudo apt install poppler-utils pandoc
$ for pdf in *.pdf; do pdftohtml -c -noframes "$pdf" "${pdf%.pdf}.html"; done
$ for html in *.html; do pandoc "$html" -o "${html%.html}.epub"; done
Additionally, here is a treasure trove of about half a gig compressed of unreleased custom Sims objects, including the Simprov Wedding Play Set stuff like Cupid (who makes you instantly fall in love with anyone you want, even cats and dogs) and Buddha (who makes everybody happy and not piss themselves and fall asleep in their own puddles of urine during parties) and the Crowd Sitter (to make your guests all sit down and shut up for the wedding ceremony, also useful for assembling and controlling cults) and lots of beautiful SimFreaks objects and skins.
Please subscribe to Zombie Sims to thank and support Heather and Steve for all their great and generous work, which they've updated for the recent 25 year anniversary release of The Sims Legacy Collection. Then you can spice up your wedding by inviting zombies!
DonHopkins on Jan 23, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: A guide for playing The Sims 1 on Intel and ARM Ma...
ZombieSims is a mind-blowing, brain-eating, tour de force Sims 1 fan expansion pack by two of the greatest Sims user created content artists and programmers: Heather "SimFreaks" (who created SimFreaks.com and much of the beautiful content for Sims 1 at http://www.simfreaks.com/index.php including themed play sets like http://www.simfreaks.com/themes/storytime/pirate/index.shtml ) and Steve "SimSlice" (who created SliceCity: SimCity within The Sims at http://simslice.com/Slicecity.htm by programming many interlocking objects in SimAntics, and also many other amazing Sims 1 objects like the weather machine at other cool stuff at http://www.simslice.com/Objects-Electronic.html ).
Heather and Steve were both early Sims 1 fans who each published their own popular web sites with downloadable objects, met through the Sims 1 modding community, then eventually moved in together and got married, and now they've combined their extreme art and programming talents to make an intricately intertwingled collection of Sims 1 Zombie objects, with a whole lot of original artwork and programming!
Check out some of the crazy menus that pop up -- this demo barely scratches the surface!
DonHopkins on Jan 23, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: A guide for playing The Sims 1 on Intel and ARM Ma...
(In Professor Farnsworth's voice:) Good news everyone!
I asked Heather permission, and she says it's OK for me to give away the huge collection of custom Sims objects I have that includes an archive snapshot of many classic SimFreaks objects, as well as all the unreleased SimProv Wedding Playset objects that Heather and Donna and Steve and I created years ago but never finished and released, and a whole bunch of other stuff like the Transmogrifier object that randomly changes your body, the Dumbold voting machine that sometimes makes you accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, Satan who shows up when you're depressed and offers to buy your soul, the Crowd Sitter that makes everyone gather together and sit down on chairs, and the Cupid that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood, and the Buddha that makes everyone happy and not piss themselves and fall asleep in their own puddles of urine during parties.
I don't have time to actually support and debug any of this stuff, but at least I recently updated the Cupid to be compatible with the Pets expansion pack, so it now lets you fall in love with any pet in the neighborhood. (You just can't actually marry them -- not that there's anything wrong with marrying cats and dogs, but we didn't have the animations for that!)
If you want to express your appreciation, then please subscribe to Zombie Sims for a $9.99 lifetime membership, and then you can play around with inviting lots of Zombies to your weddings and see how that works! (Or don't invite them, and they will crash your wedding anyway!) But no guarantees or warranties that it doesn't devolve into a bloody mess!
Here's my special collection of Sims 1 downloads, including the unreleased and not quite finished "SimProv" wedding Playset and handy "Cupid" that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood (including pets)!
Speed Dating With Cupid: A demo of Speed Dating with Cupid, part of the SimProv Wedding Play Set for The Sims 1. Programming by Don Hopkins. Graphics by SimBabes and SimFreaks.
To find the Cupid and other Simprov items, go into buy mode, press the last icon of three dots for "Miscellaneous", then press the first icon with a pool table for "Recreation". The main item of the Simprov wedding playset is the "Hope Chest", which has a "Help" item that explains what to do next, and it summons a wedding consultant (who you can dismiss and call back if you don't like her hanging around in your bedroom forever). Then you can click on the hope chest to make other objects like the Cupid, and click on the wedding consultant to make catalogs of other items (most of them are just placeholder programmer art right now, but some of then configure things like what kind of wedding you will have and who will officiate it), but the idea was that you could order lots of items through the catalogs that you couldn't get through the normal shopping interface. But for now most of the wedding items are still in the build mode shopping catalog. The Simprov Wedding Playset video above walks through how to use most of the objects!
Also be sure to check out Donna's beautiful wedding beds, the luxurious buffet with ice dolphin sculpture, gold inlaid glass dining table, fancy dollhouses, elegant dolls, and many other premium objects identified as Simprov, SimBabes, and SimFreaks in their catalog descriptions.
The crowd sitter and the Dumbold voting machine are included in the collection. (Just kind of hard to find since there are so darn many objects!)
The Sims 1 Crowd Sitter
The Sims will forever be one of those magic games to me; one that inspired me to learn MAX to get my own items into the game, non-perspective rendering, sprites, z-buffer, iirc. I still play and work in 3D to this day, game modding has taught me the best way to interact with a computer... create vs. consume!
