Will Wright Talk @ BAFTA
I got a ticket to his talk on “The Future of Games” tonight, and managed to get right into the auditorium too rather than having to stand and watch on a screen.
He’s a very fast speaker and crams a lot of information in; I caught just about everything but missed many of the slides while frantically making notes. This is all paraphrased, so I suggest not quoting or nitpicking, but it’s a fairly precise and comprehensive gist of his talk. My occasional comments are in square brackets. It began with an intro by a suited EA guy and a brief showreel of EA games.
Full text after the jump.
Will starts: How many explosions did you count in that reel? (Laughter)
It’s odd for me watching trailers for games, as it’s a completely linear format, unlike the games represented.
(Slide: Programming Next Generation Systems)
That’s the title of my talk. I don’t mean these (Slide of consoles), I mean these (Slide of children playing games) (Laughter).
Kids now are different to prior generations. They have more communications. They can multi-task. They’re networked. And because they’re so saturated with media, they have high input bandwidth.
When I was growing up, we had a TV with three channels. Now my TV has 500 and I have to pay a robot to watch it for me (Laughter). Has Tivo taken off in the UK yet? Well, anyway, I effectively have it watching and recording TV for me.
When I was younger, music was on LPs. Collections were measured by weight :), I’d have like, 50 pounds of LPs. Now music is digital and massless.
Newspapers and new broadcasts used to be daily and scheduled, now on the net, news access is instant.
A measure of whether information was worthwhile when I was a kid was if it was in the Library of Congress (Slide showing it). That building contains about 20 terabytes of data on paper. Nowadays, you can buy a 1 terabyte hard drive. You can buy 20 and fit them in a backpack.
Motivation is the issue; access to information is not.
Games could change behaviour, they could change the world.
(Slide: Time Playing x Social Relevance = World Impact)
If we could take the time kids spend playing and multiply it by social relevance, it would have a major real world impact.
Games have a large heritage in linear media, but they’re fundamentally more like architecture, toy design, product design, art, math and even psychology.
Games involve story, hobby and sports. [Slide had subcategories but moved too fast for me to record them all]
In other art forms, we find deep expression (Illustrative slides of important works in other media), but games are kind of like this (Slide of big Conan style dude with giant blade, luridly titled DEATH SWORD) (Laughter). They’re kind of a popcorn experience, disposable entertainment. I’m not saying that’s wrong, I watch action films sometimes, but games could do more.
Meaningful messages given through games could have the power to create change.
Play is valuable; many species do it, and in doing it they are creating mental models of the world.
(Slide: Processor A, the human mind. Processor B, CPU)
Game developers are developing for two processors, and the human mind is the one we should be concerned with.
(Slide: Constructed model kits of ship, plane, etc.)
When I was a kid, I built a lot of these. These real models are static, they’re kind of caricatures of the real things. The mental models we construct by playing games are dynamic.
Playing games is very much like scientific method. As people explore the game, they experiment, test their mental models, and revise them.
Games can also give people very different perpectives on things. An 8 year old who played Sim City was riding in a car and asked “That’s industrial! Why did they put that there? It’s right next to a residential zone”. It’s amazing that a game can teach an 8 year old to see things like that.
Kids are much more involved in building worldviews than adults. Their worldviews are more malleable, which isn’t so much the case for adults. I’m not saying I’ve given up on older generations, but kids are the people on whom games could have the most impact.
How many people here have heard of memes? Oh good, about half of you. How many of you work in game development? [Way more than half raise hands] Ah, that explains it :)
Memes are ideas. They can be simple, like “Wash your hands after going to the bathroom”, or they can be complex, for example, Catholicism (Laughter, slide: Wash hands sign on one side captioned “Simple”, painted Catholic icon captioned “Complex”).
Genes compete for population, but memes compete for mindspace. They have no mass. They can be fun, they can be serious, such as scientific ideas; they can be visionary and give hope (Slide: Martin Luther King).
Science fiction is about where stuff could go. It’s usually full of wrongful extrapolations. When skyscrapers were first being built, SF envisioned 500 storey buildings.
Some people are very good at spreading memes. Walt Disney was one such person. He spread them first through TV shows, then presented his visions through theme parks. The Epcot Center was originally intended to be a city, though if you’ve been you’ll know it turned out as a corporate marquee.
Disney even founded a town in Florida named Celebration (Slide: Celebration, population 5000), which is exempt from Florida state law. It’s inhabitants live under Disney law (Laughter).
He also made a film called Mars and Beyond, which is amazing. He got his animators to speculate about what life on Mars would look like, ["and it was based on the science of the time" <-- I recall him saying this, but am only about 70% sure].
