|
April 2002
 A CHAT WITH
WILL WRIGHT
GIGnews recruited Melanie Cambron, known by most in
the industry as The Game Recruiting Goddess, to use her
skills for the good of gamekind and recruit some of the
big names in the industry to give us all valuable
insight into what they do and how they do it.
In this interview, Melanie chats up Will Wright,
a man The Wall Street Journal summed up as follows: "In
an industry best known for blood and gore, computer-game
designer Will Wright is an alternative thinker.
Intellectual may be more like it." Co-founder of Maxis
and the man behind SimCity and The Sims, Wright was
recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Science
Hall of Fame, joining other industry luminaries such as
Shigeru Miyamoto, Sid Meier, Hironobu Sakaguchi, and
John Carmack. A recognized visionary, Wright has been
included in Entertainment Weekly’s "It List" of the 100
most creative people in entertainment, as well as Time
Digital’s "Digital 50," a listing of the most important
people shaping technology today. Today, Wright is
working on The Sims Online, an online version of the
best-selling PC game and cultural phenomenon. The game
is scheduled for release in the second half of 2002.
MC: As has been
widely reported, your games are inspired by theories and
ideas posed by some of the world’s great "thinkers." For
example, SimCity, draws upon the urban planning theories
of MIT’s Jay Forrester, TheSims embodies a philosophy
based on the writings of architect Christopher W.
Alexander, and SimEarth is based on the Gaia
theory of atmospheric scientist James Lovelock. How does
your research come about? Does the research beget the
game idea or does the game idea beget the research?
WW: It
usually starts with the research. I’ll find some subject
that I’m reading about that fascinates me. It will pique
my interest and then I’ll slowly become obsessed with
it. About half of those subjects I’ll end up seriously
pursuing as a game project. Some of them I’ll pursue for
a while but then decide that they really don’t make
sense as a game. I’ve always liked studying different
things. That’s one reason why I really like doing game
design. It gives me an excuse to go out and research
these wildly different things for a year or two and then
move onto the next thing later.
MC: What
theories have you researched and contemplated for a
game, but decided it just couldn’t work either from a
design perspective or a marketing perspective?
WW: Some of
these ideas don’t make sense to me initially but then
incubate in my head for a long time. Some of the ideas
I’ve worked on have actually been in the back of my mind
for 5 or 6 years before I actually did anything about
them. Other ones…well, I’m not sure that I’ll really
give them up. One thing that I’ve always wanted to do is
a tactical weather simulation and by tactical I mean
really zoomed in on the intricate nature of a
thundercloud, the way tornadoes form, gust fronts, etc.
If you could visualize the whole thing in 3 dimensions,
I think it would be a fascinating game. It’s very much
an interface challenge though. I actually did some
experiments for a while, pursuing this idea. How you
would simulate a thunderstorm and how you would
visualize the different layers inside it. That’s one of
those ideas I just haven’t quite figured out yet.
MC:
Speaking of Forrester, Alexander, and Lovelock? Do you
know if any of them have ever played your games? I think
Jay Forrester is 84 today, but he was 71 when SimCity
came out. Alexander is 66 and Lovelock is at least 70.
Your games are known for attracting people of all ages.
Have you ever personally talked to any of them about
your games?
WW:
Actually, I know Lovelock and Alexander. I had lunch
with Alexander last week, but I’ve never met Forrester.
Generally, none of those guys are really game players.
Although Lovelock was working pretty closely with us on
SimEarth and so I would send him copies of the game
every few weeks. His grandson would get it all working
for him. They would play it together. I don’t think
Alexander really plays computer games although he’s now
getting interested in the computer side of things much
more than he was. Forrester has done a lot of computer
programming in his time. I don’t really know what his
level of involvement is.
MC: With regard
to The Sims, I’ve read that focus groups hated the game,
and the product-selection committee at your company
actually rejected it. It’s now the best-selling PC game
of all time. Why, do you think, you can "see" things
when, perhaps, other people might not quite get the
picture?
WW: A focus
group is a very difficult thing because you’re going up
in front of these people and describing a concept, but
not showing them the implementation. So you’re basically
leaving it up to their imaginations as to how you would
resolve all the design decisions. Even a designer has a
hard time visualizing this internally. The same thing
goes for product selection committees. If you don’t
actually have something to put in front of them and show
them, and you’re describing this game where you take out
the trash and water the plants… Most people when they
imagine that concept in their minds are not going to
imagine something very compelling. So it’s the
designer’s task to make that into a compelling activity
with interactions, the way it’s visualized, etc.
Play-testing groups are far more valuable than focus
groups. With focus groups, you’re giving them a concept,
but with play-testers you’re putting them in front of a
product and observing the way they actually interact
with it and deal with it. Frequently, you can describe
an idea and it’s so hard to really imagine what the
level of fun is going to be when you are working with a
high level concept until you actually see what the
granular interactions within the game are. What exactly
are you doing? What exactly are you seeing? What are you
hearing? It’s very hard to decide whether the concept
adds up to fun or not.
MC: Your
business partner Mike Winter has been quoted as saying
"Will has more knowledge of human behavior than anyone
I've ever come across." Do you believe that sort of
knowledge is something that can be learned or is it
simply more innate?
WW: I think
Mike was being charitable. I wouldn’t think of it so
much as knowledge of human behavior as it is being
willing to sit back and observe with an empty mind. I
think of it as contemporary anthropology. You sit and
watch people and what they do, trying to imagine what’s
motivating them or why they are doing that. It’s really
just a matter of stopping and opening your senses up to
perceive what’s going on in their heads. The same goes
for your self. When I’m sitting there playing a game, I
always wonder why I am I really doing this? What is the
hook here? What is my compulsion to continue this
activity? It’s usually not the most obvious thing.
Usually there is some underlying mechanism -- some
reason I’m finding a game satisfying or compelling.
That’s the thing that frequently gets lost in our
cognitive processing. We tend to filter out a lot of the
world around us. We’re making decisions all the time,
almost instinctually. We think we know the overt reason
but there’s usually a deeper underlying reason that’s
hard to verbalize sometimes. It’s almost below the
verbal conscious level. In many games in which you enter
the zone of real enjoyment, it’s below the conscious
level but yet there’s some activity there that you’re
finding satisfying or interesting.
MC: An
increasing number of schools are offering degrees in
game design. But when I read about the sources of
inspiration for your games I think there is just no way
that sort of research initiative and insight can be
taught. Nevertheless, Richard Garriott, among others,
has mentioned Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth
as a source of inspiration. Garriott also mentioned
Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet and Being Good
by Simon Blackburn as examples of research material. Are
there any books, in particular, that you believe are
"must reads" for game inspiration?
WW: Our
field has not been around long enough to generate much
in the way of critical theory or language. I think that
every designer needs to find their own center, their own
inspirations. My inspirations wouldn’t necessarily
translate well to other people. There have been a lot of
books that I’ve used over the years that seem to have a
more general application such as Alexander’s book A
Pattern of Language or his earlier book, Notes on
the Synthesis of Form. Scott McCloud’s
Understanding Comics has always been a big
inspiration. I tend to find the most interesting stuff
in the cracks, between fields. Usually, it’s fairly
controversial work like James Lovelock’s work, or that
of Stuart Kaufman or Edward Wilson. These are all people
that have done some of their most significant work
between established fields. Kaufman was between computer
science and biology. Wilson was between biology and
sociology. Alexander was roughly between psychology and
architecture. Those areas that tend to be controversial
because they become interdisciplinary and cross these
arbitrary academic boundaries, I have found to be some
of the richest sources of inspiration for the game ideas
themselves.
MC: I want to
chat a bit about The Sims Online. The last I heard it’s
on track for release in the second half of 2002. What’s
the strategy for marketing The Sims Online? Do you think
the current user base will buy into the monthly
subscription model?
WW: That’s
probably the biggest challenge we face because we are
definitely not going for a hard core gaming audience.
We’re really interested in trying to translate the
online experience to a much more casual crowd. It’s
interesting if you look at our expansion packs. A lot of
our players are buying all of our expansion packs. We’re
getting a huge tie-rate (the percentage of original
players who buy the add-ons) on these expansion packs.
If you look at how often the packs come out and what
they cost, the players are already subscribing to The
Sims. That is, they are already paying over $10 per
month to play The Sims continuously. What we need to do
is give them whatever they’re getting now in a more
compelling online experience. I think that for a lot of
these people it is going to be intimidating going into
an online game, but at the same time very rewarding.
It’s going to bring the social interaction of The Sims
to a whole new level when you are dealing with real
people. The accessibility of the thing is foremost in my
mind. No matter how easy we make an online game it’s
going to be a much trickier deal than a stand-alone. At
the same time it’s going to be a far, far richer
environment. Our players have proven that they have
these huge reservoirs of creativity. That’s really what
we are trying to harness in The Sims Online. We’re
trying to take this dynamic that we’re getting in the
fan community of all these people making cool things and
then everybody else being able to reap those rewards.
We’re trying to bring that to the online space. So if
only 5% of our online players are as creative as they
our in our online fan community, then we’ll be able to
generate a lot of interesting stuff in the game for the
other players. We’re shooting for The Sims player as
opposed to the current online game player.
MC: I recently
interviewed Richard Garriott and talked about Lineage,
the Korean online game he has brought to the U.S. One of
the issues we discussed was broadband. Games like
Lineage are huge in countries such as Korea because of
the wide availability of broadband connections and
internet cafes. The argument also goes that broadband
became so widespread because of the popularity of online
games. Do you think that TSO could be the game that
finally makes widely available broadband a reality in
the US?
WW: No. I
don’t think so. First of all, we are going out of our
way to ensure that The Sims plays very well on a 56K
modem because we think that our fan base, the casual
Sims player, is going to have a lower end platform than
most gamers. The structure of The Sims where we’re
sending these high level events actually makes The Sims
work very well already at low bandwidth. I would contend
that the success of Lineage and what’s going on in Korea
isn’t just based upon the broadband effect. I think
there are more factors at play there, especially
cultural factors. In South Korea, most of the people who
play Lineage live within 50 miles of each other. Someone
you meet in that game you can go out and meet in the
real world, they’re not that far away. There’s a
critical density that would be much more difficult to
attain in the US due to proximity of the players. There
was also a generational jump into the internet cafes and
game rooms. The cultural factors at work over there
around Lineage are very different than the dynamics here
in the US. So I don’t really see The Sims as having a
real big impact on broadband connections.
MC: I’ve
read where you said you think we're going to see more
games with a social focus where you do something besides
kill the other person. And that you would like to think
that because The Sims is just a little outside the box
that game companies might be willing to give more time
to get unusual projects off the ground, but you doubt
that that's the case. As the game industry grows and
become more "corporate" in nature, it seems increasingly
less likely that unusual projects will fostered. How can
developers of unique games get a break?
WW: One of
the big advantages of a large company is the fact that
you can afford to take more risks. A company like
Electronic Arts has a stable of franchises that produce
for them year after year. The Sims is going to become
one of those. SimCity has been one and they’ve also got
all those sports games, Madden, etc. Because of those
predictable successes it buys you the option to roll the
dice on a few unpredictable projects like Majestic. If
it fails, you haven’t lost your company. With a small
developer you get one chance to roll the dice and if it
comes up six you win, otherwise you lose. You’re going
to always have people willing to take that bet but
financially it’s very difficult. Also, it’s also very
hard to get the appropriate resources at that scale. So
unfortunately, a lot of the creative ideas that you’ll
see or have seen are things that probably might have
worked had they had more time and money to develop. I
see a lot of very creative ideas that are just
implemented badly. Usually it’s not the designer’s
fault, it’s that the resources weren’t available. They
couldn’t pull together enough time and money to do the
idea justice. Also, as the industry has become more
mature and consolidated, the existing genres have
solidified to some degree. In the early industry, there
weren’t these well-established genres. Every single game
was different, unique and interesting. Over time these
games have clumped together, real-time strategy,
adventure, flight sim. Getting outside those boxes is
always a struggle in any environment. Where you’re
trying to explain to people that you’re making this new
game and they are always wanting to put it into this
pigeon hole box. Is it a real time strategy or is it
turn-based strategy or what? That, I think, is more of a
conceptual challenge, when you come up with a new idea
that doesn’t fit into any existing genre. How do you
invent a new genre or discover new genre?
