Someone is Killing All the Sims

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Tim O'Reilly
Apr. 28, 2000 03:06 PM
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Rob Glaser forwarded a pointer to John Markoff's latest NY Times story with the mail header "Markoff is God (or maybe Will Wright is)."

The story begins: "Imagine a computer game in which you follow all the rules, but your characters still die, because someone has introduced a virus into the game. Not only that, but the person who invented the game is the one who is distributing the virus."

OK, John, take it from there! This is the coolest story I've seen in years, like something out of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, slightly unsettling but exhilarating, bearing a breath of the future through a crack in the door.

When I was in college, I heard a talk by Norman Mailer, of which I remember nothing but one memorable passage, which went something like this: "People confuse evil and wicked, which really have nothing to do with each other. Evil is doing something you know is wrong. Wicked is upping the ante without knowing the consequences."

This doesn't correspond to any dictionary definition of the term "wicked"; it is in fact itself a "wicked" act, changing the definition of a word in a way that twists its meaning away from its history but towards some new truth. Mailer's redefinition of wicked is definitely the right word for what Will Wright has done to his Sims. This is performance art of the highest measure, and inspired leap that introduces the randomness of real life into the artificial world of a game, and by doing so, takes the game to a new level. We seek refuge in games because they mimic life, but have rules that we can master. While the new viral rules infecting Sims can also be mastered, the game evolves not just through the actions of the player, but also through additions that may come from many directions.

It seems to me that as we spend more and more time online, interacting with each other through virtual means, that the world of games and the world of real life have more and more in common. There are dismaying downsides to this evolution, documented in Steve Talbott's classic The Future Does Not Compute. But there are also fascinating upsides.

By introducing surprise and evolution into a computer game, Will Wright has brought it closer to the real world. But by "breaking the frame" he also gives us new perspective on the way that we constrain ourselves in the real world. What are the rules that we rely on? How can we learn those rules when they keep changing on us? Where do they come from, and what can we do about it?

He's also giving us a very powerful look at the world ahead. Certain events are bellwethers, harbingers of things to come. This seems to me to be one of them, a suggestion of the way that our "real" and "virtual" worlds are going to become increasingly entangled.

I guess in the end, I'm also fascinated because this suggests that the computer game is evolving to the point where it can be thought of as an art form, with all the ability of art to surprise us, and to change the way we think.

Bravo!

(P.S. For more on surprise being part of the magic of art, see Robert Bly's wonderful little book, Leaping Poetry.)

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to Foo Camps ("Friends of O'Reilly" Camps, which gave rise to the "un-conference" movement), O'Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the Gov 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Expo. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar, "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim's long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. In addition to O'Reilly Media, Tim is a founder of Safari Books Online, a pioneering subscription service for accessing books online, and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early-stage venture firm.

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