NEWSLETTER

WILL WRIGHT, INVENTOR OF SIMCITY, THE SIMS, AND NOW SPORE

On the topic of player creativity, the Spore Creature Creator has been out for two months now, so you’re starting to see the sort of things players are creating. Have they done anything that’s surprised you?

Yeah, right off the bat they surprised us both with the volume of the stuff they made, which I think is approaching 3 million creatures now, and the quality as well. They were doing things with such a high level of quality, just after the first couple of weeks. They were even discovering bugs in our editor that they could make use of to do strange things. Then they started writing petitions to us not to fix the bugs, because they were able to exploit them in interesting, creative ways. Some of these things took us a while to figure out how they were even doing. What’s also interesting is how quickly they’re learning from each other. They’re able to tag content, to apply tags that say whether it’s a monkey or a bird. One of the tags they started applying was “Creator Tip.” Whenever they found a cool trick in the editor for creating something, they put that as the tag, and in the description they would describe the trick. So now they’ve built up a little database of tutorials and tricks you can do in the editor, and all you have to do is search for that tag, Creator Tip, and it will come up with a few thousand features, each one showing an interesting trick somebody discovered. And by doing that, the creators—the players—are actually learning from each other at a pretty accelerated rate.

So as inspirations for Spore, you’ve talked about Powers of 10 and the Drake equation, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the SETI program. Are there any inspirations for the game that you haven’t really talked about in the media yet?

Depends on how deep you go and in what directions. Yeah, there were a lot of inspirations from the biological side, Richard Dawkins and Edward Wilson, primarily. There was a lot of inspiration that was fairly intangible—things like the origin of life. Also, one project was trying to decide how we were going to present the origin of life. Was it going to be biogenesis on earth or panspermia? We went down a lot of those paths researching. I’d say there were also a lot of inspirations that came more on the design side, like in the editors. So if you look at something like the creature editor, we were actually studying a lot of toys and constructive systems, and taking inspiration from those. The creature editor ended up being a combination of Mr. Potato Head, Erector sets, and clay.

What other recent games have you seen that seem innovative to you?

I think a lot of the stuff on the Wii seems fairly innovative not only in terms of how they use the controller or even the Wii Fit, but also in terms of the audience that they’re capturing. I think that one of the dangerous trends in games five years ago was the fact that we were catering so much to hardcore gamers, and we were in danger of cutting off a lot of new players who would come in and enjoy these things if they were more geared to them. We’ve started to see that trend reverse a little bit, and now we’re starting to see a broader variety of games appealing to nongamers, which I think is really good, and I think the Nintendo Wii is probably one of the prime examples of that. But you’re also seeing stuff like Xbox Live and Xbox Arcade, and experimental stuff on the web as well. Some of the DS stuff has been fairly innovative as well, things like Brain Age.

Yeah, Brain Age actually got my mother into gaming, which I thought was impossible.

All of a sudden someone has their parents playing or their grandparents. Now they have senior-league bowling on the Wii in retirement homes. That was a market a lot of people basically figured they would never capture ever.

What influence do you think Spore will have on the game industry?

I think that technically we’ve demonstrated certain things that we can do procedurally that were not available before. In particular, things like procedural animation that will open a lot of new avenues in design. I also think the editors and the ease of use of the editors in Spore are going to potentially open new directions. People won’t realize it, but probably the deepest AI in Spore is inside our editors, not inside the opponent AI. There’s a lot of AI in the editor to try to guess what the player intends as they’re moving things around in there. And that’s why it seems easy to use. So, it’s one of those things that when it works well it’s totally transparent and you don’t even realize how much technology is behind it, but it required a lot of time and effort to get right. When you see the results, all of a sudden you can enable millions of people to make things that used to be more in the realm of the professional artist. That just opens whole new areas of design.

INTERVIEW BY STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD


SHEPPARD'S VIDEO-GAME PIE | 1 | 2 |

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Comments

Anonymous, on Mar 30, 2009 wrote: Spore sucked diiiiiiccckkkkkkk

Anonymous, on Nov 28, 2008 wrote: Man, who would have thought that over the course of several years "copyfighters" would become as obnoxious as scientologists.

Anonymous, on Oct 20, 2008 wrote: what’s DRM?

Anonymous, on Oct 18, 2008 wrote: ’So you’re not saying Spore is shit, you’re saying you’ve got a problem with the DRM. You’re just like the 8,000 zero-star reviews on Amazon that all say "I haven’t played this game, but I read something about it having a DRM and therefore no matter what they do, I will forever hate it on principle."’ no, its shit, i have it, it was fun for about 3 days, then just bores you.

Anonymous, on Oct 15, 2008 wrote: So you’re not saying Spore is shit, you’re saying you’ve got a problem with the DRM. You’re just like the 8,000 zero-star reviews on Amazon that all say "I haven’t played this game, but I read something about it having a DRM and therefore no matter what they do, I will forever hate it on principle."

Anonymous, on Oct 14, 2008 wrote: i don’t know. a friend of mine got an advance copy and he’s knee-deep in virtual evolution every night till 3 AM.

Anonymous, on Oct 13, 2008 wrote: spore is shit. definitely don’t buy it, due to the stupid DRM. Don’t even download it, its fucking boring.

Anonymous, on Oct 11, 2008 wrote: i don’t know about this game but.. look at his eyez