Jacques Severn is the "homosexual programmer at Maxis" who was responsible for the easter egg. The term he used for the buff dudes in speedos was "himbos" (male bimbos).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Servin
Jacques was actually dismissed for inserting unapproved content into the game, not because there was a bug in the code, nor because he was gay.
One consequence of the bug was that it delayed the release of SimCopter so it missed the Christmas season, which lost Maxis a lot of money.
The people at Maxis were not anti-gay or close minded or homophobic bigots, like Brendan Eich and his ilk who want to cancel gay marriages because they hate the idea of treating gays equally and don't believe in human rights for everyone regardless of sexual preference, or I would not have hired on there in January 1997 to work on The Sims.
It might have gone a lot differently (and been better QA'ed, tested, and debugged) if Jacques had told Will and others about his objections to the unbalanced bimbos, and his ideas about including gay characters, which I know because that's what I did on The Sims, and my suggestions made it into the game. (Will loves weird easter eggs! In fact SimCopter even had some officially sanctioned cannibalistic behaviors, which is more controversial and illegal than himbos.)
After EA bought Maxis, I made a point of bringing up the "SimCopter fiasco" in my reviews of the early Sims design documents (before it was called The Sims). The original implementation was Heterosexist and Monosexist, but that was only because it was rapidly prototyped by straight people who didn't think things through, but who were fortunately open to constructive criticism, not because anybody involved was homophobic and actively anti-gay like Brendan Eich.
And that is exactly why game development teams (and all other teams) need to be inclusive (but not include bigots), and open to all different points of view (that aren't hateful). Because people without particular life experiences and outlooks simply aren't aware of everyone else's perspective, and don't take them into consideration by default, so they need to be reminded, not because they're bigots who would do something as crass and hateful as donating money to a campaign to cancel gay marriages, and then hypocritically whine about cancel culture themselves.
The Sims Design Documents:
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...
>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.
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...
>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.
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...
>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.
I admit that the model for sexual preferences I proposed in the comments I wrote on the design document [linked below] wasn't as "woke" as it should have been. For one thing, I mistakenly compared asexual people (who are perfectly normal) to a terrible person, Mother Theresa:
https://twitter.com/gay4dimitri/status/1151994153317748737
>Jay || Crab @gay4dimitri Replying to @itstheshadsy:
I hope their concepts of asexual people have evolved a bit beyond 'Mother Teresa' since 1998 but this is really damn good and that last line gets me right in the pants.
>xardox @xardox Replying to @gay4dimitri and @itstheshadsy:
Sorry about that -- I didn't know what horrible fraud Mother Teresa was at the time. ;(
Mother Teresa’s Sainthood is a Fraud, Just Like She Was:
https://medium.com/@KittyWenham/mother-teresas-sainthood-is-...
"Hells Angel (Mother Teresa) - Christopher Hitchens":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJG-lgmPvYA
The model I proposed in the design document comments also mistakenly presumed there were only two genders. And in retrospect, I was mistaken that sexual preference should be directly represented as a property of the characters.
In retrospect, I'm actually quite happy with the way that Patrick programmed The Sims to not actually model sexual preference in the character's personality data in any way at all, so instead of reducing it down into a stark numeric property, it's purely dynamically defined by what you do, and your relationships with other people, which can change over time, so it's always up to you to decide what to do next, and change your mind and act any way at any time.
That non-model may or may not be at odds with reality, the nurture -vs- nature debate, and certain branches of "queer theory", but it makes for better game play, and enables players to easily role play, experiment, and explore. It's a lot like Will's comments on SimCity's model:
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-...
>Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996): A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winnograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
>[...] Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.” [...]
It's not actually important to the gay rights debate whether sexual preference is a choice or not (and it still isn't even known for sure), because everyone absolutely deserves the human rights to make their own choices and decisions about who they love and marry, what their favorite color is, and which foods they like to eat, whether or not they're biologically determined or immutable.
Phil Salvador wrote a series of tweets with a link to some Sims Design Documents I scanned and put online:
https://twitter.com/itstheshadsy/status/1151868012707962881
>Phil Salvador @itstheshadsy: Sims developer Don Hopkins released a bunch of design documents from The Sims, including this one from August 1998 with his notes about romance:
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/
>It's incredible to see the internal discussion about romance in The Sims written out so strongly like this.
