The Wright Stuff

How do you see the progression from Sim City to Sims to Spore, in terms of your magnum opus. Is there a progression?

I think if there's a progression there, it's that the player is taking a larger and larger role in creating the world. In Sim City you had very well structured tools. You could put down roads, buildings, and so on. Within that kind of region you could build any kind of city out of those tools. The Sims was a more open-ended version, now you can create these little characters and they go around and they have behaviors and personalities and you can build their house and they have neighbors, so it was a little bit larger box in which the players can kind of create a world. And Spore I think is even further in that direction, where we really focus even more on the tools, how do we give the players the widest possible range of output from these tools that we've given them, and get the widest diversity of worlds, at different scales. So I think it's pretty much getting the player to do more and more of my work for me †you know, delegating. And getting them to pay me for that privilege. That's a great way to approach it. The fact that they enjoy doing it is even better.

You're committed to shipping during the second half of 2007. Do you have a sense of what you want to do next?
There are so many different things†well actually yeah, there's one idea, but I don't want to talk about it. But I'm very interested in more relevant gaming.

Relevant how? Socially?
Socially, yeah. Getting people more connected to the real world through gaming. Because I think we all live in our own little bubbles, we have our own little lives and there's this whole world out there of things happening that we're kind of dimly aware of. We might pick up the paper or watch the news. And it's a complex world. A lot of very strange twisted dynamics, interesting things, very important things that are going to shape the future that our children live in. And that if you could just get everybody to be a little bit more aware of the world around them, and how it works, and have that feedback in to the course the world is taking, gaming could be an incredibly powerful mechanism for steering the system.

If nothing else you get to play with parameters with no harm done.
Yeah, and we think of things like politics and economics and environmentalism, all these things as these horrendously complicated things with a million variables. But yet there is a limited level of understanding of the climate, of politics, of economics, that we could take anybody and make them five points smarter in any one of these dimensions. And just making everybody in the world five points more educated on each of these dimensions I think would have a tremendous impact on the system as a whole.

Is playing Spore like playing God?
In some ways. I guess it depends on what your conception of God is. I mean, in Spore, for instance, you do have limitations. and so, if you're a god, you're not a terribly powerful, omnipotent god. But yet there is this feeling of creating a world at the end of the day, there is this entire little world that you've had a major hand in creating. So I would say on the creative side probably yes, on the omnipotent side definitely not.

But you do have more control than you do in real life.
But if you could predict exactly what would happen as a result of your actions, there would be no entertainment there. So it's exactly the fact that when I do something I want to stop and see what's going to happen, I have to actually watch it play out, as opposed to automatically know the futureâ€

Do you participate in any of the online communities?
I have on and off, but the time commitment is just too much. I find them interesting from a sociological point of view, and from a tool point of view. I think Second Life is interesting because they have given the players such huge control over the environment. And they're now just hitting their stride and getting a lot of really cool stuff, amazing stuff. There were a lot of predecessors to that, like Alphaworld and things like that.

Most forms of entertainment don't get that kind of gestation period ordinarily. It has to be at least five years. And all of a sudden my daughter said to me, "Say, have you heard about this Second Life thing?"
Yeah, it's probably more like six or seven years†I think the first version launched in 2001. And the important part of that development wasn't so much what Linden Labs did, it was the user community. In fact they were very careful to nurture the right of user community and it took them three or four years to do that, and then the community were really the ones who grew it from that point.

So what we need now is to be able to bring your Spore creature into Second Life.
Well really, they're both tools-based, so it's a matter of can we create lower and lower function tools for people in those environments to use to then create a collective experience.

It would be interesting if all your virtual lives could intersect.
It's a simple idea of having cross-game compatible avatars †I've talked to quite a few people about that idea.

In a sense it's like what they've done on the Wii, where the first thing you do is create a character that then is inserted into the action of many different games.
Which is a great idea.

How do you think the audience for Spore may be different from your other games?
I think we're probably going to be capturing some more hardcore gamers, just because of the scope of the game and the unusual nature of it. I'm looking hopefully at a big overlap with The Sims players, though †I want to make sure the game is not too hard or complex for the average Sims player. But if you look at Sims 2, it's actually a very complex game, and it surprised me how easily players migrated from Sims 1 to Sims 2. And if anything, the interface and controls of Spore should be much simpler and more streamlined than Sims 2. Next is, will the theme of content and worlds and space and science be appealing, and I think primarily the creatures are our hook there. If you can make weird, cool goofy creatures that show emotion and have societies and do dances and stuff, I think if you look at the graphics for Neopets and Pokemon â€Neopets especially is actually quite gender balanced. So I think really we're looking at those two groups as probably the first core groups, half Sims players, half hardcore competitive gamers looking for something novel, and maybe a third, people coming from totally outside. I've had a lot of people, when I've demoed Spore coming up and saying "I've never played a game before, but I want to play this one." And I think those people are attracted by the empowerment of the tools, they would really like the experience of creating a Pixar character and having it come to life.