The Wright Stuff

So what you leave out of that equation is the socializing you get in say a Second Life.
The face-to-face socializing, yeah. we're still hoping to have the asynchronous socializing through content, which we're already seeing in The Sims web community. huge communities form with very well-known people based on the content they've made, other people taking that content and telling cool stories with it. So that's the kind of socialization I want to focus on with Spore, that worked very well with The Sims.

Speaking of which†Sims Online seemed like a slam dunk, got huge press, it was going to change the nature of gaming. And it still exists, but it wasn't the raging success people were expecting.
I think that's actually the reason, because with The Sims, I think people love controlling this experience, and creating everything, and playing out these stories, and having the ultimate power to shape the experience and environment to whatever they want to. In an online game you can't even pause the game, or speed it up †you can't control time at all, because everybody has to be on the same time sync. So I think the empowering part of The Sims is one of the reasons it was so successful, the fact that I could be creative with how the experience unfolded, but the limitations of an online game meant that you really couldn't have any power over other players, or much control over the environment itself or even over the timeline. So those two things felt like they were really in opposition to me. Plus the majority of our players of The Sims, sort of our mainstay, are teenage girls for the most part. And these were also players who never played any other game. So the prospect of getting them to actually subscribe to a game for $10 a month was a very difficult business proposition to these people, who a lot of them don't even have credit cards. I mean I'm a hardcore gamer and I don't subscribe to any online games, and getting a casual player to do the same, it's totally different.

I find I don't subscribe to World of Warcraft †I appreciate what they did, but I have maybe a half hour to play, an hour to play, on my own schedule. I can't join a guild and make commitments †I have enough trouble keeping commitments to my own family.

Oh I know - same here!
And it seems like gaming more and more is slotted in, as opposed to the kid playing obsessively.

I think it's more interstitial time now, where you have these little tiny blocks of time that you carve out that you want to play a game in. I mean, that's why I play Battlefield all the time, because I can sit down and play half an hour of Battlefield, it's really satisfying and I don't have to worry if I never play it again for another two months. I'm not paying anything, nobody's waiting for me, no commitments. I can have a nice half-hour satisfying experience.

Which brings up an interesting question. If I've created a world in Spore, will I be able to play on my cellphone and somehow link back into that.
We are actually looking at versions for all these different platforms, and the content that you make in the game, because it compresses to these incredibly small files, is pretty much platform agnostic. It's small enough to where you can easily send anything you've jade in Spore down to a cellphone, it's just a matter of reconstituting it at that resolution. Our creatures should be compressible down to about 3K each, and they're one of the largest pieces of content.

So I could theoretically then have an editor that I carried on my cellphone and then send it back to the game when I got home?
Well, the hard part here is building a satisfying editor on your cellphone, not sending the creature back and forth, that's the easy part. But like a Nintendo DS or something, that's plausible.

Do you see Spore, or the rest of your games for that matter, as being educational?
I think in a deep way yeah †that's kind of why I do them. But not in a curriculum-based, 'I'm gong to teach you facts' kind of way. I think more in terms of deep lessons of things like problem-solving, or just creativity †creativity is a fundamental of education that's not really taught so much. But giving people tools†what it means to be human is to learn to use tools to basically expand your abilities. And I think computer games are in some sense a fundamental tool for our imagination. If we can let players create these elaborate worlds, there's a lot of thought, design thought, problem solving, expression that goes into what you're going to create. You know, I think of the world of hobbies, which isn't what it used to be. When I was a kid, you know, people that were into trains had a big train set and they spent a lot of time sculpting mountains and building villages, or they might have been into slot cars or dollhouses or whatever, but these hobbies involved skill, involved creativity, and at some point involved socialization. Finding other people and joining the model train club, comparing and contrasting our skills, our approaches. And I think a lot of computer gaming has kind of supplanted those activities, they have a lot of the aspects of hobbies. Especially the games that allow the player to be creative and to share that creativity and form a community around it. I think just in general, play is about problem-solving, about interacting with things in an unstructured way to get a sense of it and what the rules are.