>For more background: Will Wright's notebooks from the making of The Sims (viewable at @museumofplay !) mention "same sex move-in romance" as a potential feature, but it sounds like there wasn't a plan about how or whether to implement that until Don Hopkins stood up for it here.
>It's not clear if Will Wright's notes predate the design document, but either way, it sounds like there was a delay implementing it. Further down the page, Don Hopkins says that Patrick J. Barrett III was the one who just added it in without waiting to hear back.
>Here's an article with additional context from Barrett's perspective about when/how same-sex relationships were added. The article mentions "going back and forth for several months" before he joined, which likely refers to what these documents are saying.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss...
>Hey, it's Don Hopkins himself! ( @xardox )
>He shared a screenshot of the actual scripting before same-sex relationships were added.
https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1152266586025332736
>@xardox Replying to @itstheshadsy:
Here's the offending "tree code" from "The Sims Steering Committee" internal release of June 4, 1998. [screen snapshots in the tweets]
>Also here's a demo of "The Sims Steering Committee" release, a very early version of the game from June 4 1998 (almost two years before the March 2000 release) that we distributed internally at EA to convince them please not to cancel our poor little game. [video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY&list=PLX66BqHq0q...
>The Sims Steering Committee - June 4 1998. A demo of an early pre-release version of The Sims for The Sims Steering Committee at EA, developed June 4 1998.
>It includes an old klunky version of Edith (the "EDIT House" game programming tool). I listed out all the people, clicked "New Object Instance", and got the old gang of original Sims back together (including lots of extra clones)! Check out Archie Bunker with a cigar in his hand!
>The flamingos were pretty ugly: [screen snapshot]
>Not to mention the phone that looked like it had Halloween candy corn springing out of it whenever you got a call, and the carpet that looked like 40 grit sandpaper (but at least it kept their feet from skating and moon walking)! [screen snapshot]
Here are some more tweets with screen snapshots of The Sims Steering Committee demo:
https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1223211835823984642
>The Sims turns 20 today! Here's an early pre-release version of The Sims for The Sim Steering Committee, from June 4 1998. #TheSims #PreRelease #Demo [screen snapshots from the video linked above in the tweets]
HN post on The Sims Design Documents:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22886489
Here's the abstract and a link to the draft of a paper I was writing for QGCon about "How Inclusivity Saved The Sims", before the conference got derailed by Covid-19. When I find the time I'll finish the paper and publish it somewhere, but for now, here it is in rough outline form, including a detailed timeline of events. Also I'll link some other documents with lots of references and excerpts from other sources.
QGCon Abstract
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13u-kNaWC2AAd-L0_5OoLc_-x...
How Inclusivity Saved The Sims
By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software.
The Sims has evolved with society over two decades towards a more inclusive, tolerant world celebrating diversity and creativity. Its procedural rhetoric promotes inclusivity, diversity, personalization, and tolerance, and supports self-expression, creativity, storytelling, and sharing. Players impress their own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and share their own personal emergent narratives with tools like The Sims Family Album and The Sims Exchange.
The Sims presumes to model human minds and relationships, but necessarily makes brazen simplifications due to technological constraints. It optimizes for playability instead of realism, while making concessions to marketability, corporate interests, societal norms, and taboos. But somehow it works, and this paper attempts to explain some of the magic.
Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.
The “AI” of The Sims is scripted in a noodly visual programming language called “SimAntics”, and is distributed throughout the objects and characters of the Sims microworld. But it magically offloads most of the heavy lifting into the player’s own imagination, incorporating and enriching their intertwingled tapestry of common-sense knowledge and stories about people, families, and communities.
The graphical design of The Sims was inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, in which he illustrated how the “Masking” visual style draws abstract characters against realistic backgrounds, which increases empathy and projective identification, empowers emotional connections, and permits players to easily and deeply identify with characters.
The educational philosophy of The Sims and SimCity was inspired by Seymour Papert’s “Constructionism” learning theory, with which learners construct mental models to understand the real world by building tangible personally meaningful shareable microworlds, and learn by discovery and exploration, by leveraging information they already know to learn more, and architecting their own educations.
This paper reviews the history of inclusivity in The Sims franchise over two decades, and explains some techniques for imagination, persuasion, identification, empathy, storytelling, and education, which can also make other games more inclusive, expressive, and enlightening.
The Sims References:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YEK0Y1l5ByC2koU4nGrCBNHj...
Lots more Sims Design Documents:
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments