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Will Wright on Game Design
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.'"
Well, this was one of the things that was never done. Anyway, it would be really nice to see a MMORPG in which it would be allowed to create your own software controlled androids - and see how they survive and mix with real -human controlled -players. Not just "bots" that complete simple routines, but something that tries to learn, evolve and survive in that world.
Is anything like this happening already?
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...
Is anything like [Learning Bots] happening already?
Two examples:
1) Technosphere http://www.technosphere.org.uk/
2) RoboCode http://apps.alphaworks.ibm.com/rumble/
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.
Lots of people share your opinion, that's OK--we all play differently. ;-) For example, I enjoy the kinds of games he's talking about. There's something voyeuristic and interesting about playing a game -similar- to reality, but not quite. I was constantly making up games as a kid. Card games that played like strategy board games, acted-out games, computer games that vaguely operated like arcade games...and what was fun was that given a very loose rule set, you eventually created a good game, with rules of your own creation. Typical toy soldiers scenario--take a hundred green plastic men, an unkempt bedroom, and anything can happen! One group defects. There are spies. A dog suddenly kills off a dozen of your country's best. This is great fun (for me)!
Strategy games, and also games like the Sims, are a foggy mirror on reality, and although there are sometimes 'better' ways to play each game, the rules are not limited to those in the book/code. For example, say in Civ I have a really successful Swordsman, who has had numerous victories under his belt, but now is becoming outdated. Instead of upgrading/scrapping him, I will usually send him to either the capital city, or the city last conquered, and station him there for eternity as a reminder of their courage. This action -definitely- doesn't affect the gameplay much, but it means the world to my gaming experience. With something like the Sims, the experience (like life) is composed almost entirely of those kinds of experiences alone. 'Oh, that's the guy who peed in my kitchen...ew.' 'I tried hitting on her once...didn't work.' These are experiences, which for me are a little more memorable than, for example, 'how damn high my resolution was.' Note that I enjoy FPS' as well, and you can build the same sorts of experiences playing those...I just meant to speak to the notion that open-ended games are interesting, at least to some.
Gaming is growing up, fitfully and slowly. There are those of us who believe that was is now called gaming will become the definitive media of the 21st century, the way that film and television were the definitive media for the first and second half of the 20th. For this to happen, the media will have a number of explosions past its existing boundaries and expectations. Did you know that film got its start as an amusement park curiosity and as an arcade amusement? If you began with the early history of film - Lumiere, Melies - you would have had virtually no way of predicting it would become a social institution in which hundreds of people sat together in dark rooms watching 2 hour long narratives.