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Changing The World With Videogames
Will Wright gave the keynote address at the Texas SXSW event, showing off Spore to a packed crowd and offering up hopes that 'Toys' will change the world. His hope is that offerings like Spore might force kids to rethink their understandings of nature. Likewise, non-linear storytelling via 'branching' gaming is what he sees as the future of the medium. He cites the movie Groundhog Day as an example, a movie which told the same story over and over again but never did it the same way twice. "'I think if we can teach the computer to listen to the story that players are telling,' Wright said, a game could detect patterns of what the player wants, and adjust music, lighting, and other immersive elements to reflect the story that a player wants to play. He thinks this modeling would best be accomplished by networks that constantly mine and refine player information." Alice, of the Wonderland blog, helpfully provides extensive notes, and Kotaku has a video of the demo the attendees saw.
Why is the article titled "Changing The World With Videogames"? It sounds more like "Tuning Videogames to Provide People with a Better Way of Ignoring the World"
In other news, Will Wright is anticipating a flourishing of urban planning with the release of SimCity 5, a solution to the problem of childhood obesity with SimFat's release, and a growth of grandiose sales pitches with SimSoftwareDesigner.
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So the kids who torture real small animals for fun will suddenly gain a conscience when faced with simulated ones?
The game isn't meant to say, "This is exactly how evolution works." Not having played it, this is a guess, but it's supposed to illustrate some of the basic principles and let kids have some fun while learning it.
Animals also don't evolve as you go outside and look at the real thing; it's a process that typically takes millions of years. And I'm sorry, but David Attenborough is boring.
If you want your kids playing outside instead of playing video games, that's fine, I encourage it too, and more power to you. But I find it a little snooty to look down on something that is trying to be a little more intelligent than your typical Grand Theft Auto or Doom game that so many other kids are playing these days.
Maybe it won't change the world, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
No, the virtual world in Ender's Game (which actually had nothing to do with the title, just to make that clear) was a system designed to lead the children on a path of self-exploration. It had very, very little to do with what the child wanted and had everything to do with what the child needed.
Wright's comment deals only with wants, and not at all with needs.
His comment is interesting, though. He's suggesting that a TheSims-type player would be playing a game with marriage, kids, and happy music while a Halo-type player would end up with lightning and dark music, and an alien invasion. A game that could adapt this much would pretty much be the ultimate game and would therefore destroy the games industry. Thank heavens it isn't possible yet, or in the near future.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Will Wright is probably so smart because he's been working out. Did you see how buff he is in that article?
All kidding aside, yeah, video games do have the potential to change the world, both for the better, and the worse. In instances like WoW or Evercrack, people have let it ruin their lives through loss of jobs, divorces, etc. That's not the games' faults though. I play WoW for maybe 4-5 hours a week, sometimes less. It can still be fun, and it doesn't dominate my life.
But then there's the "Serious Games" that can be used to train people on doing many real world tasks while helping to keep them from making deadly mistakes.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
A few of the problems they will have is that people don't know what they want, and they play games to escape real life problems which stay resident in their mind like AOL on a PC.
You'll have games that won't satisfy people unless the theme goes completely dark, and has the person lost frantically searching for a ray of hope that leads to nothing (Like WoW for instance.)
Seriously though, I don't think I want the same thing from every game. I (used to) play WoW to have some feeling of accomplishment in my lame life. I play Need for Speed so that I don't hit 160mph on the freeway on a daily basis (I try and keep that to a yearly event these days...)
I play games sometimes to take risks that I could not take in real life. Sometimes I play a game to get away from stress knowing the game rules will not change. Yes kids, the rules of real life can change on a daily basis. DST anyone? Physics however (so far in my experience) has stayed the same.
Wouldn't it be awesome to teach kids that if you drive too fast and wreck your car that you loose & can't play the game for 3 weeks, because you don't have money to pay for the damage to other persons property & fix your car? Sure would have made me think twice that one time when I was 18...
It's a neat Idea, but I think it won't work for any game type other than MMOG. I don't think there is a gamer out there who wouldn't want to take his Ultima work, and apply it to EQ, then take his EQ avatar, and put him in DAOC, then take that DAOC extension of themselves, and move him to WoW.
That Idea rocks. It's solid because people get very attached to their Avatars. I know because I am going through separation anxiety right now as I tell Blizzard to eF off when they failed to reimburse my char for a scam. In real life, you don't get reimbursed for a scam. The bank says "sucks to be you, move along." In videogames, There is a trail of that money, and they know EXACTLY where it goes. They usually are supposed to be unevenly fair towards the player. It's really to bad I can't take that guy and stick him in a different game.
I think what he is saying here is just that games will drive the vision of technological growth in the future just as Sci-Fi & comic books did in years past. While that statement is true, It's also -1 obvious. There is no doubt that the future will be shaped, has been shaped by VG's. Just ask Block-Buster & Hollywood video, or the Movie industry in general.
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While he used both of those as examples, he went on to say that the movie whose structure he wanted to emulate the most in an interactive game fashion was The Truman Show, not Groundhog's Day, and that branching paths were the most primitive method of dynamic storytelling, not the way of the future. What he saw as an interesting way of telling a dynamic story was creating a dual-layered system:
1 - Story Parsing. Like Natural Language Parsing, this would be a system of metrics that would allow the game to figure out what kind of story the player was trying to play. E.g. if the player was trying to play a horror story, the game would dim the lights, thunder would crash, etc. However, these superficial effects would be coupled with:
2 - Story Building Blocks. These small bits and pieces of story would have various compatible inputs and outputs. For example, lets say you have the story bit "boy leaves home", and another story bit "girl gets hurt". These would not have any compatible connection - the first bits outputs might be compatible with other story building blocks that are about maybe an adventure, or something happening to the boy. Likewise, the second story building block would have compatible inputs to other story devices about girls or injuries. So when you add the story block "boy meets girl" then you can have a smooth, dynamic story - "boy leaves home", "boy meets girl", "girl gets hurt". But of course you would be drawing from a massive pool of dramatic elements.
Obviously that is a very high-level look at the system, but Mr. Wright seemed to think that there was some considerable promise in that powerful, combined approach. He also went on to say some very insightful things about who to tweak this system to create a believable and organic climax at the end of the story, so that there is still an end state and a sense of satisfaction for players. He called this tweaking "dramatic amplification", and it was a method of creating larger and larger world state changes with smaller and smaller events until you reach some apex; e.g. in Star Wars, when Luke is shooting his torpedoes into the exhaust vent, there are only two possible outcomes: either he misses, and alderan (or whatever planet they were trying to explode at the time) is destroyed utterly, OR the death star itself explodes. Minor event, massive world state changes; dramatic amplification!
It was a fascinating speech delivered at his apparently usual whirlwind speed, inspiring stuff!
Groundhog Day: The Game was made about 8 years ago. It was called Majora's Mask.