92. Sulsul! Plerg majah bliff?

92. "SIM Hagar" by Jerry Martin

One of the things I tried to specialize in during grad school was the design of instructional simulations. Consequently, I felt compelled to purchase "The Sims" computer game when it first came out and do a post-mortem on the game to figure out how it was designed. I probably learned more about designing simulations from that game than anything else I studied, and every time we discussed simulations in class, I could always relate everything back to the game. So all those hours and days and months I spent playing the game were NOT completely wasted.

One of the cleverest things about the game design was that the Sims--the little virtual people you controlled in the game--spoke a made-up language called "Simlish." It's a combination of made-up words along with a few actual words in various languages (including English) thrown in from time to time just to screw with your mind. (It's jarring to hear an English word or phrase, because your brain says, "Hold on a second! That made sense...didn't it?") Anytime the Sims talked, you would see a bubble with the text in English, but you'd hear them say something in Simlish. Even more clever, the game featured a radio you could purchase for your Sims, and you could turn it to stations that played various music genres--country, jazz, rock, etc.--with all the song lyrics in Simlish.



Since that first game, they've had some well-known professional musicians record new music (Mike Mothersbaugh from Devo did the music to Sims 2) or record their own songs in Simlish.

Here's Katy Perry recording the Simlish version of her song "Last Friday Night."



I'm not a Katy Perry fan, but I think I could listen to a little more of her singing in Simlish.



Shortly after the game came out, Apple introduced its first iPod, which let me put one thousand songs on a little magical white brick and listen to them in random order wherever I went. One day, I got the bright idea to download all of The Sims music onto my iPod and listen to it while I went shopping. Now, the game had some lame shopping music it would play while you were "shopping" in the game, so listening to that same music as I searched for real items to purchase was more than a little surreal. I felt like I was one of the little cartoon people inside the game!

My favorite song in that first game was one of the five rock station songs that played when you turned on the radio within the game. There was one song in particular that actually rocked pretty hard. They call it "SIM Hagar" now, but it was always song #4 to me. It is especially fun to lip-sync the lyrics in Simlish--if you can figure out what they are.