Will Wright Q&A @ BAFTA
[Continued from post "Will Wright Talk @ BAFTA"; much paraphrasing from memory, and my occasional comments in square brackets]
Q: [highly paraphrased] Can games engage emotionally? Can they make us cry?
A: I think games already involve people strongly, they just have a different emotional pallette. Making my creature suffer in Black and White made me feel gulty, and in some games I can build something and feel proud of it. I’ve never felt those emotions while watching a film, and I don’t tend to feel empathy while playing games.
There’s that whole thing about creating a character who elicits empathy, but that’s a whole other question.
I tend to divide it into the reptillian brain, which is quite simple and driven by the kind of goals games have right now, and the outer cortex which is much more complex. The next task for games is to find out how to engage that, like more mature forms of media, and create empathy [extreme paraphrasing there].
Q: Are there any recent games you liked?
A: I liked Brain Age. It’s kind of different and quirky, and I found I could show it to people who aren’t usually into games and they’d get into it. It’s also quite narcissitic, and people like it when a game is about them :) The Sims was kind of narcissistic too (Laughter).
I liked Guitar Hero as well. It’s really satisfying to nail a difficult song.
Games have this massive landscape we’re not seeing; it’s good to go off into the woods and find these things that demonstrate what could be.
Q: What do you think the potential is for modding?
A: We’ve already seen some amazing things from modders. I tend to divide players into a hierarchy (makes triangle gesture), at the bottom here you have a majority of casual players, above that there are players I’d call the hardcore, above them you have the players who run fansites and so on, and right at the top here you have a minority of modders who actually pick up the development tools and start editing the game.
In my work I’m trying to make those tools accessible to people lower on the hierarchy [Cognitive load and opportunity cost: see Shaping Things, by Bruce Sterling]. I want to give that kind of ability to casual gamers. Games should tailor themselves to users.
[Right now, the guy on the computer next to me is looking at the Spore website. He didn't know Will was talking about it over the road just now :)]
[Because it was at BAFTA, of course there were film people there. This question was from one of them]
Q: What can games learn or borrow from film?
A: I think games have already borrowed too much from film. Every form of media has had roots in previous forms of media. At first, TV was radio with moving pictures. Games are more like architecture than linear forms of media. Film has reached for that with movies like Memento, and less artistically accessible stuff like Timecode.
How many people here have seen Memento? Oh great; it works kind of like any other film in that you construct a world model as you go along, but as you see the same data from different viewpoints you have to revise the model. I think films like that are a reflection of how current generations are learning to think.
Q: If you could tackle one social issue, what would it be?
A: Oooo…  getting young people interested in social issues is really important. [Here he mentioned "Mirror Worlds" by David Gelernter, but I missed a chunk]. In that, people could surf their municipality, going all the way down from the scale of the earth to just their area to look at stuff. If you could get something like Google maps working with something like Sim City, you have a game and tool that can teach things with real world relevance.
A few years ago, Maxis did a simulation of an oil refinery for Chevron. It wasn’t to train people how to operate the refinery, it was to train management to understand the refinery and make communcation with engineers more meaningful to them. They could know just how important something was if an engineer told them it was broken.
I think long term, the most important issue to be dealt with is the environment.
Globally speaking, Africa is being ignored and that’s scandalous. A game about Africa, done in the right way, could really be popular and raise awareness of the issue.
Q: What has been the biggest factor in your career, and what advice would you give to someone looking to forge a career in the games industry?
A: The biggest factor in my career has been seeing what people do with games. Even before the internet, Sim City players got on to BBSes and exchanged cities. By looking at those, you can see what that player thinks a city is or should be. Games are a shorthand for imagination. [This answer was much longer when given]
I’m sorry that was such a long answer that I’ve forgotton what the second part of the question was. (questioner shouts out)
Oh right. If you want to forge a career in the games industry, look at a lot of other design forms, because games absorb them all. Games require good basic design skills. You have to juggle many details at all levels, for instance you might be dealing with things on levels from engineering to production. Being a game designer is a lot like being a producer.
Q: Who has the clout to make a difference socially through games, and who is failing at it?
[This question corresponds interestingly with John Robb's theory of 4th generation warfare: inadequate responses to 4GW are down to responsibility being outsourced solely to institutions, that largely don't understand autonomous, amorhpous cultural actors. This question seems to show a similar mindset in a different context].
A: Anyone can cast out a meme. Anyone can start a blog nowadays. ["It's not dependent on an authoritarian model" may have been Will's next words, but I think he said something that was just similar].
Formerly, there were just a few big broadcasters, but now it’s more of a peer to peer model. It’s a bootstrapping process, trying to get attention for a blog, but I think it’s becoming more of a level playing field.
Q: Games can surely have negative effects as well as positive ones. How you you tell the difference?
A: Watching someone play is very different to actually playing. Someone watching a kid play an FPS sees explosions and blood. To a spectator it’s violence. To the kid who’s playing, it’s sport. He’s experiencing a lot of teamwork and community building.
Game are a powerful medium, and I’m not denying that they can have bad effects, but when I see someone playing an FPS I don’t think it’s that different to kids playing cowboys and indians. They’re building models of the world, and the game doesn’t make them want to kill each other.
Q: How do you think massively multiplayer games could be made into something that effects social change?
A: Those kind of games aren’t just about killing monsters, they’re all about socialisation. [I know?] people [who?] have employed someone because they saw them build and run a big World of Warcraft guild, and in doing so demonstrate leadership skills.
Teachers could build these worlds for educational purposes [I lost a lot here, but the gist was that MMOs are already partially there, and though nothing obviously revolutionary is likely to immediately spring up, through osmosis educators who use and understand these worlds now could one day use them as an educational medium. Not in the flawed "make learning fun!" sense of a bit of play tacked onto traditional learning, but in the sense that the way people engage with MMO worlds now could be shaped to teach relevant things]
Q: I’ve read that you’re worried about the size of development teams. How do you think the problem could be tackled?
A: The dev team for Spore is half the size of the team for the last game I worked on, and that’s down to Spore using player built content. Studios have responded to demand by raising the size of teams, but brute force isn’t a good approach. You make a team that is two times the size but get a game that is only 50% better. The curves don’t add up, it’s just not going to work.
More creativity should be turned over to the players. I think we’ve already handed narrative to them, playing on rails is pretty boring and we’re letting players explore more.
Q: What’s your favorite game? (Laughter from cynical bunch of game developers)
A: My favorite game is an old Chinese board game called Go. It has only two rules, but really deep strategy. Games are meant to have simple rule sets that generate maximum possibility space. Go seems to have the best ratio in that respect.