{"id":50088,"date":"2018-09-24T21:14:00","date_gmt":"2018-09-24T21:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/327165"},"modified":"2018-09-24T21:14:00","modified_gmt":"2018-09-24T21:14:00","slug":"archiving-will-wrights-early-design-notes-for-the-sims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/09\/24\/archiving-will-wrights-early-design-notes-for-the-sims\/","title":{"rendered":"Archiving Will Wright&#8217;s early design notes for The Sims"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Strong Museum\u00a0of Play in Rochester, New York is home to a massive archive of video game history including design documents and sketches from\u00a0<em>The Sims<\/em>\u00a0creator Will Wright, offering\u00a0a glimpse\u00a0into the early stages of creating a long-standing franchise.<\/p>\n<p>Museum\u00a0director Jon-Paul Dyson and archivist Julia Novakovic\u00a0spoke with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gameinformer.com\/exclusive-video\/2018\/09\/21\/the-sims-unseen-design-docs-revealing-gamings-history\">Game Informer<\/a>\u00a0recently to showcase Wright&#8217;s design notebook, providing commentary for certain pages and giving\u00a0context to why his notes are so important to gaming&#8217;s history.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The interesting thing that you see with Will, with these notebooks, is that he&#8217;s all over the place,&#8221; Dyson points out.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You might have some snatches of code, there are random lists of things, there are schematic diagrams&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re seeing just specific key words that he&#8217;s going to use for programming, maybe some ideas for verbs or characteristics of things, and then you&#8217;ll also see his grocery list,&#8221; Novakovic\u00a0adds.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They&#8217;re not systematic,&#8221; he explains, pointing to a section labeled <em>Lessons<\/em>, implying that this portion of the notebook may have been a post-mortem. &#8220;He might jump back and forth between journals.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Dyson also talks a little about the importance of archiving design notebooks like Wright&#8217;s, noting that the preservation of these materials is crucial when looking back at how popular games were conceived.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The full interview goes into more detail about Wright&#8217;s notebook and <em>The Sims<\/em>,\u00a0be sure to watch the entire video over at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gameinformer.com\/exclusive-video\/2018\/09\/21\/the-sims-unseen-design-docs-revealing-gamings-history\">Game Informer<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/archiving-will-wrights-early-design-notes-for-the-sims.png\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Strong Museum\u00a0of Play in Rochester, New York is home to a massive archive of video game history including design documents and sketches from\u00a0The Sims\u00a0creator Will Wright, offering\u00a0a glimpse\u00a0into the early stages of creating a long-standing franchise. Museum\u00a0director Jon-Paul Dyson and archivist Julia Novakovic\u00a0spoke with Game Informer\u00a0recently to showcase Wright&#8217;s design notebook, providing commentary for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50089,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}