What's the actual data bandwidth as we talk to each other? Is it more or less over different forms of, you know, electronics?
It used to be that you knew your neighbors and maybe your coworkers--the people in your physical vicinity. In some sense our phone network is kind of pretty closely mapped to that physical topology.
As we move onto the Net, we have an entirely different set of topologies that are based around special interests and forums and bulletin boards, chat rooms. And online games are their own kind of form of topology. And so we can have groups of friends that I know in the office, and my neighbors, and also ones that are playing this online game with me, or ones that hang out with at this particular website that reflects my hobby, and that I interact with over a bulletin board.
I think everybody in their head has a map of each one of these topologies and where they fit into it. It's kind of amazing how many of these maps a person can hold in their head. But on the other hand, you find yourself left with so much more time. I find it refreshing to unplug from it for a while.
You kind of forget how deeply you get embedded in it. You have this situational awareness. Some of it security based, some of it socially based, as is: Oh, I know the guy that just walked into the room. You kind a little map in your head of kind of where you are in relation to this other stuff. Like my work? Visit my Etsy shop! All rights reserved. Skip to main content. Request new password. This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Interview With Will Wright. Why is that? I'm very broadly interested in science as a lay person, and I read a lot of science that gets me interested in particular subjects.
I think the game industry could use spokespeople that try to represent the potential of gaming. The industry hasn't even begun to realise its potential — we're getting there very slowly — but in the meantime we need to be educating the public as to what this can eventually become. If we have more discussion about what games could be versus what they are right now, we might get there sooner. From a kid's point of view gaming feels somewhat subversive. If the parents don't like it, it must be cool.
If the parents also liked it, it wouldn't be cool and they'd try something else. So in some sense the games industry has a vested interest in keeping games culturally edgy — and there's an element of truth there.
With the exception of Advance Wars on my DS, there's no one game that I spend a huge amount of time playing. Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii — the PS3 and the Xbox feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement.
Bu tht eWii feels like a major jump — not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that's happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while. We've got an Xbox collecting dust in the background, a Wii hooked up that we use quite a bit. I don't have a PS3. I still, for the most part, prefer playing games on the computer — to me the mouse is the best input device ever.
Every generation it's like "the PC's dead! But, how did such a unique concept for a video game — namely the manipulation of tiny virtual people and their everyday lives — come to be? So originally, it was more meant to be an architectural version of SimCity.
As I went down that path I started thinking I needed some way to 'score' what it was that you were building, and so I knew I needed little people living in these structures that you were designing.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the behaviour of these people very robust, interesting and plausible no matter what kind of environment you put them in.
Creating these tiny people — AI characters that would interact with the structures built within the simulation — took about two years of Will's life, in between a variety of other projects.
SimCity had become a huge success and, as a result, Maxis had a little freedom to create ideas that it wanted to see made. For Will Wright, that would end up being The Sims. I kept the architecture tools in there, but then I just really started focusing more on the people and objects and their behaviours and relationships — all that sort of stuff.
But Maxis wasn't convinced. Though Wright detailed the project and what he hoped it would be, the company was nonplussed; why play a game about emulating real-life when video games could help us live out our wildest fantasies? Wright persisted, however, knowing it was something he needed to make.
At first, nobody was behind the project. We had some programmers who were in a tool group that we weren't using really so I turned it into a Black Box project on my side and said 'can I have these four programmers', and nobody really cared so they said 'yeah'. It wasn't just his fellow developers that he had to convince either, with the game concept that would turn out to be one of the most important PC games of all time struggling to even appeal to focus testers in the earliest stages of development.
I remember [with] the other four the focus testers said 'oh yeah, it was pretty good, we would play that', but when it came to The Sims and we were describing the idea to them, they were all universally like 'oh that's such a stupid idea, we would never play that, we hate that idea'. So the object set for this is going to be huge compared to The Sims, seven times more objects than were in the first game. Will Wright: We're really trying to make the thing accessible, since all the online games I've seen are so hardcore that even I, as a hardcore gamer, don't feel compelled to play them.
To step that far back and get a more casual audience, it's quite different. Will Wright: Oh there are! But those are the people we are relying on!
The two percent. What we have to structure the world in such a way that they're whole goal is to do something really cool that's going to blow some people away. And in fact they do that on our website, the uploads are just extraordinary, some of it, and most people don't see it, they're too busy playing the game, so they're not exposed to it.
I want to give those people much more exposure, so when they do something really killer, fifty thousand people are going to see it each day. And then they're going to feel a little more 'incentivized' to keep on doing it.
Will Wright: Well yeah, there's a Most Visited House List, and for whoever's on that list, it's going to be really cool. Will Wright: Well we're saying right now early ; in terms of when the beta is, that's a hard question.
Will Wright: Yeah, we have a ramped development process so we have milestones about every month or month and a half or so, so every milestone -- and we've been doing it for about four or five months now -- so we're up to about a hundred players internally. In the next month it'll be three hundred, then the next month a thousand At some point we're going to run out of people inside EA, and then we'll have to start going external.
But EA's pretty big, so we might get to a thousand eight hundred across all the studios. And that's the point at which we'll external. Like my work? Visit my Etsy shop! All rights reserved. Skip to main content. Request new password. This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions. Will Wright Speaks. You are here Home. Thursday, June 21, - That is a huge issue.
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