It has this quality that I'd describe as toy-like, you can pick it up in so many different ways and let your imagination fill in the experience.
Personally I'd spend weeks just building, paused, filling up my account §§§ as I need, ignoring my sims at the curb. Other times I'd give it an honest play-through roleplaying as myself in a different world. Eventually I'd be mean and lock my Sims in a- (maybe I'll not document my war-crimes today.)
I'd reinstall and build up a fancy house, but I fear it'd grab me like a Factorio drip and I'd disappear into the Sims for a month. I think I'll give this a read instead, I haven't done the design-document thing since I studied Game Design in college many moons ago.
Thanks so much for posting all the tidbits and insight into another true gem of a game.
It's super nice to see this random submission of mine ended up being a meeting point of sorts :) It is one of my favorite design documents, probably 'THE' one now that I think about it. Thanks for all the hard work put into the document -- or well, the game in general, still a favorite of mine.
The Sims is one of my all-time favorite games. Reading these documents have been such a surprising delight and are a huge dose of nostalgia for play this game in my childhood, but now (>20 years later) I have a huge respect for how well-thought out and absolutely massive the whole game is. I especially enjoyed the TheSimsDesignDocumentDraft3-DonsReview.doc writeup, such as the `Other game elements` section because it shows how daunting it is to do a life sim game like this and do it well. Thank you for sharing!
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
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):
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 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
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.
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.
[Reposting this thread here, because a GamerGate incel "FAAST" just tried to vandalize this discussion by posting an incoherent angry reply and flagged my comment as undermining his self-loathing homophobic ideology, so now you can read it without his ridiculous hate speech:]
I'm disappointed The Sims 1 wasn't included on that frightened angry list of "Woke Games" the GamerGate incels were circulating around!
This is a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 3, 8/7/98.
On page 5, he wrote the following comments about same sex relationships in the game:
>The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitly going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world’s population). It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other people.
This is a PDF file with a scan of the handwritten notes, and a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 5, 8/31/98.
On page 4, there is a section about Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships, which reflects Don's suggestion to change the design to support same sex relationships.
>Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships To be outlined in 9/30 Live Mode deliverable. Currently the game only allows heterosexual romance. This will not be the only type available – it just reflects the early stages of implementation. Will is reviewing the code and will make recommendations for how to implement homosexual romance as well.
This is a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 7, 10/2/98.
On page 21, there is a section (same as above) about Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships, which reflects Don's suggestion to change the design to support same sex relationships.
After discussing it with Patrick J. Barrett III, we've determined that the sequence of events that led to The Sims having same sex relationships: The initial prototype implementation did not support same sex relationships, and I noticed that, when I tried to have two women kiss, the would-be-kissee slapped the kisser. So I wrote up my opinion that it should support same sex relationships, instead of resulting in homophobic violence, and proposed a straw man 2-dimensional way of modeling it. Subsequent design documents said heterosexual romance would not be the only kind available, and that Will was reviewing the code and would make recommendations on how to implement it. Patrick was hired soon after that, and was set to task implementing some social interactions. But Will didn't get back to Patrick and the production database didn't reflect his opinion by the time Patrick started working on it. But Patrick implemented support for same sex relationships anyway, but not by explicitly modeling sexual preference as property of The Sims personality -- just as a behavior that was possible at any time for any character.
spondylosaurus 1 hour ago | parent | next [–]
And the Sims 1 live demo at E3 had two female sims unexpectedly kiss!
Which generated a lot of buzz for the game, as you might expect. Maybe it wouldn't have taken off without that publicity.
DonHopkins 42 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–]
Yes, the unplanned off-the-rails lesbian kiss at E3 generated some really great press coverage! And it was also soon after Columbine, when video games were getting a lot of unfair flack and blame for causing violence and school shootings, so people were really hurting for a non-violent gender inclusive video game, both for gamers to play and for the press to write about.
Here's a great video essay by Alex Avila, who deeply analyzes The Sims, and discusses "The Kiss". The YouTube comments are exceptionally amazing and heartwarming! (Well curated to eliminate the toxic slime from hateful GamerGate incels like FAAST, too.)
>It's no doubt The Sims is an influential video game. In this video essay, we're going to talk about its GAY influence, particularly the role it plays in queer people's identity development. Enjoy the presentation as we go over how the Sims influenced a generation in letting them live out their Tumblr dreams...
Just a few of the many comments:
Yes it did, I used to make wlw families in my Sims 2 games and make their homes lower than the ground level bc I thought it'd hide them from my parents
I DID SOMETHING LIKE THIS. I made the bedroom downstairs so when they slept, cuddled or whoohoo, my parents would not see.
Ah yes, fond memories of saving my gay in-game relationships on a separate memory card. And if that wasn’t enough good measure, being a psychopath and making my characters fight to reduce their social status back down to friends or enemies so that no one would see or suspect that they were ever married.
You were hardly made gay by the sims.
You were always gay.
The sims just help you discover it.
@tikimillie hey not trying to respond in a mean or hateful way, I’m pretty sure everyone commenting and the person who made the video know the sims didn’t make them gay, but it’s a joke based on anti lgbt people claiming stuff makes us gay, so this joke subverts that by claiming the thing that made us gay is a game we love.
