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Will Wright’s keynote address
After game developer Will Wright spoke to a large audience at the SXSW Interactive Festival on Tuesday, I overhead one audience member ask another what he thought.
“Wow,” was the one-word answer.
Wright is the developer behind “The Sims” and “Sim City.” He is considered a revolutionary game developer, launching the most successful PC franchise ever. So there is a lot of hype behind his latest game, “Spore,” which is expected to be released this year after six years of development.
Wright catered to the SXSW audience, talking about parallels between storytelling in games and movies. His left arm was bandaged from a skiing accident, but that didn’t stop him from talking nonstop for an hour, flipping through a lengthy “Power Point” presentation.
“I had way too much coffee today,” Wright said.
He discussed his favorite movies and why they are like games. “Groundhog Day” and “The Truman Show” are most like games, Wright said. “Groundhog Day” showed what happens when the main character was stuck repeating the same day over and over, with different things happening in each day. That’s very similar to games, Wright said, and, in fact, games should emphasize the repetition less, allowing players to skip ahead to different levels. “The Truman Show” is like a game because it sets up a fictional world for the main character, Truman, to live in.
“I wish games were more like ‘The Truman Show,’” Wright said.
“The Sims,” Wright said, helped generate stories more like traditional movies or books. Players would get so involved in their Sims worlds that they would create stories around them and post them online to share with other players. They wrote about everything from what happens at the local Starbucks to the tragic tale of a woman involved in an abusive relationship.
“Games are being though of as a tool for self-expression,” Wright said.
But by far the most engaging part of his speech was his demonstration of “Spore,” a game he has been working on for six years. His games are called “God games” and for good reason. They put total control in the hands of the players.
“Spore” allows a player to construct his or her own creature, using a “creature editor” to add mouths, feet, hands, legs and arms. If a player is successful, the creature will reproduce, building its own tribe, then a species, and eventually take over an entire planet and the universe, traveling via a spaceship that, of course, the player can build and decorate to his or her taste.
He quickly ran through the beginning single-celled organism phase, where he was eaten by a larger creature. Then he showed us what it looks like when that creature moves on to land, where he was again eaten by a competitor species.
“I wasn’t supposed to die,” Wright said.
Wright thinks of his games as a way to extend a player’s imagination. A big fan of Montessori schools, which he attended as a child, Wright creates games that help a player explore and understand how the world works.
“I want it to bring up interesting issues for the players,” Wright said. “When you look at the effect life can have on the universe, it is philosophically staggering.”
“The entire planet is a toy you can play with,” Wright said.
In one memorable example, Wright showed what happens with there are too many greenhouse gases introduced into an Earth-like planet on Spore. The oceans rise, drowning out the continents. Then several different species start dying off and eventually the heat rises so much that the planet turns into a ball of fire, scorched by those gases.
“Our biggest problem as humans, is we are so bad about long-term thinking,” Wright said. “It’s so hard for us to think about 100 years from now.” His game went from teaching evolution to, as he joked, a “sequel to Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’”
“Games have this perception of being simple, meaningless tools we waste our time with,” Wright said. “But we’re already seeing games that change the way we see our behavior and the way we think about the world.”
He finished up with a quick “Thank you, that’s the end.”
He got a standing ovation and was quickly surrounded by dozens of admiring fans.
Wow.
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