Ray Mazza's Website

In The Sims 3, we made many additions and improvements to the lovable and quirky beings we call Sims. By far, my favorite of those is our character traits system, and I know I’m not alone – it has captured the hearts and minds of our players, too – often even more than our largest feature: the seamless, living neighborhood. So I wanted to describe the thinking that led us to the traits design, and some of the interesting choices and observations we made along the way.

First, a little background. In The Sims and The Sims 2, personalities were chosen on a ten-point scale along five different personality characteristics:

In The Sims, personality affected the choices a Sim made on their own, affected rates of skill gain, and also altered the speed a Sim’s needs would deplete. For example, a Sim with a high playful score would have their fun drop quickly, causing the Sim to do more fun things than normal.

In The Sims 2, we expanded the system to add special behaviors for specific ranges of personality. The 0-3 range was considered “low” and 8-10 points was considered “high.” Both came with unique animations and interactions for the Sims. Anything in between (4-7 points) was considered neutral, and usually did not have any special animations or interactions. For  example:

The problem we found as we were implementing personalities on The Sims 2 was that we couldn’t reasonably create enough special animation and interaction content to make each notch of the 0-10 scale feel interesting.

Additionally, players didn’t understand that there would only be a nominal difference between, say, a 2-point and a 3-point Sloppy Sim, but a huge difference between a 3-point Sloppy Sim and a 4-point Sloppy Sim. We didn’t make that clear in the UI, so players had to learn this from strategy guides and Sims wikis.

Around the time we began designing The Sims 3, I’d been reading a lot about screenwriting, and noticed that in screenplays, characters often have a few glaringly distinct traits. There’s no fuzziness about them:

We used this approach as inspiration on The Sims 3, and developed a philosophy of doing away with the continuous aspect of personality. Instead, we wanted to take the extremes from The Sims 2 and package that fun content into discrete bundles of behavior, which we dubbed Traits.

Now, how would we begin to figure out which traits we wanted? One of the first days we brainstormed traits, my boss called me into his office (Matt Brown, now of Blizzard). Quirky genius that he was, he sat me down and pointed to his monitor, which was littered with personal ads and dating websites. The idea was to see exactly how people described themselves. People said things like the following, which are from real personal ads:

If you play The Sims 3, you’ll notice some of these from the game with slightly altered names: Loves the Outdoors, Hopeless Romantic, Athletic, Friendly, and Loner. And although Mid Life Crisis didn’t make sense as a trait, we used it as a lifetime happiness reward which could be used to swap traits mid-game.

Then we locked the design team in a room and made a list of the interesting characters we knew from TV, movies, and books. We filled entire whiteboards with names, then scrawled the prominent traits of those characters in any whitespace we could find. Due to the wonders of technology, I was able to dig up a piece of one of those brainstorms. I know it looks like we had an angry chimp scribbling these down, but hey… it’s hard to keep a chimp happy all the time:

In the end, a handful of fun traits in The Sims 3 were inspired by some of our favorite characters. Here are four:

As we fleshed out the designs for the rest of the game, we continued to add traits that enhanced the gameplay of those systems.

As we designed Fishing Skill, we added the Angler trait – these Sims are natural fishers and have lots of fun while fishing. When designing Gardening Skill, we added Green Thumb – these Sims are great at gardening, and can even revive dead plants. And as we developed the food system, we added Vegetarian – these Sims get special versions of recipes, like Tofu Dogs, and they enjoy longer lives… but be careful: force them to eat, and they’ll start throwing up (players always enjoy new ways to torture their Sims!).

Then, there were some traits that were hard to agree upon. Do we want them? Do they fit the “Sims” style? Do they provide enough value? Here are the stories of three troubling traits:

Clumsy. These Sims drop food, trip over their feet, tumble into pools, and generally lack coordination. The trouble with Clumsy was that it had no gameplay value. Some designers wondered why anyone would pick a trait that had no benefits. On the other hand, the argument was that Clumsy would be worth it just for the humor and storytelling aspects. In the end, we shipped it, and many players loved it, often saying that they themselves were clumsy, and so they felt a special attachment to it.