My wife was a huge fan of The Sims and your video on its impact on sexual orientation made her laugh out loud. She would watch it over and over, always finding something new to enjoy. Though she is no longer with me, the memories of her laughter while watching your video will always be a source of comfort. Thank you for creating something that brought her so much joy. Rest in peace, my love.
I 100% made gay sims but the pattern actually started way earlier. When I was five had a pair of polly pockets who were "married" and lived in the same little pocket house. My parents thought this was very cute and were equally sweet (and completely unsurprised) when I came out 10 years later.
I was gay before but the Sims make me accept in who i am, because of how gay people in the game is treated as just normal people, it was so heart warming to see my two gay sims kiss each other in public without people harassing them
I remmeber playing my first sim game (3) alone at the age of 10 and my two characters, one rich old man and one surfer bro who started out as roommates, eventually fell in love and started cuddling on their own and at the time I was so unfamiliar with gay content in any of the media I consumed I remember being absolutely astonished that the game would let them do that at all. not in the angry reactionary way but in the "holy shit... they can just DO that????? and it's FINE???????!!!!" kind of way
When I came out to my sister, the very first thing she said to me was “……. Is that why all your Sims were gay?”
I'm one of those players that never had a problem with the sexuality system in The Sims. I never felt the need for labels, homophobia, queer history and such in my game. Equal for me was enough. More than enough, it was everything I wanted. No distinction means no hate. Everyone is normal and the same. I love queer history irl, but I long for a world where I don't need to label myself, to come out, to identify with a community and not with another. For me, not having to be different is freedom. As in, I can be as different and unique as I want, but it won't make a difference in how much people love me or hate me; I want walk down the street holding hand with my partner without people looking at us because we're not the pair they expect. Their indifference would mean the world to me. And The Sims gives me that. I don't want no labels, no hate, trauma in my game. Not the real life kind that is. Downloading extreme violence and ending families is a whole different story :)
Making my sim flirt with/date/kiss a female sim every day before quitting without saving so my parents wouldn’t find it and so it didn’t count is one of my gayest experiences
That reminds me a story of my childhood:
Me and my cousin playing the sims together.
Making two sims (me: a female, he: a male) and controlling them in turns.
My cousin controls his sim and gets him a girlfriend from some of the neighbor households.
Then he says: "Yay, I started dating her! And who are you going to date?".
And I answered, without a second thought: "I am going to steal your girlfriend".
He: "What? Is it even possible?"
Me: "Let's try and see."
And it worked, my sim successfully stole his sim's girlfriend.
That's how we discovered the sims can be gay. And how I discovered I prefer girls. So I quess The Sims made me gay? :D
When I was like 7 I used to play a psp sims game and saw the option for 2 same sex sims to get married, so I tried that and was surprised to see it wasn't like a weird insulting thing. When I showed it to my grandma she just confiscated the psp and hid it for actual years which was so confusing
I remember the first time I ever made gay happen in the Sims. As a kid I didn't know sex worked so I made my Sims adopt their children as I was unsure of how to make them have children naturally. I learnt much later by accident when 2 of my Sims were sharing the same bed and the option came up. So the next generation of my Sims family came along. Their offspring was a girl who had a friend throughout childhood who was also a girl. As they grew into teenagehood, I realised the option to do romantic interactions was there. I was really surprised. When I clicked on them I didn't think the two girls would actually kiss. I felt really hot all over, it was so exciting. I made them kiss over and over and over. I didn't know why this kiss felt different from all my other Sims kissing. Quickly, I started to feel guilty and embarrassed (I don't know why because my family have no issues with gay things, seeing as many members are gay themselves). I forced my sim to leave her girlfriend and marry a man so they could have children, because I was desperate to have biological children. My Sims were basically always gay as I got older and older. The Sims actually helped me to realise that I was apart of the lgbtq community myself even if I didn't know it yet.
as a bisexual sims fan, i view the lack of choosing an identity, and the "utopia" of existing without having to declare a label as something that was helpful to me. to see sims autonomously love each other despite that was one of the things that helped me realise that people having to come out is just strange. And as someone who loves queer history and understanding the oppression and suppression presently and in the past i think having a game where flirting with the opposite sex is the same as flirting with the same sex. it felt refreshing to other games i also like, such as stardew valley.
When we were 9 or 10 my best friend and I made an all-female prison and since we had heard that lesbians were bad people we made two prisoners kiss, it was supposed to be wrong but for some reason it felt more familiar to me than my sim self's life with a husband and kids. So I decided to give myself a girlfriend and see how I felt, I realized this is how I wanted my real life to be as well when I grew up. Unfortunately, my mom caught me and made me delete my gf and back in the closet I went.
I'm obsessed with how well this essay was put together. The background information laid a wonderful platform to build off of and put things into perspective, and then call back to as we went and were introduced to new information. Not only that, but it created a sense of tension that led up to and really paid off around the 30 minute mark when the mirror stage was brought up. That whole section brought all the other ideas talked about into a singular, clear focus and made a really compelling argument.
From the title before watching, I thought the video was going to talk about being able to discover your identity through a private experience with a game that allowed queer expression that you might not have seen/experienced before, but damn, it went in hard with the idea of queerness coming from innately within or from external societal ideology and has seriously made me rethink a bunch of things, past just the game and even past the subject of queerness.
Seriously, amazing job. I hope you got great marks for your school essays, because I'd bet my left foot you deserved them.
