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Will Wright on developing Spore |
Listed in: Titles Tags: aliens, SETI, Will Wright
PopSci caught a bite with Spore creator Will Wright, the game developer responsible for rendering millions glued to their computer screens with their worldwide hit, The Sims series. His latest creation, due to ship this fall, took him seven years to finish. The game, showing its Sims roots, allows players to create worlds all the way from the microscopic up to the galactic scale.Growing up, Will always thought that he was going to be an architect or an engineer. He was the sort of kid who "spent a lot of time building models, lots and lots of models, planes, tanks, ships, whatever." When he got his first computer, he realized that he could build more interesting models.
Building models is still his favorite pastime and the latest game he built still deals with creating and modeling; in particular, a game where players pilot the development of life from a single cell into a galactic empire. The creative aspect of the Wright games has always appealed to women. Will this game be more "masculine" than its predecessors, The Sims, which appealed more strongly to the female contingent? Will responds,
I think Spore is going to feel like a much more elaborate creative palette than The Sims did, and itÂ’s a matter of making the environment of creatures and evolution and traveling in space not seem off-putting or too science-y but make it feel like a very natural narrative environment, where I naturally want to tell a story in these worlds
Will believes that, although Spore touches established scientific theories, in particular, Darwinian evolution, 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 multi cell to intelligence. It's a pretty educational game, Will thinks, but in an unstructured way. It has always been about creativity, and a bit of a humor, for the 47-year-old genius.Spore started development in 2000, when Will Wright started researching on the SETI project. SETI is the collective name for a number of organized efforts to detect intelligent aliens. When asked about where he sees gaming moving in the future, Will muses,
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.
Will is currently working on a documentary about the Russian space program, but from the above talk of the computer "playing against the player" make us wonder. There must be more addicting games the magnitude of The Sims and his latest Spore coming up! Ahh, expect more sleepless days and nights being controlled by the Wright-simulation creatures, then!
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