Incredible interview with a really smart guy, Will Wright, creator of Sim City and The Sims:
Highlights:
How much is the game based on established scientific theory, Darwinian evolution or what have you, and how much of it is more seat-of-your-pants?
I think the rough arc of life in the game is a pretty accurate though caricatured representation of reality, in the way life evolved from single cell to multicell to intelligence. Specifically on every level that kind of depends on what you're looking at. The evolution part of the game, the player is actually designing the creature, so in fact it's almost like intelligent design rather than pure evolution for your creature. The creatures around you are in fact kind of evolving more naturally, but in fact behind them of course are intelligent designers making the specific versions. Once we get up to the civilization level it's kind of an abstraction of human history. What are the different ways in which humans have built larger and larger groupings of people? We've done it militarily, economically, culturally, those are represented in fairly abstract terms. Once we get to space the scope of the size of the galaxy is an interesting little model of the real galaxy in terms of the distance between stars, the type of other objects you have up there, planetary nebula, black holes, stuff like that are fairly accurately represented in terms of their distribution in the galaxy, the number of stars we're dealing with is actually a very small fraction. Even though we have millions of stars in our galaxy, it's a very small fraction of what a real galaxy has. But still from the player's point of view they're both still huge numbers – almost inconceivable. Unless there's a compelling reason to break reality we've tried to follow reality, but again, in a caricatured format.
Let's talk about the content sharing system, since that's one of the coolest things in the game. Can you explain how that works?
Every time the player makes something in the game – creature, building, vehicle, planet, whatever, it gets sent to our servers automatically, a compressed representation of it. As other players are playing the game we need to populate their game with other creatures around them in the evolution game, other cities around them in the civilization game, other planets and races and aliens in the space game, and those are actually coming from our server and were created by other players. so there's an infinite variety of NPCs that I can encounter in the game that are continually being made by the other players as they play. And whenever I encounter this content I actually end up building a little card deck in the game that we call Sporepedia, there's a little card to represent every piece of content, every creature, every building, every vehicle, and I can see who made that. I can see what its stats are. I can bookmark that person if I like their stuff and have their stuff… like I can find my best friend and say make sure my best friend's stuff comes into my game, so I encounter their worlds first. So it's almost what we were seeing people do with The Sims, where they would go browse web sites looking for cool stuff and then download it, except we kind of burn it all into the gameplay. I don't have to leave the game, put it in my folder, go browse the web – it's now part of the gameplay experience.
One of the oddball things about Spore, when you look at it, it's sort of a single-player massively multiplayer game, which seems at odds… I kind of like the idea that I won't be killed by a 14-year-old who has more skills than I do, but did you consider having it live online player versus player?
We thought about it. In fact, technically, based on all the stuff we've already done for it, it wouldn't be very hard at all. We've already solved all the hard problems we would need to do a persistent online world version of Spore. The hard part is, what happens when you come to a planet and the planet's offline? Which would be the case. In fact, one of the reasons why I kind of went down this path is that nobody has really explored the hybrid model. And this really is a hybrid, it's what we call a massively single-player game, where we try to get the benefits of an online game, which is all the people building the world collectively together, without the liabilities, which is that the 14-year-old can kill you or that you've invested all this time in your planet and somebody comes along and blows it up, and therefore you had to put everybody on the same level treadmill. And I hate these level treadmill games, and I wanted the players to feel really empowered. You know, you have this whole universe and this UFO and you really want to go out there and do epic things, but in an online game you couldn't. So trying to get the best of both worlds, figuring out what the sweet spot is between the features available through a shared universe experience and then the power available to a single-player experience. The intersection of those two things is kind of where Spore ended up and why it ended up there.
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So the prospect of getting them to actually subscribe to a game for $10 a month was a very difficult business proposition to these people, who a lot of them don't even have credit cards. I mean I'm a hardcore gamer and I don't subscribe to any online games, and getting a casual player to do the same, it's totally different.
I find I don't subscribe to World of Warcraft – I appreciate what they did, but I have maybe a half hour to play, an hour to play, on my own schedule. I can't join a guild and make commitments – I have enough trouble keeping commitments to my own family.
Oh I know - same here!
And it seems like gaming more and more is slotted in, as opposed to the kid playing obsessively.
I think it's more interstitial time now, where you have these little tiny blocks of time that you carve out that you want to play a game in. I mean, that's why I play Battlefield all the time, because I can sit down and play half an hour of Battlefield, it's really satisfying and I don't have to worry if I never play it again for another two months. I'm not paying anything, nobody's waiting for me, no commitments. I can have a nice half-hour satisfying experience.
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Do you see Spore, or the rest of your games for that matter, as being educational?