[These are just a few examples. There are many more great comments on the video!]
Can't reply directly to Don's comment because it has been flagged unfortunately. Do I read this correctly that you (Don) are responsible for allowing same-sex romantic interactions in The Sims? If yes, that's so cool! I played The Sims as a teenager and this feature really stood out to me!
I was the first one to suggest it, and sketched out a straw-man design, but Patrick implemented it himself with his own design, after the design document mentioned it was TBD, but before the production database specified a design.
My straw-man design suggested a two-dimensional representation in the character properties: male attraction and female attraction.
But Patrick's design was actually much better from a game play and exploratory experimental perspective: it didn't explicitly represent the character's sexual preference at all, just their relationships with each other, so it was all up to you to decided who to love and what to do at any given moment, and you could change your mind if you wanted.
Regardless of whether or not sexual preference is something that's set at birth or you can change it if you want to, all human beings deserve the right to love who they choose, and how they behave, just like you get to decide your favorite color or food regardless of whether you're born with that attraction and can change it or not.
In the debate about LGBTQ+ rights, it really doesn't matter whether or not sexual preference is innate, because human beings already have the right of freedom of choice, and deserve to love anyone they want, no matter if they can chose or change their sexual preference or not.
The bigoted arguments against gay rights and marriage based on the belief that sexual preference is a choice (which is pretty presumptuous of anybody who's not LGBTQ+ themselves to have an opinion about) don't matter at all. Nobody even really knows or understands how the human mind and body works enough to be sure, and it's different from person to person, and there are many factors at play, so why bake it into the game one way or the other?
So from a gameplay, family representation, and storytelling perspective, it was better not to explicitly represent sexual preference, and just let the players and Sims be free to love whoever they want. Like it should be in the real world.
>After discussing it with Patrick J. Barrett III, we've determined that the sequence of events that led to The Sims having same sex relationships: The initial prototype implementation did not support same sex relationships, and I noticed that, when I tried to have two women kiss, the would-be-kissee slapped the kisser. So I wrote up my opinion that it should support same sex relationships, instead of resulting in homophobic violence, and proposed a straw man 2-dimensional way of modeling it. Subsequent design documents said heterosexual romance would not be the only kind available, and that Will was reviewing the code and would make recommendations on how to implement it. Patrick was hired soon after that, and was set to task implementing some social interactions. But Will didn't get back to Patrick and the production database didn't reflect his opinion by the time Patrick started working on it. But Patrick implemented support for same sex relationships anyway, but not by explicitly modeling sexual preference as property of The Sims personality -- just as a behavior that was possible at any time for any character.
> So from a gameplay, family representation, and storytelling perspective, it was better not to explicitly represent sexual preference, and just let the players and Sims be free to love whoever they want. Like it should be in the real world.
Yes, the unplanned off-the-rails lesbian kiss at E3 generated some really great press coverage! And it was also soon after Columbine, when video games were getting a lot of unfair flack and blame for causing violence and school shootings, so people were really hurting for a non-violent gender inclusive video game, both for gamers to play and for the press to write about.
Here's a great video essay by Alex Avila, who deeply analyzes The Sims, and discusses "The Kiss". The YouTube comments are exceptionally amazing and heartwarming! (Well curated to eliminate the toxic slime from hateful GamerGate incels like FAAST, too.)
>It's no doubt The Sims is an influential video game. In this video essay, we're going to talk about its GAY influence, particularly the role it plays in queer people's identity development. Enjoy the presentation as we go over how the Sims influenced a generation in letting them live out their Tumblr dreams...
Just a few of the many comments:
Yes it did, I used to make wlw families in my Sims 2 games and make their homes lower than the ground level bc I thought it'd hide them from my parents
I DID SOMETHING LIKE THIS. I made the bedroom downstairs so when they slept, cuddled or whoohoo, my parents would not see.
Ah yes, fond memories of saving my gay in-game relationships on a separate memory card. And if that wasn’t enough good measure, being a psychopath and making my characters fight to reduce their social status back down to friends or enemies so that no one would see or suspect that they were ever married.
You were hardly made gay by the sims.
You were always gay.
The sims just help you discover it.
@tikimillie hey not trying to respond in a mean or hateful way, I’m pretty sure everyone commenting and the person who made the video know the sims didn’t make them gay, but it’s a joke based on anti lgbt people claiming stuff makes us gay, so this joke subverts that by claiming the thing that made us gay is a game we love.
My wife was a huge fan of The Sims and your video on its impact on sexual orientation made her laugh out loud. She would watch it over and over, always finding something new to enjoy. Though she is no longer with me, the memories of her laughter while watching your video will always be a source of comfort. Thank you for creating something that brought her so much joy. Rest in peace, my love.
I 100% made gay sims but the pattern actually started way earlier. When I was five had a pair of polly pockets who were "married" and lived in the same little pocket house. My parents thought this was very cute and were equally sweet (and completely unsurprised) when I came out 10 years later.
I was gay before but the Sims make me accept in who i am, because of how gay people in the game is treated as just normal people, it was so heart warming to see my two gay sims kiss each other in public without people harassing them
I remmeber playing my first sim game (3) alone at the age of 10 and my two characters, one rich old man and one surfer bro who started out as roommates, eventually fell in love and started cuddling on their own and at the time I was so unfamiliar with gay content in any of the media I consumed I remember being absolutely astonished that the game would let them do that at all. not in the angry reactionary way but in the "holy shit... they can just DO that????? and it's FINE???????!!!!" kind of way
When I came out to my sister, the very first thing she said to me was “……. Is that why all your Sims were gay?”
