RafaelFajardo

FEED: We’re clearly still a few steps away from games where spontaneous behavior really starts to happen and you have real learning going on with the virtual characters. But were there cases with The Sims where you pressed play and the characters really surprised you with their behavior?

WRIGHT: A lot of stuff, yeah. Probably the strangest thing was how smart they were. I mean — overly so, in a problematic way. We came up with this algorithm where they could kind of sense their environment; they could sense their internal state and they could decide, “Okay, what would maximize my happiness the most right now?” And in fact, the algorithm ended up being way too good. So in fact, we had to dumb them down quite a bit: We made them rather irrational and we had the personality values figure in much higher in their decision-making process than it did at first.