Eventually, we had a list of over 100 traits. Far too many. It would have been overwhelming for players, and too much to implement. First, we ruthlessly cut the weakest traits. That left us with traits that we liked, but many of them didn’t have enough gameplay, or were too similar. This led us to “The Great Merge,” where we combined a lot of our proposed traits into fewer, stronger traits with more gameplay. This eventually got us to The Sims 3’s shipping set of 63 traits.

For example:

 

We limit each Sim to a maximum of 5 traits. Early in pre-production, this wasn’t the case. We originally had a system where each trait had a point value, and the player had points to spend. Positive traits cost points, but negative traits returned points as an incentive to pick them, thereby allowing players to choose many traits as long as they balanced negatives with positives. But we quickly realized this approach was far too geeky and inhuman for a Sims game.

Next, we tried removing the points, and just letting players pick to their heart’s content. And that’s just what people tended to do – pick lots of traits. There’s a reason movie characters only have a few big traits – too many and it waters down their identity. We found the same thing happening in our prototype. Ultimately, we settled on a maximum of 5 as a number that was still large enough to give virtually unlimited interesting combinations, yet was small enough that each trait felt like a meaningful choice.

Also, it’s easy for players to remember 5 traits, as opposed to 7 or 10 or more. When a player can remember a Sim’s traits easily, they are more likely to change their play style in accordance with those traits – e.g. My Sim is a Virtuoso, I should practice guitar today or play in the park for tips! That’s the kind of trait-based motivation we want to see!

We settled on this number even before production. You can see the space is limited to 5 trait slots in this screenshot of our 2D prototype. Testing these variations in our prototype saved us plenty of UI re-work we would have had to do if we’d learned these lessons later in production:

And in the final game, it looks like this:

 

We wanted to emphasize character, so we considered having traits as the very first part of Sim creation, even before the appearance of the Sim. It was a well-intentioned, but ultimately doomed idea.

We quickly learned that most players don’t even think about the internal character of their Sims until they can see the visual character. If we gave them a random Sim and opened up the traits panel, they wouldn’t pay attention to the traits – they’d feel like they needed to change the look of that Sim first.

In the end, we ordered Create-A-Sim from the most prominent physical characteristics to the least (first gender, weight, & skin tone; then hair; then face & makeup; then clothing) followed by traits. It’s interesting to note that the hair step is even before face; this is because hair makes such a huge difference in visually defining a Sim – more than setting any aspect of a Sim’s face (especially from a larger viewing distance).

Here are the top 4 traits:

A whopping 8% of created Sims have the Friendly trait -- yes, 8% is a considered high when there are 63+ traits to choose from, and not all Sims leave Create-A-Sim with 5 traits (younger ages get fewer). Almost as many Sims have Athletic, Great Kisser, or Family Oriented. I love the uplifting message this sends about our Simmers – our community idealizes  positive, wholesome qualities in humanity! (With a little smooching tossed in.)

Here are the 4 least popular traits:

It’s no surprise that the negative traits were the least popular. Unflirty was chosen less than 0.25% of the time. After seeing this data, I often get the question about whether we should have not had negative traits. After all, what was their use if so few people pick them?

There are a few good reasons. First, they are necessary to create a diverse and challenging set of personalities for the NPCs in the town. If everyone was easy to flirt with, what fun would that be? So there’s the occasional Unflirty Sim to throw a wrench in things.

Second, they can be useful in describing people we know and want to make.

Third, it allows advanced players to create more interesting challenges. Try the Legacy Challenge with a Sim who Dislikes Children, is a Loner, and Insane!

And as much as possible, we tried to add benefits to the negative traits in case players decided to check them out. For example, an Unlucky Sim may burn her home down more often and get the short stick in life, but if she dies by accident or malpractice, the Grim Reaper will feel sorry for the poor Sim and resurrect her.

The movement from an analog personality system to discrete bundles of behavior gave us and players a creative toolbox to make millions of inspiring, deep, dramatic, and entertaining characters. 

And they are The Sims.

I’ll know I’ve made it as a game designer when…

… growing up, I design games that aren’t much fun, but I have a great time doing it.

… I eventually make an amateur game that people enjoy.

… I drop out of school to become a game designer.