I'm one of those players that never had a problem with the sexuality system in The Sims. I never felt the need for labels, homophobia, queer history and such in my game. Equal for me was enough. More than enough, it was everything I wanted. No distinction means no hate. Everyone is normal and the same. I love queer history irl, but I long for a world where I don't need to label myself, to come out, to identify with a community and not with another. For me, not having to be different is freedom. As in, I can be as different and unique as I want, but it won't make a difference in how much people love me or hate me; I want walk down the street holding hand with my partner without people looking at us because we're not the pair they expect. Their indifference would mean the world to me. And The Sims gives me that. I don't want no labels, no hate, trauma in my game. Not the real life kind that is. Downloading extreme violence and ending families is a whole different story :)
Making my sim flirt with/date/kiss a female sim every day before quitting without saving so my parents wouldn’t find it and so it didn’t count is one of my gayest experiences
That reminds me a story of my childhood:
Me and my cousin playing the sims together.
Making two sims (me: a female, he: a male) and controlling them in turns.
My cousin controls his sim and gets him a girlfriend from some of the neighbor households.
Then he says: "Yay, I started dating her! And who are you going to date?".
And I answered, without a second thought: "I am going to steal your girlfriend".
He: "What? Is it even possible?"
Me: "Let's try and see."
And it worked, my sim successfully stole his sim's girlfriend.
That's how we discovered the sims can be gay. And how I discovered I prefer girls. So I quess The Sims made me gay? :D
When I was like 7 I used to play a psp sims game and saw the option for 2 same sex sims to get married, so I tried that and was surprised to see it wasn't like a weird insulting thing. When I showed it to my grandma she just confiscated the psp and hid it for actual years which was so confusing
I remember the first time I ever made gay happen in the Sims. As a kid I didn't know sex worked so I made my Sims adopt their children as I was unsure of how to make them have children naturally. I learnt much later by accident when 2 of my Sims were sharing the same bed and the option came up. So the next generation of my Sims family came along. Their offspring was a girl who had a friend throughout childhood who was also a girl. As they grew into teenagehood, I realised the option to do romantic interactions was there. I was really surprised. When I clicked on them I didn't think the two girls would actually kiss. I felt really hot all over, it was so exciting. I made them kiss over and over and over. I didn't know why this kiss felt different from all my other Sims kissing. Quickly, I started to feel guilty and embarrassed (I don't know why because my family have no issues with gay things, seeing as many members are gay themselves). I forced my sim to leave her girlfriend and marry a man so they could have children, because I was desperate to have biological children. My Sims were basically always gay as I got older and older. The Sims actually helped me to realise that I was apart of the lgbtq community myself even if I didn't know it yet.
as a bisexual sims fan, i view the lack of choosing an identity, and the "utopia" of existing without having to declare a label as something that was helpful to me. to see sims autonomously love each other despite that was one of the things that helped me realise that people having to come out is just strange. And as someone who loves queer history and understanding the oppression and suppression presently and in the past i think having a game where flirting with the opposite sex is the same as flirting with the same sex. it felt refreshing to other games i also like, such as stardew valley.
When we were 9 or 10 my best friend and I made an all-female prison and since we had heard that lesbians were bad people we made two prisoners kiss, it was supposed to be wrong but for some reason it felt more familiar to me than my sim self's life with a husband and kids. So I decided to give myself a girlfriend and see how I felt, I realized this is how I wanted my real life to be as well when I grew up. Unfortunately, my mom caught me and made me delete my gf and back in the closet I went.
I'm obsessed with how well this essay was put together. The background information laid a wonderful platform to build off of and put things into perspective, and then call back to as we went and were introduced to new information. Not only that, but it created a sense of tension that led up to and really paid off around the 30 minute mark when the mirror stage was brought up. That whole section brought all the other ideas talked about into a singular, clear focus and made a really compelling argument.
From the title before watching, I thought the video was going to talk about being able to discover your identity through a private experience with a game that allowed queer expression that you might not have seen/experienced before, but damn, it went in hard with the idea of queerness coming from innately within or from external societal ideology and has seriously made me rethink a bunch of things, past just the game and even past the subject of queerness.
Seriously, amazing job. I hope you got great marks for your school essays, because I'd bet my left foot you deserved them.
[These are just a few examples. There are many more great comments on the video!]
> [These are just a few examples. There are many more great comments on the video!]
Just FYI, in general people on this forum (and many others) _really_ don't appreciate a big wall of text; more so if the text is just a big paste from another source.
Funny you'd say that in a discussion of a whole directory full of gigantic walls of text. Other people posted replies thanking me for sharing the big walls of text, and I think most people prefer to have all the text and links curated, deduplicated, links checked and broken links updated to archive.org, and merged together in one place, instead of scattered around across many different pages with broken links.
It takes more than a few words to describe the contents of the half a gig compressed archive of Sims objects I posted a link to, and I think most people would want to have some idea what was in it, installation instructions, and links to videos demonstrating how to use it, before downloading it.
