The Sims Design Documents

TheSimsDesignDocumentDraft3-1998-08-07-DonsReview.pdf

This is a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 3, 8/7/98. On page 5, he wrote the following comments about same sex relationships in the game: The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitly going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world’s population). It 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. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other people.

TheSimsDesignDocumentDraft5-1998-08-31-DonsReview-Handwritten.pdf

TheSimsDesignDocumentDraft5-1998-08-31-DonsReview.pdf

This is a PDF file with a scan of the handwritten notes, and a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 5, 8/31/98. On page 4, there is a section about Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships, which reflects Don's suggestion to change the design to support same sex relationships. Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships

To be outlined in 9/30 Live Mode deliverable.

Currently the game only allows heterosexual romance. This will not be the only type available – it just reflects the early stages of implementation. Will is reviewing the code and will make recommendations for how to implement homosexual romance as well.

TheSimsDesignDocumentDraft5-1998-08-31-DonsReview.pdf TheSimsDesignDocumentDraft7-1998-10-02-DonsReview.pdf This is a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 7, 10/2/98. On page 21, there is a section (same as above) about Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships, which reflects Don's suggestion to change the design to support same sex relationships.

After discussing it with Patrick J. Barrett III, we've determined that the sequence of events that led to The Sims having same sex relationships: The initial prototype implementation did not support same sex relationships, and I noticed that, when I tried to have two women kiss, the would-be-kissee slapped the kisser. So I wrote up my opinion that it should support same sex relationships, instead of resulting in homophobic violence, and proposed a straw man 2-dimensional way of modeling it. Subsequent design documents said heterosexual romance would not be the only kind available, and that Will 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. But 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 personality -- just as a behavior that was possible at any time for any character.