The Wright Stuff

Which is counter to current trends -- educational philosophy seems to have taken a huge step towards the three Rs, the basics, what you can regurgitate on a standardized test. And this seems to be going back to process-oriented education, where you're learning problem solving.
And a lot of it also is†you know, some of the most effective education is failure-based, where you're given a system and you can manipulate it and explore different failure states and success states, and all that. Most of our educational system is designed to protect you from failure. You know †here's how you write a proper sentence, here's how you do a math problem without failing. So basically, they don't let you experience failure. Failure is seen as a bad thing, not as a learning experience. And even when you get to the professional world, things like architecture, engineering, industrial design, they teach you how to do it the right way. Where it used to be you would build five bad buildings and they'd fall down and you'd learn yourself †that was more the apprenticeship, craftsmanship model. You'd build 20 bad chairs but eventually learn how to build a good one because you would learn the failure states yourself, inherently †you'd experience them directly. Whereas when you go to engineering school they teach you how not to fail, so you're never directly experiencing those failures. It limits your intuitions. Whereas a kid playing a game †the first thing they do is they'll sit there and play five or six times and learn from that, and they learn at a very core level in a very different way. They've actually explored the whole possibility space. It's not that they've been told 'don't go there because you'll fail' and so they never go there and never experience it directly on their own. They're encouraged to do that all on their own, in fact they're directly building that possibility map.

We talked about the fact that you're platform agnostic, coming out on PC first. Are you looking at Spore on consoles?
The PC is a lower-friction development environment when you're doing innovative stuff. And especially something that has such as strong network connection like Spore does, we need a hub, really, as the core experience that we first do. Because if our server content is going to be platform agnostic, we want to figure out what is the biggest funnel for that content into the server that we can build right off the bat, and the PC seems like the best platform for that. And now we can flow the content to other platforms as well. But hopefully all that content will be platform independent. But the PC is a really good environment still in a number of ways relative to consoles, primarily because we have a high-res monitor, we have a mouse as an input device, and they're pretty much universally connected to the net. And some of the consoles are starting to get aspects of these things, but to have all three of these things in one device is still really valuable from a gaming point of view.

I would imagine building an editor for creating creatures using just the console controlsâ€.
That's where the mouse is actually a wonderful input device. I just love the mouse as a gaming input device.

â€it's sort of like trying to draw with mittens on.
I mean the Wii, in fact, is one of the more interesting ones because of that. It's still not as precise as the mouse, but it's much better from my point of view for random access of the screen compared to a controller joypad.

Obviously as a kid you didn't dream of being a computer game designer, seeing as how there was no industry at that point. What did you think you were going to do?
I always thought I was going to be some sort of engineer or architect †those were the two things that really kind of captured my fancy. But basically I thought I'd be making things. I always liked making things as a kid. I spent a lot of time building models, lots and lots of models, planes, tanks, ships, whatever. When I got my first computer I realized that hey, I can build models on the computer now and they're dynamic, so I could build these much more interesting models. And that's what got me into simulation and AI. Kind of in between all that I also got very interested in robots, as kind of a hybrid, an interesting form of modeling, really modeling people. People seemed like the most interesting thing to try to model. And that's kind of been a hobby of mine since before I got my first computer and it still is†building robots.

At this point there are game development curricula at many institutions of higher education. Good idea or bad idea, if you want to work in the industry? Or do you go study art history or whatever and then show up at EA?
Well there are a few programs that are actually turning out some really good graduates now. And I try to stay on top of these pretty closely, get to know the professors teaching the best courses across the country, because I'm actually trying to harvest really good interns from these people. And the ones that are working out well tend to be a really nice blend of technology and art, to where you end up with technologists, programmers, whatever, that have very well-developed art sensibilities, or you have artists that have a good appreciation for using digital tools, and the new spaces that those open for artistic expression. And one of the most successful ones is at CMU. They have this program, the Entertainment Technology program, and it was co-developed between the computer science department and the art department. And we've probably, at EA, hired at least half the people coming out of that program. There are about five universities around the country that have pioneered these new programs. And I'm not talking about vocational schools, things like Digipen and stuff like that, I'm talking about more the fundamentals of how should we teach this to the next generation.

One of the things I've always liked about covering the industry and hanging out with developers is that it's kind of a community of mutts. It's not like we all went to j-school or went to whatever. It's all people who developed some liberal arts or technical expertise and then were drawn to gaming.
There's huge diversity of experience. You're getting people that came in from architecture or movie-making or engineering, and that's a really interesting creative mixture of these different design fields. And game design in general, if you look at all the things you need to know that fall into game design, it's probably the richest design field there is, relative to any other design field. You have aspects of industrial engineering, music, architecture, film and video, usability, cognitive psychology, product design †all these things become components of game design.

And at some level, marketing.
Yeah, it's entertainment. How do you basically show a person that this is something that they'd enjoy doing with their discretionary time.

And I've been doing this long enough to remember buying games on cassettes in baggies that one guy built in his garage...

In a month.