This is a wonderful trove of historical and contextual material. I had moved on to other interests by the time The Sims was released, but I remember thinking it had broken some interesting barriers in gaming. I just wanted to thank you for being so generous with your knowledge and experiences. This has been a really fascinating rabbit hole to dive into.
Thank you for the kind feedback and encouragement!
I'd love to write a book, but it's an enormous investment of time and effort, so I write about it here off and on when I can. I'm working on collecting it all and publishing it in a blog in my rare spare time.
Chaim Gingold wrote an excellent tour-de-force book all about Building SimCity, which he invested many years in, and I can only dream and aspire to write something as deep and comprehensive as that, but writing on Hacker News and collecting it in blog will have to do for now.
Check out the Hacker News discussion about Chaim's book, where he popped in and answered questions:
Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machine (mitpress.mit.edu)
440 points by jarmitage 8 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 168 comments
Hi! I wrote this book. Ask me anything. I also was a designer on Spore. I'm also trying to feed my 8 month old lunch and he is very excited to asn``wer anything too.
Micropolis Web is the browser based version of Micropolis (open source SimCity), that uses WebAssembly, WebGL, and SvelteKit. Based on the original SimCity Classic code, designed by Will Wright, ported by Don Hopkins. This first demo shows an early version that runs the WebAssembly simulator and animates the tiles with WebGL, but most of the user interface is still a work in progress.
Micropolis Web is the browser based version of Micropolis (open source SimCity), that uses WebAssembly, WebGL, and SvelteKit. Based on the original SimCity Classic code, designed by Will Wright, ported by Don Hopkins. This first video has music by Juho Hietala, Blamstrain, and the Space Inventory Cellular Automata is performed by Don Hopkins.
When I was a teenager I wrote an e-mail to Jerry Martin, the composer, to ask him various questions I had about the music. He actually send me a very nice and helpful reply!
I listen to this soundtrack while working, been doing it for years. Recently my wife started playing the remaster and now I feel my adrenaline spiking when I hear the music lol
The mood change between Build Mode and Buy Mode is genius. Build always felt tranquil, almost contemplative, whereas Buy was exactly the kind of peppy music that makes you want to spend your hard-earned (or in my case, hard-cheated) simoleons.
Wow, incredible. Reading these brings back so many memories. I remember spending so many hours in architecture mode designing houses, reading these makes me realize how well designed the whole thing was.
These design documents are incredibly rich. I would love to work at a place that had such clarity and vision before sitting down to actually write software…
Thanks for sharing! So great to learn more about this iconic game. Just recently there was a discussion about the Video Game History Foundation library — this feels like it could be a nice addition to it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42926076
Remember how the players were totally freaking out that their Sims were dropping dead due to them not taking good care of the guinea pig? (Not that the cause/effect relationship was at all obvious!) It was the first downloadable object for The Sims, with an actual communicable deadly virus! I think that was one of Will's twisted ideas.
Soon afterwards, we issued a downloadable painting of a guinea pig that would immunize your whole family against the deadly Guinea Pig Virus. Kind of the opposite of the tragic clown painting, which if you looked at it would summon that poor depressing sad clown character to torment your family. (Another of Will's twisted ideas, if I recall.)
>A basic Primer and stories from the Crypt on the animation of The Sims PC Game of the Year from the year 2000. Two years of heavy toil, fear of cancellation, game industry politics, real & artificial personalities, and Silly Little Computer People. How we provided scads of content over a very short amount of time to help make millions of people happy. Using old techniques of acting to give life to artificial beings. What was at the core of a phenomenon when it came to building the style and the substance of a something special. The Sims, The Sims PC, OG Sims, 24th Anniversary, Will Wright, Maxis, Electronic Arts, TS1, The Sims 1, irk, animation, fun, joke, whimsy, Eric Hedman
irk says, the Sims Livin' Large is special. for many reasons.
> This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997. [...] This code is a interesting example of game design, programming and prototyping techniques. The Sims code has certainly
changed a lot since Will wrote this original prototype code. For example, there is no longer any "stress" motive.
I can’t be the only one who is a little bummed that Will basically disappeared after Spore turned out not to be everything he hoped it would be. And now he’s old enough to be retired, and I have little hope of him doing a Miyazaki and coming out of retirement multiple times for good premises.
Oxygen Not Included, Rimworld, and City Skylines have all occupied niches that used to be his to rule.
>Little Computer People is often compared to an early predecessor to The Sims game series.[12][11] When asked about its influence, Crane responded that "Almost everything we touched in those days could be constructed as the precursor to something on the market today. So rather than go there, I simple acknowledge that I took the first baby steps toward the simulation genre when I added human-like interactivity to Little Computer People."[12] Will Wright, designer of The Sims, has mentioned playing Little Computer People and receiving valuable feedback on The Sims from its designer, Rich Gold.[23]
Will Wright: A chat about the "The Sims" and "SimCity", January 20, 2000, CNN:
>Question from MaxSteele: Will, did you ever play "Little Computer People Research Project" from Activision, and did it influence you at all?
>Will Wright: Yes, a long time ago. I've since gotten to know several people who were involved with that project, and many of them gave valuable feedback on The Sims, especially Rich Gold.
>Question from Dan: Can Sims express their sexuality?
>Will Wright: To a degree. We have different levels of romantic involvement. At the highest you see very passionate kissing, sharing of the hot tub naked, sharing a bed together, and sharing of the bathrooms with no modesty.
