Link: The New Yorker: Fact: GAME MASTER.
Great couple of paragraphs in this new longer story in the New Yorker, about Will Wright, the ground-breaking creator of the immersion game Sims. I couldn't help myself. I had to pull out excerpts.
It's a typically long New Yorker piece, so go read the whole thing, some time when you're eating dinner by yourself. I love those good long reads.
Speaking of gods and god-games... right now I'm plowing through the wonderful Harper's "Soldiers of Christ," on the Colorado Springs megachurch and Pastor Ted Haggard's leadership of it (and his connection to the Bush administration). I'm feeling awfully pleased with myself that I'd read it when it first came out in May 2005. Gives the recent Ted Haggard stories much more context (you think it's because his last name is a slant rhyme with Jimmy Swaggart? Do you suppose Jimmy used to swagger? Is Ted feeling a bit haggard these days?)
If you've been living under a rock the last two days (or are reading this from deep in the archives):
My favorite bits about game designer Will Wright in the article below are in bold.
Link: The New Yorker: Fact: GAME MASTER.
GAME MASTER
Will Wright changed the concept of video games with the Sims. Can he do it again with Spore?
Issue of 2006-11-06
Posted 2006-10-30[...]
Among the pioneers of the God game was Peter Molyneux, of Great Britain, who created Populous, in 1989. The game gives the player omniscient power over a variety of simulated societies. (You can help them or torture them as you wish, although your actions have consequences in the game.) Another important God-game designer, Sid Meier, has based his Civilization series, which began to appear in 1991, on historical processes, such as scientific discovery, war, and diplomacy. But the master of the genre—the god of God games—is Will Wright. Beginning in 1989, with SimCity, in which the object is to design and manage a modern city, and continuing with The Sims, in 2000, in which you care for a family in an ordinary suburban environment, 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?” To game designers, Wright is the Zola of the form: the man who moved the subject matter of games away from myth, fantasy, and violence and toward ordinary social life.
For the past six years, Wright has been working on a new game, which will be released in 2007. It is anticipated with something like the interest with which writers in Paris in the early twenties awaited Joyce’s “Ulysses.” At first, Wright called the project Sim Everything, but a few years ago he settled on the name Spore. 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 isn’t a multiplayer game, like the immensely popular World of Warcraft, which runs on “massively parallel” computers (a distributed system employing many networked machines); it’s 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.
[...]
Wright had been working on a Power-Point presentation of a talk he had been asked to give about Spore. “It’s supposed to be about how I came up with the game, but what I really want to talk about is the history of astrobiology, so I’m doing both,” he said. He moved over to the two computers in his office and clicked through some images, while describing the basic structure of Spore. At first, I was baffled. Up to this point in his career, Wright has been including more and more social realism in his games. But Spore is a surprise—at a glance, it looks like a “cartoony bug game,” as one contributor to a gaming Web site put it. The buildings don’t have the crisp urban lines of SimCity; they look more like the architecture in Dr. Seuss books. Wright has also introduced weapons and conquest. The violence isn’t gratuitous—in some cases, you have to kill to survive—but it isn’t sugar-coated, either. Not only do you kill other creatures in Spore but you have to eat them.
[...]
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