Playing God: Rod Humble on building the radical new simulator Life By You
In the acclaimed HBO series The Rehearsal, comedian Nathan Fielder builds meticulous sets and hires actors to help everyday people plan out their lives in an attempt to anticipate every possible conclusion of a difficult upcoming conversation. The results are absurd and thought-provoking, but life is much more complicated and unpredictable outside a controlled environment, and regardless of how much you influence the variables, things don’t always go exactly as planned.
Nowhere is this more evident than in video games, where life simulators such as The Sims permit users to build replicants and create their own fantasies, only to watch them unravel before their eyes as the chaos of artificial intelligence takes hold. Life By You, a new kind of social simulation game from Paradox Tectonic, seeks to blend the role of player and developer to give its users a level of control as yet unseen in the genre.
At the helm of this experimental ship is developer Rod Humble, whose credits include Everquest, The Sims 2 and Second Life. “Life By You began when I approached Paradox to discuss the formation of a new studio, one that would cater to several very large yet underserved gaming audiences,” says Humble. “We want to empower player creators, storytellers and streamers with a particular emphasis on privacy.”
From a distance, Life By You looks like any other life simulator on the market. But under the hood, there’s a lot more going on. Beyond the housebuilding and character customisation tools we’ve come to expect, the game intends to give players true omnipotence in their bespoke worlds. You can drag and drop your humans wherever you want or drive them around in third-person mode. And if you don’t think the scripted dialogue speaks to their motives, you can intervene and manually write a new line. At this year’s Gamescom event, a Paradox Tectonic developer led me through a hands-off demo, where I got to see this bold, potentially kingslaying vision in action.
For 20 minutes I followed a character who was, by all accounts, pretty irritating. They walked to their job at a local gym, avoided doing their work, and then scolded a co-worker for not doing enough. Before clocking off early, they taught yoga while their colleague tidied up nearby. It was a comical, oddly realistic and, most importantly, an admirably continuous experience. I felt the discomfort of being a voyeur in the minutiae of this selfish person’s day.
As well as relying on tone, expressions or emoticons, the agents (what Life By You calls its simulated humans)
use real language, with topics tailored to the situation they’re in: their job, relationships, interests and more. “Life simulation players like to explore many different areas of life, and many of these require high-level metaphysical concepts which benefit from real language,” says Humble. “A character looking you in the eye and saying ‘I love you’, for example, is very different to a symbolic or more cartoony approach.”
The potential for this is staggering from a storytelling perspective. Rather than simply portraying the major beats of a typical life, Life By You encourages the player to set up their own small stories and scenarios so they can watch them pay off over time. “Our writing partners often craft conversations that range from hilarious to deeply moving,” says Humble. “[A designer] shared an interaction where a child looked up at her father and said, ‘I wish you weren’t my dad,’ a moment that was both poignant and heart-wrenching. These instances of unexpected moments and emotional resonance are what make the development process for Life By
You a lot of fun.”
Verbal interactions in the game work in conjunction with perceived actions and behaviours to create digital footprints of each resident in your world. As in real life, it’s not just about what you say; it’s about what you do while in the company of others – the virtual townsfolk will remember and react accordingly.
“The main questions we ask for a given event in the world of the characters’ minds is: How will this affect the choices players make and the stories they tell if their humans can remember who was kind, flirty, aggressive or even rude to them?” explains Humble. “Characters have a memory timeline. This timeline can create traits that can influence the agent’s mental model and change their behaviour. Not only can these emotions and traits be communicated by speech but also by observation. So if an agent sees someone doing something, that can influence their future behaviour and relationships.”
I cast my mind back to the wronged co-worker sulking in the background as my demo’s lead avatar taught yoga to their fitness class. While the nature of the preview meant that I didn’t get to see the long-term consequences of their negative interaction, it was compelling to think about how the next few days at work might look in the wake of this little spat. The gravity of a single decision can wield tantalising drama in Life By You. What could happen to this person’s career or social status as a result of their uncouth actions in the moment? “Being late to work triggers an observable,” Humble says. “Many characters will not care, but your boss or co-workers might, generating new emergent scenarios.”
The question of privacy naturally rears its head. Humble is keen to mention that there is no behavioural data collection, and that these stories, no matter how intricate they get, will always be the property of players, not Paradox. “Everything you create, from mods to streams to in-game stories, belongs to you,” he says. “This ownership is vital, whether you’re creating a romantic comedy series on YouTube, offering content on Patreon or sharing your mods on your own website.”
Come launch, players will be able to mod Life By You with more than 30 ingame editors and tools, and are encouraged to share their creations online, whether they are characters, sounds, buildings or scenarios. It’s a fascinating prospect, and if it works out of the box and fosters a creative community, Paradox Tectonic are primed to deliver the first credible competitor to The Sims in more than 20 years.
• Life By You enters early access on PC on 5 March 2024
to star as Marwood, the eponymous I to Richard E Grant’s Withnail in 1987 and then was cast as the eighth Doctor in the 1996 TV film, Doctor Who (the first attempt to relaunch the series following its 1989 cancellation).
McGann is now starring in a period gothic gangster thriller, The Undertaker, opposite Tara Fitzgerald and Lily Frazer, as a mild-mannered funeral director who gets caught up in a power-grab by a local gangster. To that end, McGann will be here to take your questions. Do ask about Withnail and Doctor Who, but don’t forget all his other roles. On TV he has been in everything from the ITV historical war drama Hornblower to Jonathan Creek, Holby City and Waking the Dead. In the theatre, he has done Much Ado About Nothing and The Seagull. And definitely ask him about Lesbian Vampire Killers from 2009. He’ll like that for sure. *wink emoji* Leave your questions in the comments below, and we’ll print his answers in Film & Music.
• The Undertaker is released on 3 November, with a special screening at Watershed in Bristol on 17 October