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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.'"

3 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The only good... by Oculus+Habent · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A good FPS may entertain for some time, but a simulation game is great. It ends when you want it to, you control how things happen, You can save, come back, do something different and have the game go an entirely different way (try that with Duke Nukem).

    Don't get me wrong, a good multiplayer FPS is great now and then. But I still turn to sim games more often than not.

    Maybe it's my God complex : )

    --
    That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
  2. Re:why they ever don't get it right about game des by Paolomania · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Good game design lets you slip in a role of an actor, not a designer, thats what all the arcade stuff was all about. Gaming is adrenaline (defender, robotron) not administration(warcraft, sim xx) and should be not to time-consuming indeed.

    I see, thats why mod'ability is becoming more and more of a standard feature on games these days. I guess all this time I've been having a blast designing a Warcraft III map, I really just been proving how bad the game is ... mmm hmm

  3. The game Will Wright plays by wormbin · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I'm trying to basically chronicle the average model that the players have made in their heads. It's like cultural anthropology. Already it's having a huge impact on what we do with our expansion packs and the next version of The Sims. We're getting a sense of when people like to play the house building game vs. the relationship game, and what types of families they like to create, what objects they like the most. Eventually, in the not too distant future, we're working towards having this be dynamic on a daily basis so the game in some sense can be self-tuning to each individual player based on what they've done in the game.

    So Will is playing a game where he has to make sure that a million Sims players are happy playing their Sims game. I guess you could call him the only Sims player who is getting paid for playing. :)