Will Wright's ideas on gaming: Concepts, etc. *

[cbarcus]

This is not of course news, but I thought people here might be interested in reading about Will Wright. Quite humorous yet informative. Enjoy.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/06/061106fa_fact

From the essay:

Wright created situations that redefined the boundaries of what a game can be.

“It occurred to me that most books and movies tend to be about realistic situations,” he has said. “Why shouldn’t games be?”

[Spore] is anticipated with something like the interest with which writers in Paris in the early twenties awaited Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

The game draws on the theory of natural selection. It seeks to replicate algorithmically the conditions by which evolution works, and render the process as a game. Conceptually, Spore is radical: at a time when most game makers are offering ever more dazzling graphics and scenarios and stories, Wright and his backer, Electronic Arts, are betting that players want to create the environments and stories themselves—that what players really like about games is exploring what Wright calls “possibility space.” “Will has a reality-distortion field around him,” his former business partner, Jeff Braun, told me. “He comes up with the craziest idea you’ve ever heard, and when he’s finished explaining it to you the world looks crazy—he’s the only sane person in it.”

[Spore is] what Wright jokingly calls a massively parallel single-player game. If you enable an Internet feature, Spore servers will “pollinate” your copy of the game with content created by other players. In order to create the best content for your style of play—“the right kind of ecosystem for your creature,” as Wright puts it—Spore builds a model of how you play the game, and searches for other players’ content that fits that model. If you create a hyper-aggressive Darwinian monster, for example, the game might download equally cutthroat opponents to test you. In other words, while you are playing the game, the game is playing you.

“Montessori taught me the joy of discovery,” Wright told me. “It showed you can become interested in pretty complex theories, like Pythagorean theory, say, by playing with blocks. It’s all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori—if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design.”

They wore night-vision goggles so that they could drive fast in the dark without headlights and avoid the cops.

One day in his office, Wright showed me an e-mail he had received from Lara M. Brown, a professor of political science at California State University, Channel Islands, in response to an essay he had written for Wired about the educational value of video games. Brown, who uses technology in her own teaching, wrote, “Most of us are in agreement that this younger generation—raised on video games—has learned to be reactive, instead of active, and worse, they have lost their imaginative abilities and creativity because the games provide all of the images, sounds, and possible outcomes for them. Our students tend to not know how to initiate questions, formulate hypotheses, or lead off a debate because they like to wait to see what ‘comes at them.’ They also have difficulty imagining worlds (places and/or historical times) unless you (as a professor) can provide them with a picture and a sound to go along with the words. . . . In essence, they seem to have lost the ability to visualize with their minds.”

Wright, though, believes that video games teach you how to learn; what needs to change is the way children are taught. “The problem with our education system is we’ve taken this kind of narrow, reductionist, Aristotelian approach to what learning is,” he told me. “It’s not designed for experimenting with complex systems and navigating your way through them in an intuitive way, which is what games teach. It’s not really designed for failure, which is also something games teach. I mean, I think that failure is a better teacher than success. Trial and error, reverse-engineering stuff in your mind—all the ways that kids interact with games—that’s the kind of thinking schools should be teaching. And I would argue that as the world becomes more complex, and as outcomes become less about success or failure, games are better at preparing you.

SimCity was slow to catch on, but seventeen years later the game has earned the company two hundred and thirty million dollars. A sizable number of players who first became interested in urban design as a result of the game have gone on to become architects and designers, making SimCity arguably the single most influential work of urban-design theory ever created.

 

[cbarcus]

change thread title please

Blast! I think 'A New Yorker Magazine essay on Will Wright' would be a more accurate description. If someone senior could make the change, I'd greatly appreciate it.

 

[cbarcus]

Will Wright on Shigeru Miyamoto in TIME

http://www.time.com/time/asia/2006/heroes/bl_miyamoto.html

Ask video-game producers which individual has had the most creative impact on this burgeoning art form, and the name you will hear over and over again is Shigeru Miyamoto. Chief game designer for Nintendo, Miyamoto has been called the Walt Disney of electronic gaming.

Miyamoto specializes in testing the limits of imagination.

By understanding the nature of play—the activities that we all enjoyed as children but are later taught to eschew as adults—Miyamoto is able to create engrossing games that rekindle very old and yet very satisfying learning experiences in a fresh way.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Any particular reason you've decided to link these 2 year old articles? You might want to actually create discussion points rather than just quoting things if you had some discussion in mind.

 

[cbarcus]

Any particular reason you've decided to link these 2 year old articles? You might want to actually create discussion points rather than just quoting things if you had some discussion in mind.

Thanks for the suggestion!

What do people think of Wright's ideas about toys and learning? Has anyone gone back, examined the game anew, and come up with a different feeling about it? Any opinions about Wright's desire to introduce more people to long-term thinking through gaming (may not have been in the article, but he does explicitly state this elsewhere)? Does Wright's game design effectively draw upon Miyamoto's legacy? Does anyone else think that the generative technologies present in Spore will become far more common in other games?

Any other ideas?

 

[Danalys]

games are still too limited really. even with something like spore i think there will be many things it doesn't take into account about the creatures you create. i mean i thought of a creature that's half horse half octopus with mouths on the end of it's tendrils, but in real life would it possibly choke on food. there any number of factors that wont be taken into account. so you'll end up playing the game thinking about how to deal with the things it does take into account, reverse engineering the rules and then exploiting them.

i certainly think games can be educational. just setting a game in the past with life simulations for NPC in the vain of shen mue would teach people a lot as they could really get a feel for a place.

then there's the difference between story driven, fulfill a role games and the story of the game games. i think both have their place. there are real life analogs, like football for example where the story of the game can be told afterwards. sports are so popular because they have a large “possibility space.” but then we also like to fulfill specific roles at times, rather than forge our own.

when it comes to children's games inspiring gameplay, it's kind of weird because many children's games derive from survival techniques, hide and seek being hunted or hunter. then the games of course mimic the situations that inspired the children's games.