MC: If
you could narrow your success down to three key
elements, what would they be?
WW: 1)
People I work with. It’s unfair that as the game
designer I get so much of the credit for these products.
These products are actually built by large teams of very
dedicated people. I’m just one gear in that machine. I’m
not just trying to be modest, that’s really the way it
is. There are so many places where you can drop the ball
on one of these projects. The weakest link can destroy
the whole thing. You’ve got this large group of people
and each one is pulling their own weight in the project.
Most of them are making creative contributions, too. So
game design is really a synthesis. The game designer is
more of a traffic cop than anything. I have people
coming to me all time with ideas and then it’s up to me
to judge those ideas. A lot of the cool ideas that go
into the games are coming from all members of the team.
2) Pathological persistence. When you look at how
long these projects take -- The Sims over 5 years,
SimCity 4 or 5 years -- to stick with an idea that long
takes quite a bit persistence. If you stick with it long
enough, in my experience, I’ve been rewarded. It’s very
satisfying when you’ve done something for that long and
it actually sees the light of day and people enjoy it
and it does well.
3) Curiosity about the world. That’s what draws me
into these other fields. I’m always trying to figure out
the way the world works. That has led me to so many
interesting ideas that have later become games.
MC:
Finally, if the idea behind The Sims was a game where
players would try to make virtual people happy by
designing the perfect house for them, what is your idea
of the perfect house? Is there a real, live Wright dream
house and what is your favorite thing about your house?
WW:
I know several people who
have built their dream house. After seeing them go
through that process, it’s something that I’m in no
hurry to go through. I think one day I might decide to
design my dream house but I much prefer it as an
abstract mental thing in my head as opposed to actually
making blueprints of it. I love the idea of design and I
love designing homes. That’s one of the things that
brought me into The Sims. The idea of the perfect design
seems to be a fallacy, a fleeting concept that can never
be realized. Even people that I’ve seen who have built
their "dream house", have said that they wished they had
done things differently, it’s always a learning
experience. The dream house is always a target you’re
chasing, never something you’ll actually realize.
Because no matter what you build, it just becomes
another point of reference.
BIO
Melanie
Cambron is a recruiter for game industry leaders
such as EA, Sony, and Infogrames. Featured in
Game Design: Secrets of the Sages for her game
industry knowledge, she also wrote the foreword to the
successful book, Game Programming with Direct X 7.0
and its follow-up. Melanie speaks each semester at the
University of Texas at Austin and the University of
North Texas on the game development industry, and is
frequently interviewed by major media such as the Dallas
Morning News for her industry expertise. She also serves
as a consultant to the City of Austin's Interactive
Industry Development Committee. Learn more about the
"Game Recruiting Goddess" at
www.melaniecambron.com or contact her directly at
melanie@melaniecambron.com
 Past
Interviews:
Interview With Stevie
Case and John Romero
(March 2002)
Interview With Richard
Garriott
(February 2002)
Interview With George
Sanger
(January 2002)
Interview With Josh Resnick
(December 2001)
Interview With Paul
Steed (November 2001)
Interview With Marc
Saltzman (October 2001)
Interview With Rick Hall,
Senior Producer, Ultima Online (September 2001)
<<Back
to GIG Spotlight home
|
