Did you know one of the biggest gaming franchises was molded in a new way because of….ants?
New York Times talked with the creator of The Sims, Will Wright, which expressed his interest in ants is actually what crafted the diabolical actions of Sims. Which fits perfectly in the timeline considering the first game he was working on was indeed SimAnt, so it makes sense why he was studying them so closely.
It all started when his house burned down in 1991, and upon returning he noticed the only thing left alive were Ants, which had burrowed into the ground. Ants are very straight forward creatures, going directly to their needs and not escaping much outside of that. Meanwhile he was left slowly rebuilding his life, aspiring to obtain objects and making mistakes along the way.
This is why when The Sims were first programmed, simply transferring over the data from SimAnt wasn’t the best idea. The code made the original Sims too good at their own game.
“In early versions of the game, the autonomy was too good,” Wright said. “Almost anything the player did was worse than the Sims running on autopilot.”
Similar to an actual human, the developers had to give each Sim multiple variations of options to choose from, but the game was too smart at fulfilling needs and ignoring others. If a Sim was hungry, it knew where the fridge was. Tired? Bed. And having all these things in a home projected safety for the Sim. But that all changed when the developers had to purposely make the Sims more humanlike.
This meant that if a Sim had multiple needs at once, they would then quickly prioritize an action over another, and often ignored certain needs to prioritize wants. This is how Sims started to wet themselves or cause disasters in their own homes. The longer you left a Sim alone, the worse things got. If you played the original Sims you know this meant that if you left them alone for some time, your house would likely burn down at some point too.
In follow up titles the developers found ways to have the AI make better overall logical choices, while still having opportunity for mistakes. For example eating after cooking a meal, instead of some other distraction. It also meant fine tuning wants and needs to create a more balanced approach to the game.
But it is interesting that thanks to Ants, our Sims somehow got dumber.
