Terry Winnograd is a user interface researcher and professor at Stanford, who has a regular user interface seminar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Winograd

Stanford University, CS Dept., HCI Group, CS547 seminar videorecordings, 1990–2012 (collection SC1217). Terry Winograd's open, recorded, one-guest-a-week public seminar. 339 talks catalogued.

https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...

Many of the videos are now online, including this 1996 talk by Will Wright, who gives a retrospective of SimAnt (too simple, but kids love it), SimEarth (too complex, but professors love it), and SimCity 2000 (just right).

Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk

In response to a student's direct question about his current projects, Will seemed momentarily taken aback before deciding to reveal something genuinely groundbreaking:

*Student:* What projects are you working on now, and if you'd rather not talk about that, what projects or models had you considered before that were kind of interesting that you didn't do?

*Will Wright:* You mean like what systems have I considered modeling?

*Student:* Right.

*Will Wright:* Oh, God...

*Student:* And also what systems are you currently working on, if you if you can talk about them?

*Will Wright:* Okay, well one thing we're working on, is a — we've been kind of interested in our company for a long time about the idea of data portability. Really, let me back up just a little bit here, and this might be a little bit more of an answer than you were looking for, but…

He then proceeded to demonstrate an early prototype of what would become *The Sims*, at the time called "*Dollhouse*."

"This is a game I call *Dollhouse*. And if this looks familiar, it's because I've just loaded a *SimCity* file into here. Okay, so what we're seeing is a *SimCity* file, but now at this point I can actually zoom down to the street level."

More info and transcript:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)

A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk!