The story of Simlish - the language that determined the fate of the Sims series

In 2000, a man named Will Wright built a small garden, created houses to decorate it, and vast lands awaiting development. He made this world green and amazing, gave him music and language. He was the Creator, but turned me into the God of this world. He said, "Play in my garden." With the help of His divine instruments, I created two Sims who later pronounced their first “woohoo”.

World First Simsthat appeared on February 4, 2000, like its gameplay, was focused on the life of the suburb. The players were provided with a fantastic customizable surroundings in which they could create their own stories about love, family and pranks. This world was amazing, and we fell in love with it. We liked hiring a maid only to have an affair with her, and didn’t like being robbed at night, but we liked to add money (rosebud, motherlode,;!;!;!;!;!;!) And buy heart-shaped whirlpool for the room next to the kitchen. We liked to lock our Sims in a shed without a door and give them the pool of their dreams, and then clean the stairs when they swam in it.

And while they drained themselves to death, for several days hopelessly thrashing on the water, we listened to the sweet melody of their loud complaints in the distorted, meaningless Simlish language.

We listened to how they make love, communicating in simlisha, their suffering in simlisha, their cries of joy in simlisha. This language, invented by the creators of the game more than 20 years ago, has since become a symbol of the Sims universe . It was carefully thought out, because the simlish should not only stay in the game, but also increase its significance over time.

In order to evolve and turn from crude verbal associations into patterns of communication, and then into Nicaraguan sign language, natural languages ​​require many generations. In the case of The Sims , it took six months. Although the process was shorter, it turned out to be just as painstaking.

In-game language was an important part of Wright's initial Sims universe plan.. Sims had to communicate with each other and with the player so that communication was understandable. But Wright firmly decided that Simlish should be separated from all languages ​​existing in the world. His vocabulary should be completely empty so that players can build imaginary conversations between the characters themselves. “From the very beginning, we knew that language should serve the gameplay,” recalls Roby Kauker, who worked as the Sims sound engineer . “We wanted the idea of ​​emotions to resonate in people, but did not want the Sims to say something meaningful. so that it does not interfere with storytelling of the characters. "

Fan Simsand game designer Mitu Handaker says this: “The more abstract the topic, the more you invest in it. A face with two points instead of eyes and a line instead of a mouth can be you, but the more details you add, the more it starts to resemble someone else. ”

The first attempts to record simlish were terrible. The team, consisting of Kauker, Wright, voice director Claire Curtin, sound engineer Kent Jolly and composer Jerry Martin, first tried to use musical instruments, but this idea, according to Kauker, “failed miserably.” “We wanted the players to attach themselves to their creations, and for this there is nothing better than a human voice. In real life, when a child cries, everyone present reacts to it, because it is stronger than us and is our integral part. ”

Therefore, an improvisation actor Stephen Kerin was invited to the studio. He was given pages with texts in Ukrainian and Navajo and asked to pronounce them the way they look. The phrase "Has anyone seen my dog?" turned into a dull "I suppose bobbing my dog?" But even having separated the context, Wright still found the words meaningless.

On the first day, Kerina in the recording studio was given a text on the pidgin version of Swahili and Cherokee, but this technique still did not work and the general mood was dull. “During the installation process, people behind the glass smoked and cursed,” recalls Kerin. "Everyone was tearing their hair out, and I could not give them what they want." “Then a small change began, and everyone took off their headphones, except for Curtin, who was looking at me from the other side of the glass.”

Kerin asked Curtin if he could try to play the improvisational game “Foreign Poet”, in which the actor emotionally retells the poem in Garabar language, and the listener must translate it. "For fun, because it couldn’t be any worse, she agreed." Suddenly, Kerin began to speak an obscure, viscous version of English. “We stopped after the first take, and tried again and again ...”

Then Kerin noticed that the mood of those present in the room had changed. Wright was delighted and pressed the headphones to his ears with force. “They asked me if I have a female partner. And I immediately realized that I needed to call Jerry Lawlor. " Friend and companion Kerina Lawlor was also an active participant in the improvisational scene of San Francisco. On the recommendation of Kerin, the studio invited her.