>But as I said we wanted to keep the game accessible to kids. The Sims make babies by very passionate kissing.
>Question from Pinky: Is homosexuality addressed in the Sims?
>Will Wright: We wanted players to be able to roughly model their own family structures whenever possible. So we allow the players to develop homosexual relationships in the game, though they won't happen automatically unless the player is directing it in that direction.
The awesome recent indie game "TinyLife" is even Little Computer Peoplier than The Sims 1! It takes it the opposite direction of The Sims 4, with a beautiful retro pixelated 8 bit graphics style.
>@TinyLifeGame by @Ellpeck is an awesome indie game that's a retro pixel graphics deeply moddable modern re-interpretation of The Sims 1, but is also highly unique with its own style, and stands on its own, with a mesmerizing soundtrack by @leissMusic !
It blows my mind that one person could accomplish all that (he says it’s a labor of love). And I really like the retro 8-bit pixel art style. The music is also top quality, listenable to for hours. And it even allows plug-in user created content, which was essential for the success and popularity and longevity of The Sims! I can’t wait to see how it develops over time.
This is a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 3, 8/7/98.
On page 5, he wrote the following comments about same sex relationships in the game:
>The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitly going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world’s population). It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other people.
This is a PDF file with a scan of the handwritten notes, and a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 5, 8/31/98.
On page 4, there is a section about Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships, which reflects Don's suggestion to change the design to support same sex relationships.
>Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships
To be outlined in 9/30 Live Mode deliverable.
Currently the game only allows heterosexual romance. This will not be the only type available – it just reflects the early stages of implementation. Will is reviewing the code and will make recommendations for how to implement homosexual romance as well.
This is a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 7, 10/2/98.
On page 21, there is a section (same as above) about Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships, which reflects Don's suggestion to change the design to support same sex relationships.
After discussing it with Patrick J. Barrett III, we've determined that the sequence of events that led to The Sims having same sex relationships: The initial prototype implementation did not support same sex relationships, and I noticed that, when I tried to have two women kiss, the would-be-kissee slapped the kisser. So I wrote up my opinion that it should support same sex relationships, instead of resulting in homophobic violence, and proposed a straw man 2-dimensional way of modeling it. Subsequent design documents said heterosexual romance would not be the only kind available, and that Will was reviewing the code and would make recommendations on how to implement it. Patrick was hired soon after that, and was set to task implementing some social interactions. But Will didn't get back to Patrick and the production database didn't reflect his opinion by the time Patrick started working on it. But Patrick implemented support for same sex relationships anyway, but not by explicitly modeling sexual preference as property of The Sims personality -- just as a behavior that was possible at any time for any character.
Even if there were legitimate grievances, the ends most certainly do not justify the means. "An embarrassment" would be my most charitable label for that debacle. If I'm being completely honest? I think it did real societal harm to young men who didn't know any better, and real harm to the unfortunate targets of its spiteful, misguided vitriol.
Yes, really. It's a fair and accurate take. GamerGate's reasons were pure misogyny and homophobia and hatred and harassment and bullying, and you're incredibly naive and ignorant and gullible to think otherwise.
Obviously the misogyny and hatred appeal to GamerGate bigots and incels like you, because you're broken, hateful, frustrated, mentally ill people, but it's well documented that GamerGate's reasons were anything but good, and their mission was the opposite of noble, and there's a extremely valid reason women don't want to sleep or even speak or work with you or any of the other frustrated angry incels who were involved in GamerGate: because you're totally disconnected from reality, toxic, and abusive, as well as flabbergastingly gullible, as you've just demonstrated here today.
Thanks for crawling out from under your rock and proving my point with your own words (as well as your pathetically hateful HN posting history, which anyone can view with showdead=true to see what kind of a person you really are), but don't blame "woke games" for your inability to get laid or your self hatred and conspicuous lashing out due to internalized homophobia. It's all on you, and obvious to everyone but you.
IntelBrief: Incels and the Gaming-Radicalization Nexus:
In a landmark case, an Ohio man – Tres Genco – became the first “incel” to be convicted of a federal hate crime in the U.S. last month and was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison.
While there are incel-specific games, incels play various non-incel-themed games, and misogyny is deeply embedded in the gaming community.
The susceptibility to extremist ideologies is partly facilitated by “identity fusion,” where individuals’ personal and gaming identities become increasingly interlaced.
Considering market predictions of the increasing popularity of virtual reality headsets and the proliferation of AI applications in almost every digital product, extremist content could become more immersive, automated, and efficient, requiring less manpower for greater reach.
In a landmark case, an Ohio man became the first “incel” to be convicted of a federal hate crime in the U.S. last month and was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison. Tres Genco, a self-described “incel,” or “involuntarily celibate,” had reportedly planned to commit a mass shooting targeting women at an Ohio university campus. Incels define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one and tend to harness extreme resentment. His manifesto, which he wrote in August 2019, stated that he hated women and that he would “slaughter out of hatred, jealousy, and revenge.” Although the plot was never carried out and Genco was arrested in 2021, prosecutors believed he intended to carry out the plans fully.
