Pop!Tech 2006: Dangerous Ideas

Will is one of the most successful designers of interactive entertainment in the world. Credited with establishing “Simulation Reality” as a new genre in a gaming world previously focused on action and sports,

Will is the creative force behind the award-winning game franchises SimCity and The Sims. The total sales for these two properties exceed 70 million games sold, to date.

From Will Wright’s point of view, we can gain a complex way of understanding the world, using very simple rules. Ever since we have had the ability to customize our desktops, we’ve been creating expressions of our identities, creating a “curve” of creation that started at crap and ended at something better. The trend in game development started the same way.

Wright uses the term “player” to describe those of us who create. According to his experience, players love making and sharing their content, but instead of the players building static models that participate in a game, today the paradigm is one of the games creating the players. Games become a measurable, formalized environment that offers loads of data that suggest players spend much more time building complexity into their models. In that sense, computers become a creative amplifier for the player.

In a demonstration of his new game Spore, Wright created a creature with a few mouse clicks, and the computer fills in the basics of evolution. The game takes it from there. In the space of a few minutes, Wright not only hunted and mated, but he created a vehicle that was able to explore other lands, planets and galaxies.