… I beg to be a design intern and I tell companies I’ll work for free.

… I enroll in one of those new-fangled game design programs.

… I finally design a feature for a professional game.

… I design major systems for a game.

… I ship a game.

… I go to the store on launch day to watch fans pick up copies of my game. And then I pose with them in a photo, holding armfuls of my game with a stupid grin.

… I spend hours, days reading Amazon reviews and posts in our forums. I can’t stop; it’s like a drug. Players love our game, and I love our players. I get giddy. But players hate our game, too. I get furious. I am forever influenced.

… I ship a sequel to that game.

… I’m about to ship another game, and it has already been pirated and is available on the internet.

… I balance an entire game. It takes weeks. It feels wrong. So I balance it again. And again. After it’s perfect, we release, and players find ways to break the economy within hours.

… I work on new IP.

… I have to cut 70% of the entire game because it’s so over scope. It nearly destroys my soul.

… I come to enjoy the process of cutting and scoping. It makes my designs clean and elegant.

… I spend four years on a project that gets cancelled.

… I have total faith in my designs, but when I play them, they’re terrible. I rework them. I think they’re finally good. Players get confused in focus tests. I rework them again. Some end up great. Others get cut.

… I design a game that I can’t bear to see.

… I get hate mail. It scars me and I eat soup in bed and consider becoming a doctor, someone who can make a serious difference in life.

… I design a game that’s a success. I momentarily wonder if I can ever do that again.

… I secretly think my designs are better than anyone else’s.

… I secretly think my designs are boring and uninspired.

… I become a lead designer.

… I then realize my design opinions aren’t as important as supporting my team of designers, even if we disagree.

… I care so strongly that I uncharacteristically yell and swear in meetings to protect certain designs.

… I become a creative director.

… I pitch revolutionary ideas and concepts. But they’re too crazy.

… I work on a game that sells one million copies. Five million copies. Ten million copies.

… my game scores 95 on Metacritic and wins Game of the Year in the Game Developer Choice Awards.

… the game I designed lives on years after launch, a new team keeps releasing content for it, and I’m excited about that.

… I design a game with one of my favorite celebrities in it, but never get to meet that celebrity. But we get a mannequin with one of her dresses in our lobby.

… I go to the GDC five years in a row. Ten years in a row. Twenty years. I’m inspired every time.

… I give a game design talk at the GDC. I make a name for myself. I burn or tear money on stage to make a point.

… I start a blog. And the more I talk about design, the less I actually design.

… my shelf is packed with games I’ll never have time to play.

… I no longer play games until I beat them. The games that I do play, I often play just once. I see flaws in design everywhere and the games are nothing new.

… occasionally I find a great game that I want to play for hundreds of hours, but then I feel guilty that I’m not trying other games to expand my horizons.

… I have pages and pages of design notes for games I will never have the time to make.

… I work for 5 years jumping from team to team, and never ship a single project.

… I denounce the corporate culture and quit to join a startup.

… I work for a well-funded startup with rock-star executives. It falls apart.

… I work for a different startup, and realize startups aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

… I consider working for Zynga, and then I do.

… I consider working for Zynga, and then I don’t. But half of my friends do.

… I work on a Facebook game that 100,000,000 people play.

… I work for yet another startup, and it takes off. We get bought out.

… I get fed up with the mass market, and quit to go design indie games. Games that will be hailed as art.

… I release an indie game and only five people play it. It breaks my heart. But those five people are awesome.

… I travel from game jam to game jam, chasing novelty and heartbreaking works of staggering genius.

… I make an indie game with meaningful gameplay, and have to live with my parents so I have someone to remind me to eat and to not die.

… I design something truly original that the world has never seen.

… I earn over $50 million selling my game’s beta build on my website.

… a fan recognizes me.

… fans recognize me wherever I go. And they want to know if I’ll ever get around to making a new game.

… fans stop recognizing me. Or maybe I never had any.

… I return to my old job because the corporate culture is great and I miss my team.

… I pull all-nighters and crunch for months on end. Not because my boss makes me, but because I want to make an incredible game.

… I design a game that makes players laugh and smile, that makes them shout and cry.

… and, above all …

… I design a game that I am truly happy with.