Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Will Wright on Game Design

Posted by michael on from the sim-life dept.

Torill writes "Celia Pearce interviews Will Wright in the article "Sims, Battle Bots, Cellular Automata Gods and Go", in Game Studies, volume 2. Wright talks about the philosophy behind his games, one of which is The Sims: 'What are you trying to do with this thing that you're creating? To really put the player in the design role. And the actual world is reactive to their design.'"

5 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds complicated by Blue+Screen+Windows · · Score: 3, Funny

    What's wrong with just playing MineSweeper?

  2. Obligatory PA link by flipperboy · · Score: 2, Funny


    Another recent Will Wright interview

  3. After reading the article... by Wind_Walker · · Score: 4, Funny
    I pray to God that Will Wright never names his kids after himself. After reading the article, and its constant

    CP: Question
    WW: Answer

    I just have to wonder what a question would be like to his child, Will Wright II.

    CP: Question
    WW2: Answer

    And God help us all if he has a WW3...

  4. Echoes a few things by ianscot · · Score: 5, Funny
    Layer on layer, isn't it?

    Right now I'm doing some pretty serious data mining of all those families that have been uploaded to our Exchange--looking at the average family composition, what they tend to do in the game on a daily basis. I'm actually graphing kind of a gameplay landscape.

    CP: So you're making a model of the model.

    WW: (Laughs.) Yes. I'm trying to basically chronicle the average model that the players have made in their heads. It's like cultural anthropology.

    How many layers of self-reference are involved with my friend Dave? His Sims characters always end up in a destructive loop in which they only get gratification from staying home and playing computer games. Their social skills deteriorate until they get so satisfaction from other people, so they have to resort more and more to the games... Art imitates life imitates art imitates life...

    The references to Pinball Construction Set -- had it on the C64 -- and old Avalon Hill-style wargames made a lot of sense. That Pinball title from EA was way ahead of itself; you had the sort of "how does the ball bounce" physics model to work around in a nonstructured way. Anyone who's ever made a map for Myth II would recognize the exercise.

    And yeah, Sims games are sort of a natural (side)step from the "rules lawyer" problem everyone had playing Squad Leader. Even "real time" tactics/strategy games basically just use the processor speed of the cpu to grind through the "rules" better than we could with those 40-page booklets: think of the whole "fog of battle" premise for unit visibility in something like Warcraft or Myth, and then think of the impossible "hidden unit" scenarios in Squad Leader.

    But the open-ended quality of the true Sims game is special, and we owe this guy. Or Dave does, anyway. It's the only satisfaction he really gets any more...

    --
    "Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
  5. Even Video Games by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    In the middle of the article it was talking about a future version of the sims. This proposed version would periodically download what you were doing to the main server, and based on that would decide what your experience was going to be.

    Maybe I should stop the "Murder and Mayhem" version of the sims where I invite people over then seal them into small rooms where they slowly starve to death. I might get a visit from the pre-crime unit (Homeland defense)