CT: My roommates and I have yet to kind of work out a system for hooking up in the game. They are people I don’t know. I’m playing mostly on Interhogan as Christopher Soprano. My roommates don’t know that I’m female, and they’re all male. I think they’re teenage guys. I’m sort of undercover in this all-male household, and it’s unbelievably cool. They act so differently when it’s just them then when a female walks into a room. Then, every time she leaves they start debriefing, “How do you think I did? Did I scare her off?” It’s amazing.

G: How did you get involved with The Sims initially?

CT: I came to Maxis – my background is in kids’ software. I came here when they were still doing kids products and then it was probably two months after I started that they cancelled the kids’ line and said, ‘you’re going to go work on The Sims.'

At the time, The Sims was a bastard product that nobody (laughs) wanted to be on. Nobody really understood it and they thought it was a game about going to the bathroom. It was kind of like this secret project that Will was doing now and then… I fell in love with it and I’ve been doing Sims stuff ever since.

G: So you’ve been working on the series since the first Sims was released.

CT: Yeah, I was on the first Sims for a couple years and then we did a quick expansion pack. Then we moved on to TSO and have been here almost three years.

G: Wow. It’s hard as a reviewer… I can trash a game, but at the same time I feel bad because I know people have spent years working on it.

CT: Yeah. It’s such a different world—online games--because the architecture and infrastructure is so much harder that you don’t get, as a designer, the immediate progress and the immediate turnaround. It takes a really large team, too, so the progress is generally slower. So we’ve been working on our patience and finding other side projects to occupy ourselves.

G: What kind of stuff do you do, specifically, with TSO?

CT: We redesigned all of the navigation and getting around, the roommate stuff and a lot of the objects – the job objects… we did a ton of TSO-specific objects. A lot of the costume trunks, a lot of the schematics -- some of the game-making objects, which I have yet to see anyone really use in the way that we had hoped. So I’m thinking of starting a few houses with sample games to see if that will spark people’s creativity.

G: What game-making objects?

CT: There are a bunch of objects in TSO that allow you to create your own games. There’s a little cupboard of game pieces like dice, a deck of cards that you can customize, a little ball that you can set up targets for.

G: Oh sure, I’ve seen those. I didn’t know what they were so I just ignored them.

CT: Sure. I think that’s because there aren’t a lot of examples out there yet. Like it someone was doing a life-sized trivia game. So there’s, theoretically, a lot of creative potential there. People just need to see some examples to spark their interest.

G: I agree with that. I’d like to see some examples because I have no idea how the game pieces are supposed to work.

CT: I’ll get right on that.

G: I found a ball around the other day and was thinking, “What do I do with this? Just roll it around?”

CT: But you didn’t say, “I’m so empowered, I’m going to go create my own game!”

G: No, I didn’t realize that was an option.

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