Many incels, including Genco, frequent bespoke online forums which thematically focus on their experiences as incels, “blackpilling” each other, and promoting misogynistic views. Numerous incels who committed violent attacks against women were active on these forums prior to their assaults. The Black Pill philosophy common on these forums emerged as a counterpoint to the Red Pill ideology within the manosphere – a variety of often interconnected websites, blogs, and online forums that promote misogyny, masculinity, and an opposition to feminism. Initially driven by incels conducting pseudoscientific experiments to prove that dating was only viable for exceptionally attractive men, Black Pill adherents often entertain suicidal or violent thoughts, viewing it as the only escape from their perceived isolation, particularly from women. However, the radicalization of incels is not limited to forums in the manosphere. Gaming and gaming adjacent platforms such as Discord, Steam, Twitch, and DLive, are also hotbeds for incels to connect and promote their narratives. According to research by the Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) in 2021, incels use gaming adjacent platforms to “connect to each other via private servers to communicate but also share potentially harmful content.”
While there are incel-specific games, including "Incel: The Game," and "Dark Hero Party,” incels play various non-incel themed games and are deeply embedded in the gaming community. In addition to traditional gaming, participants in online incel forums also discuss playing sex simulation games, a form of degrading, violent, and interactive pornographic content. The misogynist subculture in gaming is not a novel phenomenon. The misogynistic harassment campaign Gamergate shows one extreme example of the misogyny-gaming nexus and its considerable offline impact. This decentralized but coordinated harassment campaign – attributed largely to right-wing male gamers – targeted women in the video game industry and led to doxing, death threats, swatting attempts, and threats of sexual violence. Incels are not the only online community deeply intertwined with gaming culture, various extremists including those adhering to accelerationism, antisemitism, white supremacy, and other various ideologies on the far-right are intertwined in this culture. According to studies of this phenomenon, it is the formation of tight-knit communities within gaming spaces that can facilitate the socialization processes conducive to radicalization, especially when high levels of misogyny, toxicity, or unmoderated extremist content characterize these communities. In a study by Rachel Kowert, Alexi Martel, and William B. Swann, the susceptibility to extremist ideologies is found to be in-part facilitated by “identity fusion,” where individuals' personal and gaming identities become increasingly interlaced.
Moreover, the tight-knit nature of gaming communities, coupled with an environment where members often try to “one up” or "outbid" one another, can also lead to security risks, even when there is a seeming lack of motivation by extremist ideology. Jack Teixeira, a 22-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, pleaded guilty in early March for carrying out what is believed to be one of the most serious U.S. national security breaches in recent years. Teixeira leaked classified military documents over the course of a few months to a closed online community in Discord under the username “TheExcaliburEffect” - allegedly to impress a group of friends on the platform who bonded over gaming and guns. The leaked documents held highly classified information, including a range of documents from details on troop movements in Ukraine to Israel’s Mossad spy agency. Although Teixeira’s motivations for leaking the documents seem to be linked to a desire to impress his online community, the reported presence of racist and xenophobic memes and jokes in the closed-channel he was a part of on Discord demonstrates the interconnected and overlapping nature of specific extremist ideologies and online communities.
Gaming is an inherently multisensory, immersive experience that, when riddled with violence or slanted by an extremist ideology, can be more impactful than a simple propaganda text or image in the radicalization process. According to a report by the UN Counter-Terrorism Centre (UNCCT) on the intersection between gaming and violent extremism, simulations created by extremists in otherwise neutral games like The Sims and Minecraft allow players to experience the Christchurch massacre from the shooter’s perspective. Meanwhile, in Roblox, a system that allows users to program and play games created by themselves or other users, extremists have created “white ethnostates”. Christian Picciolini, a former white supremacist, has explained how far-right extremists use popular games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Call of Duty to recruit and radicalize marginalized youth experiencing social isolation. Additionally, in games that aren’t aligned with any particular extremist ideology, recruiters try to leverage the game characters in analogies to ease the target into the extremist ideology. Extremist groups across the ideological spectrum have been known to produce their own video games to present their ideology in an engaging and immersive format. For instance, Islamic State released custom-made content for games like Grand Theft Auto V and military simulators such as Arma 3, allowing players to re-enact acts of terrorism or take up arms as virtual ISIS insurgents. Hezbollah has also created games in which players can experience fighting against the Israeli Defense Forces or ISIS.
The rise in hateful rhetoric within online gaming communities, including antisemitic and Islamophobic hate speech, suggests that gaming spaces can reflect broader societal trends and sometimes serve as a medium for the spread of extremist ideologies. Considering market predictions of the increasing popularity of virtual reality headsets, especially among gamers, and the proliferation of AI applications in almost every digital product, extremist content could become more immersive and more automated, and efficient, requiring less manpower for greater reach. The notion of AI-driven game characters capable of enticing, radicalizing, and indoctrinating individuals is not merely speculative; it presents a realistic possibility in today's technologically advanced landscape.
Don, I just wanted to say it's unfortunate your comments about Gamergate were flagged and then unflagged. That shouldn't have happened. I appreciate you for shedding light on the whole Gamergate scandal and making sure the truth is heard. It's so sad to see people continue to outright lie about what happened.
As for your other comments on this post, it's a real treat getting to read some inside baseball about The Sims! Much love!
If you want to download all quickly:
curl -s https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/ | \ grep -o 'href="[^"]"' | \ cut -d'"' -f2 | \ while read -r file; do # Skip parent directory and query strings if [[ $file != "../" && $file != "?"* ]]; then echo "Downloading $file" curl -O "https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/$file" fi done
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