The Wright Stuff

I know the actual budget figure for developing Spore is a confidential number, but it's not small. Is that influencing the design?

In the industry that has a huge influence on design. People saying 'OK, we're going to put tens of millions of dollars behind A or B. A is a sequel to something that we saw sell before, B is some weird thing we have no idea what it is.' Getting people to roll dice on B is very, very hard. Which is why we've seen, I think, this dearth of innovation recently. But it seems like it's swinging back now toward innovation. Nintendo is a good example, on the DS and now with the Wii, we're seeing innovation being rewarded with market awareness and excitement relative to just pouring lots of money behind evolutionary progress. At E3 every year it's always 'what have you seen that's new, what have you seen that's new,' and there are these multi-million-dollar productions, really beautiful, HD, etc.,. etc., and still they're not that impressive to us because it feels like a natural continuation of what we saw last year and the year before and the year before. Whereas things that are truly innovative, as long as they can rise above the noise level, people are genuinely excited about them.

If you look at the economics you can say 'OK, this game is going to cost x, we're going to sell that much,' but also it's going to open up these other design areas that, if the market sees them as innovative and we've solved these core things that are technologically very defensible †I mean it was hard to solve a lot of these problems, and it will be years before other companies can catch up to this stuff. I mean, still to this day it's remarkable to me that nobody's come up with a really good competitor to The Sims, seven years later.

What other projects are you involved in? I understand you're working on a documentary about the Soviet space program?

Oh yeah, that's one of my long-term projectsâ€very long-termâ€

Where do you see gaming moving in the future?
One thing that really excites me, that we're doing just a little bit of in Spore†I described how the computer is kind of looking at what you do and what you buy, and developing this model of the player. I think that's going to be a fundamental differentiating factor between games and all other forms of media. The games can inherently observe you and build a more and more accurate model of the player on each individual machine, and then do a huge amount of things with that †actually customize the game, its difficulty, the content that it's pulling down, the goal structures, the stories that are being played out relative to every player. So in some sense you're teaching the game about yourself and it becomes kind of your ultimate playmate, in terms of knowing 'oh, I think you'd enjoy this' or 'try that,' and it's kind of playing against you. You and I might buy the same game off the shelf one day, play it for a month and, a month later, our games are almost unrecognizably different †because yours has evolved to fit and entertain you, and mine has evolved to fit and entertain me. And I think that's something that's going to be a fundamental thing about games about ten years from now, because we're just starting to see that more and more at this point.

That also answers one of the problems I see in the gaming world, where everything has to be incredibly difficult, because the reviewing structure rewards being really hard because it's professional gamers who are the opinion leaders.
That's a huge problem because what we're doing is closing the door to new players. We're seeing that with these forty and fifty hour games. Where most people would be more than happy to buy a game for $30 bucks and play it for five hours if they could play it all the way through and it was an entertaining experience. But people are forced to cater to the hardcore, or the Internet crowd†So I think games that have the ability to self-balance to your interest level, your skill level and your time commitment, all three of those things. Your pacing †how often do you play, do you play in ten minute chunks or in one hour chunks †and the game should be able to detect that and adjust itself accordingly.

I talked with developers before about how frustrating it is that they devote incredible amounts of work to building those last levels of a gameâ€.
â€that nobody ever gets to. It's even worse when most people only see ten percent of a game, then they get frustrated or stuck and then they miss most of it. I would imagine if you look at all the games that are bought and how much the actual people play through them, it's probably like 20 percent.

Cooperative gaming is pretty rare at this point, which seems like shame. Because if I want to play with my kid, I don't necessarily want to be blowing his brains out.

And games are one of those funny things where it can be a very social experience relative to like sitting there watching television together, it's amazing. Just watching kids in front of their game consoles, how much intense socialization they go through. Playing Mario Kart or something, even when they're competing, it ends up being a bonding experience. And I think most people see first-person shooter multiplayer games as this very aggressive thing, but in fact if you look at the group of people playing kind of before and after, it feels much more like a bonding experience, they're having a shared experience, even though they're shooting each other in the game, it's really like they're playing cowboys and indians or tag or something. From their point of view it's not like they're hurting each other and having a fight, it's that they're sitting there playing this sport together, and they come away all having this shared experience.