Duckwood

Duckwood was the very first example of a “Prototype Mondays” prototype. The topic was “socialization”. This was my attempt to playfully represent the idea of mob mentality, or I suppose more nerdily, some shadow of a collective or shared “memory” for a neighborhood.

The idea was that you (circled in yellow) and your nemesis (circled in evil red) lived in the same village. Your goal is to get rid of your nemesis by convincing the village to turn on them. You do this by declaring that a villager is a witch. However, you cannot call out your nemesis directly (as that would be too obvious). The catch though, is that every time you call someone out as a witch, each villager looks at this new “witch” and creates a mental model of what makes someone a witch. But because they know that they themselves are not a witch, they compare themselves to the unfortunate “witch” and decide any characteristic of the “witch” that doesn’t match their own traits must be what makes them a witch. Essentially, people who aren’t like me are bad people, and they’re bad because of the ways we differ.

Everyone’s individual “not-like-me” decisions are then tallied up and become the shared “belief system” displayed on the right. Every X seconds, if you don’t choose a new witch, the village will choose one based on their shared, agreed upon “witch signature”. As witches are chosen and removed from the village, the timer shrinks and you have to make assessments faster and faster.

While we definitely didn’t end up with witch burning in The Sims 3, we did seriously consider a system that would allow for each neighborhood to have its own persistent memory of significant events that could broadly influence NPC Sim behavior, lead to unique events (e.g. annual parades, protests), etc. I’d love to see something in the spirit of that shared understanding in a future Sims game.