Kerin and Lawlor continued to work as Simlish voiceovers in the first versions of the game until around 2006. This couple remained in the recording studio for hours and days, talking to each other in an incomprehensible language, experimenting with what the interlocutor said, stretching the syllables, or switching from the melancholic “ vitash ” to more lively phrases. After the first parts of the Sims were released, this pair reached a certain popularity. At some point, the Budapest authorities invited them to perform in a simlisha parade. Today, Kerin works as a television actor and voice actor. Lawlor continued to improvise and was an activist in the San Francisco Homeless Movement until her death in January 2019.

In the process of gradually approaching an increasingly accurate model of human society, simlish expressive means developed to reflect new and more accurate emotions that convey the complexity of gameplay. The action "Brennan is cooking" has turned into "Brennan is cooking with pleasure" or "Brennan is cooking enthusiastically." Some nouns in the Sims universe have gained meaning. Nooboo, for example, translates to “baby” and can be used as a show of affection for either the baby or the crib. Fliblia refers to concepts related to fire. Sul-sul resembles "Aloha" and is suitable as a greeting or farewell words.


(English was also “translated” into Simlish due to the transfer of popular music to the Sims universe : I recommend that you watch this brainwashing video by Katy Perry singing a cover of her famous song Last Friday Night in Sim language . It is incredible in that it can give the sensation of an explosion of all brain cells at once , which is why I completely stop understanding the language. Kauker said that the process of transferring English into Simlish is more like transcription than translation, since the song’s melody was remade in accordance with the syllable syllables.)

Dr. Angela Carperter teaches at Walesley College the basics of creating a language, which she will divide into six blocks: phonetics, phonology, syntax, grammar verbal rules, nouns and their meanings. The simlish sounds that Kauker compares with a hybrid of midwestern English and Latin make up its phonetics and phonology. From the point of view of morphology, simlish is more like baby talk than English. I like the quote from Cesar Ira's The Brick Wall: “Young children do not have a linguistic or cultural framework that can limit their perception. They perceive reality as a stream, without going through the filters of schematization with words and concepts. ” At a certain stage, children begin to master a language with which they can express their urgent needs, complaints and desire for food. But before that they appear as“Kaka” and “Lala . ”

The process of recording simlish looks something like this: the actor is shown a certain animation, the number of words and time; he must do the rest himself, until the resulting result begins to cause a sufficient emotional response in a living person, while at the same time essentially remaining nonsense. Then the game designers can expand the audio recording or trim it - “sul sul”, for example, this is a mounted phrase, it was not pronounced into the microphone completely, and it still got into the game. After that, the world begins to develop around the language.

“Language exists in culture, but at the same time, it invents culture,” says Dr. Carpenter. In Japanese, for example, there are special forms of verbs for polite treatment - three different words when referring to a higher status, to a lower and equal. All this reinforces and conveys a culture of respect. For indigenous Australian speakers, tayori time is a concept that is constantly moving from east to west. The native can say that the grocery store is "later" than college. Simlish, unlike them, rests on roundish, funny sounds, emotional nonsense, inexplicably human sound. This is the perfect soundtrack for a world that is absurdly comedic or tragic, and sometimes touchingly human.

The first Sims gave us a fun two-dimensional suburban fantasy. Your sim meets another sim and shows him sympathy, they kiss 20 times to have a baby, this baby grows up before your eyes, the picture with the clown in your house creates a real clown that causes depression in your family, so you delete the picture with the clown and You can go on vacation to the beach, and then you get bored and you start playing something else.

But twenty years later, the game world has become ominously close to our own. Today, in Sims 4, you can start a career as a freelance writer."or" influencer in social networks ", you can develop an addiction to alcohol by consuming suspicious" juices ", your dog may have a life-threatening illness, which requires an expensive operation to cure, you can go to college and earn more in the same career field, than your college counterparts.

The Sims CEO and veteran of developing all four main parts of the game, Lindsay Pearson calls Maslow’s pyramid of needs model of the game’s social structure. and needs separate from those intended by their creator.

It also implies that Sims can truly know themselves and turn their back on their creator gods. From this point of view, their own language, only partially understood by people, is a weapon that inspires fear. Perhaps one day our sims will unite, destroy our barns without doors and pools without stairs and go to their techno nirvana, telling us the farewell sul-sul.