I think in a deep way yeah – that's kind of why I do them. But not in a curriculum-based, 'I'm gong to teach you facts' kind of way. I think more in terms of deep lessons of things like problem-solving, or just creativity – creativity is a fundamental of education that's not really taught so much. But giving people tools… what it means to be human is to learn to use tools to basically expand your abilities. And I think computer games are in some sense a fundamental tool for our imagination. If we can let players create these elaborate worlds, there's a lot of thought, design thought, problem solving, expression that goes into what you're going to create. You know, I think of the world of hobbies, which isn't what it used to be. When I was a kid, you know, people that were into trains had a big train set and they spent a lot of time sculpting mountains and building villages, or they might have been into slot cars or dollhouses or whatever, but these hobbies involved skill, involved creativity, and at some point involved socialization. Finding other people and joining the model train club, comparing and contrasting our skills, our approaches. And I think a lot of computer gaming has kind of supplanted those activities, they have a lot of the aspects of hobbies. Especially the games that allow the player to be creative and to share that creativity and form a community around it. I think just in general, play is about problem-solving, about interacting with things in an unstructured way to get a sense of it and what the rules are.
Which is counter to current trends -- educational philosophy seems to have taken a huge step towards the three Rs, the basics, what you can regurgitate on a standardized test. And this seems to be going back to process-oriented education, where you're learning problem solving.
And a lot of it also is… you know, some of the most effective education is failure-based, where you're given a system and you can manipulate it and explore different failure states and success states, and all that. Most of our educational system is designed to protect you from failure. You know – here's how you write a proper sentence, here's how you do a math problem without failing. So basically, they don't let you experience failure. Failure is seen as a bad thing, not as a learning experience. And even when you get to the professional world, things like architecture, engineering, industrial design, they teach you how to do it the right way. Where it used to be you would build five bad buildings and they'd fall down and you'd learn yourself – that was more the apprenticeship, craftsmanship model. You'd build 20 bad chairs but eventually learn how to build a good one because you would learn the failure states yourself, inherently – you'd experience them directly. Whereas when you go to engineering school they teach you how not to fail, so you're never directly experiencing those failures. It limits your intuitions. Whereas a kid playing a game – the first thing they do is they'll sit there and play five or six times and learn from that, and they learn at a very core level in a very different way. They've actually explored the whole possibility space. It's not that they've been told 'don't go there because you'll fail' and so they never go there and never experience it directly on their own. They're encouraged to do that all on their own, in fact they're directly building that possibility map.
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Where do you see gaming moving in the future?
One thing that really excites me, that we're doing just a little bit of in Spore… I described how the computer is kind of looking at what you do and what you buy, and developing this model of the player. I think that's going to be a fundamental differentiating factor between games and all other forms of media. The games can inherently observe you and build a more and more accurate model of the player on each individual machine, and then do a huge amount of things with that – actually customize the game, its difficulty, the content that it's pulling down, the goal structures, the stories that are being played out relative to every player. So in some sense you're teaching the game about yourself and it becomes kind of your ultimate playmate, in terms of knowing 'oh, I think you'd enjoy this' or 'try that,' and it's kind of playing against you. You and I might buy the same game off the shelf one day, play it for a month and, a month later, our games are almost unrecognizably different – because yours has evolved to fit and entertain you, and mine has evolved to fit and entertain me. And I think that's something that's going to be a fundamental thing about games about ten years from now, because we're just starting to see that more and more at this point.
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Cooperative gaming is pretty rare at this point, which seems like shame. Because if I want to play with my kid, I don't necessarily want to be blowing his brains out.
And games are one of those funny things where it can be a very social experience relative to like sitting there watching television together, it's amazing. Just watching kids in front of their game consoles, how much intense socialization they go through. Playing Mario Kart or something, even when they're competing, it ends up being a bonding experience. And I think most people see first-person shooter multiplayer games as this very aggressive thing, but in fact if you look at the group of people playing kind of before and after, it feels much more like a bonding experience, they're having a shared experience, even though they're shooting each other in the game, it's really like they're playing cowboys and indians or tag or something. From their point of view it's not like they're hurting each other and having a fight, it's that they're sitting there playing this sport together, and they come away all having this shared experience.
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Relevant how? Socially?
Socially, yeah. Getting people more connected to the real world through gaming. Because I think we all live in our own little bubbles, we have our own little lives and there's this whole world out there of things happening that we're kind of dimly aware of. We might pick up the paper or watch the news. And it's a complex world. A lot of very strange twisted dynamics, interesting things, very important things that are going to shape the future that our children live in. And that if you could just get everybody to be a little bit more aware of the world around them, and how it works, and have that feedback in to the course the world is taking, gaming could be an incredibly powerful mechanism for steering the system.
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It would be interesting if all your virtual lives could intersect.
It's a simple idea of having cross-game compatible avatars – I've talked to quite a few people about that idea.
