{"id":96949,"date":"2019-07-19T18:59:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-19T18:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/347025"},"modified":"2019-07-19T18:59:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-19T18:59:00","slug":"a-look-at-the-sims-1-design-docs-and-a-devs-argument-for-including-same-sex-romance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/07\/19\/a-look-at-the-sims-1-design-docs-and-a-devs-argument-for-including-same-sex-romance\/","title":{"rendered":"A look at The Sims 1 design docs, and a dev’s argument for including same-sex romance"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Sims <\/em>programmer Don Hopkins has uploaded a smattering of design documents<\/a> from the development of that first influential life simulation game, an upload shared by Phil Salvador on Twitter<\/a> that both sheds light on the evolution of the game\u2019s core elements and captures some of the back-and-forth that preceded the inclusion of same-sex romances in the 2000 game.<\/p>\n

The Sims<\/em> has spawned a prolific series of management games that task players with building enthrallingly mundane lives for digital families, and Hopkins\u2019 documents offer fellow game developers a look at some of the early conversations and design decisions the team had to make to get the series off the ground.<\/p>\n

Those familiar with the game might recognize some of the basic doodles would later inform the game’s UI, or notice that some of the decisions discussed in the design document aren\u2019t reflected in the final release of The Sims<\/em>, (or even eventually showed up later on in the series as recently as 2014’s The Sims 4<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the document also adds another layer to the story of how same-sex romances landed in the decades-old game. That tale emerged back around The Sims 4<\/em>‘s release, with programmer Patrick J. Barrett III telling The New Yorker<\/a> that the actual implementation in The Sims 1 <\/em>was more or less unintended, since Barrett was going off of an older design document from before same-sex romances had been vetoed over worries of controversy.<\/p>\n

In snippets from the design documents Hopkins shared to his website, he passionately advocates for their inclusion in The Sims<\/em>. He argues that the previous version of romance in-game is \u201cheterosexist and monosexist,\u201d and having a sim\u2019s default response to a same-sex advance be a slap was \u201ca somewhat violent negative interaction” that was “clearly homophobic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt 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,\u201d reads the document. \u201cAnyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn\u2019t realize it since they\u2019re projecting their homophobia onto other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hopkins\u2019 website points out that the version of same-sex romance he outlined in the document wasn\u2019t the version that actually made it into the game. His pitch had been to assign each sim\u2019s sexual orientation on a 0-100 scale, including monosexual heterosexual, monosexual homosexual, bisexual, nonsexual, and \u201call shades in between.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks to that aforementioned oversight, the version implemented in the final game was much more straightforward than that.<\/p>\n

“Subsequent design documents said heterosexual romance would not be the only kind available, and that Will [Wright] 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. 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<\/em> personality — just as a behavior that was possible at any time for any character.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Sims programmer Don Hopkins has uploaded a smattering of design documents from the development of that first influential life simulation game, an upload shared by Phil Salvador on Twitter that both sheds light on the evolution of the game\u2019s core elements and captures some of the back-and-forth that preceded the inclusion of same-sex romances in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96950,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96949","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\/96949","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=96949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}