Another person who was good at spreading memes was Rod Serling, who made The Twilight Zone. He once said “My show is the only one dealing with reality at the moment”. For instance, by projecting the story into an SF setting, he could deal with huge social problems like racism when no other show would touch them.
Lately, SF has given us dystopian visions. Surprisingly, Blade Runner is often cited in city planning documents with comments on potential developments like “We don’t want this city to become like Blade Runner”.
Arthur C. Clarke said “The best way to prevent the future is to predict it”. Once you predict a really negative potential future and the idea spreads, people tend to move away from things that might cause it.
(Slide: Possible futures = possibility space).
From one beginning state, there are many potential outcomes. All games mirror this pattern. Making games is like the scientific method in reverse. A small number of algorithms are meant to generate many possiblities. Games have topology, and that topology has to be as interesting as possible.
Old media are just rides. They’re linear.
Time in games is non-linear (Slide: RTS with “Restart” button showing). Games have these time related things which we just don’t have in real life. It can be made to go backwards.
Overall play has a possibility cone (slide: hourglass on right, abstract made from two cones with toucing points on left)Â , and the more players play the more they learn and decide, “oh, I’d better not do that. I’ll go over here instead”.
In an abstract sense, game possiblity space mirrors real world possbility space.
Our devices are extensions of ourselves, for instance a car extends our body, the telephone our ears, buildings are extensions of our skin. Computers are extensions of many things, but most of all they extend our imaginations. You have these models running and the computer does all the boring bookkeeping while allowing you to play with consistent worlds.
Self expression and community are rising in games right now.
The SIMs has a toolset, [IIRC, he was referring to his neice playing it here] … and she picked up the toolset, learned it, and even developed a design sense through using it.
Most kids are creative, but they’re educated not to be (Laughter).
If you can increase the power of toolsets, you get more communities.
When I was young, the measure of whether something had a community was whether or not it had its own magazine. If there was a magazine, it meant there was a community. Now the net has made communities more granular, spread out, offbeat, and smaller. You can have just 20 people form a community online.
Communities give the power of colllective effort. The communities people are involved in are a big part of their identities (Slide: man with various things feeding into his head, such as hobbies, entertainment, and work).
Years ago, computers were something I used to connect to robots I built. They were fancy calculators. To young people now, computers are fancy communcators. They can also be used for entertainment, self expression, and education.
Social changes are speeding up. Whether it’s a grass roots movement with a slow buildup, or a sudden event (Slide: explosion emerging from the WTC), changes in society are happening faster than they used to. Political, social, and environmental changes are going to keep on happening and affecting things at greater speed.
Many warnings about potential consequences have been given in other media. Games can take a role in that.
They teach systemic thinking. Players learn to analyse and play systems of rules. They can also teach us to navigate the future. They could teach kids to think long term instead of short term.
That’s the end of my talk, thank you. I think we’re going to switch to questions and answers now.
[Continued in post "Will Wright Q&A @ BAFTA"]
September 2nd, 2006 at 5:29
[...] Part one is the talk itself: Making games is like the scientific method in reverse. A small number of algorithms are meant to generate many possiblities. Games have topology, and that topology has to be as interesting as possible. [...]
September 2nd, 2006 at 16:01
Thanks for taking the time to do that summary — Will Wright is a very important and visionary thinker. I spent over two years in his “The Sims Online” (before that years in the offline Sims games) and was fortunate to get to talk to him now and then.
I have to say that he has brilliantly put into his games the kind of positive and fulfilling facilitation of community and collaboration for which games are becoming famous. Even if it is just a silly group job object like the pizza-making machine in TSO, the inner movements of spirit and soul required to adjust, adapt, listen, collaborate are indelible and valuable — and that’s why games have to be taken seriously, whether static, closed “game games” or “serious games” or open-ended social worlds like Second Life.
Games create habits of mind and spirit that will shape the coming centuries. That’s why they are worth taking seriously now.
What Will was unable to do, however, was stop the malignancies of malevolent groups that either perverted collaboration (seizing the “roomies” function in TSO to ruin homes) or took advantage of people’s weakness and their lack of solidarity outside of the mechanical game tools (the destructive Sim Shadow Government which took hold, and which he abetted in its earliest stages).
A deep problem is memes. People take open-ended collaborative social software that they portray as open and free and “a wiki,” but then usually a self-selected cadre of those who think “we are the smart ones and we’re surrounded by idiots” begin to take over — often by wielding the technical power of being able to operate or program the game/world tools themselves. The game god/junior game cod wizard/mod problems are insidious in games.
That means they can make memes, spread them, and little or nothing mitigates against them — and they gain artificial credibility just by being spreadable and being aggressively defended, no different than the memes of communism and fascism in their day, which were also spread by the creation of virtuality through media control.
Memes that are spreading can work like this: “smart-mob” or “crowd-source” or “wise-crowd” decided — therefore it’s right. Dissent? Leave. The constant invocation of solution-by-exit makes for an aggressive force constantling meming and managing others.
Or how about the social-engineering favourite: “positive proposals only” and something like a features voting mechanism in Second Life *where you can’t vote no*. There’s no “no”. And that’s because programmers and helpers conclude that “no” isn’t useful; “no” creates short lists of negative feeling that aren’t relevant; “no” is spammed or gamed (as if positive proposals aren’t spamming and gaming, too?). And therefore legitimate dissent is silenced.
There’s never a management or conflict or a true collaborative and free and democratic compromise due to the final, deadly, mechanized features of games. Instead, there is the strong meming the weak and forcing them out by muting, ejecting, or betting then banned as “trolls” etc.
Will Wright says we don’t have to worry about such negative things happening, such totalitarian wannabes seeming to take over our metaverse because, why, we’ll see the ugly future and run from it, why, we’ll predict it and that will make it not happen.
No. Because people don’t look at it and turn down another path, they run toward it with open arms. They always sought a way either to be controlled or to control others. Now they have it. With more power of information-gathering and influence than any twentieth century totalitarian ever dreamed of.
September 2nd, 2006 at 18:37
[...] Notes from Will Wright’s BAFTA speech, as recorded by ‘David H’. Games could change behaviour, they could change the world. [...]
September 4th, 2006 at 3:01
The ideas here are quite obvious when you think about it, and that is precisely why they are so integral.
I’ve recently had the opportunity to interact with some young people, my impression is that an increasing minority of kids today are prone to the sort of abstract thought and self-expression Will describes, despite the continued prevalence of conformity demanding structures. Kids today also seem to be exploring bi-sexuality and painkiller abuse in increasing numbers, which seems relevant if you have a broad definition of interactivity. I think another side of the “Games For Change” notion is the evolution of play into countercultural pockets, after children play educational games for a decade or so they’ll naturally move on to games that could be considered the LSD of the 21st century.
September 4th, 2006 at 5:09
[...] Collating more thoughts on the Meaning of Games: “Games can also give people very different perpectives on things. An 8 year old who played Sim City was riding in a car and asked “That’s industrial Why did they put that there? It’s right next to a residential zoneâ€. It’s amazing that a game can teach an 8 year old to see things like that.” — Will Wright (Functional Autonomy » Blog Archive » Will Wright Talk @ BAFTA) [...]
September 4th, 2006 at 9:56
Prokofy, if you’re leaving comments that long then you need your own blog ;)
I meet a lot of people who are cynical about the future. Will might be an optimist, but any tech is two edged, and things emeging on the net now have a decided lean towards democracy. Authoritarian models are struggling to cope with this much data, if anything, trends are weakening authority rather than increasing its grip.
You point out some valid problems, such as majorities assuming they are right. Psychopathology will always cause people like the SSG to rise up in any social context, but trhey aren’t guaranteed majority or ascendency. Pathogenic things are not the only forces on the table.
Every human has innate motives that are healthy and self-preserving, and not necessarily at the expense of others. If we destroy ourselves, it won’t be a considered decision. Like all items of technology, games are an ethically impartial force that can affect in good and bad ways. I’m all for stuff like Will is advocating. It’s easy for a doomsayer to say he should have predicted the SSG, but similar scenarios aren’t playing out in Second Life or WoW.
Scammers and ragers are part of the background noise in just about any online community, it’s not inevitable that they gain social dominance though.
September 15th, 2006 at 22:32
Gosh, that is one of my shortest comments in fact. I do have my own blog
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com
..where I discuss at length the SSG-type phenomena of Second Life, which abounds with far greater cunning and vice — W-HAT, the FIC, etc. Indeed some very disturbing cults and alternative groups have gained dominance and even periodically crash the grid and destroy property.
September 16th, 2006 at 4:00
:o, can’t believe I didn’t click on your name before now.
Interesting stuff. I’d say the motivations of such people are psychopathologically compromised, and a reflection of the same internal states that reside behind real world phenomena.
I wonder if the success of such pathogenic groups in online worlds has to do with obsessiveness and persistence? In UT is was easy to bore aimbotters into leaving the server, but online worlds like SL just have so many more handles to grab on users and things to do with them.
I do know people who seem to get on okay in SL without trouble from these kinds, but I wonder if that will still be the case in 2 years. The “sterile happytalk” of LL is also quite worrying.