Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata God and Go (2001)

Summary

Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata God and Go A Conversation with Will Wright by Celia Pearce Conducted in Will Wright's office at Maxis, September 5, 2001 - CP: What is your philosophy of interactive design? WW: Ooh, a heavy question, a philosophy question. CP: It’s a big question, but I wanted to start you talking about why you design games. What is it about the format of an interactive experience that is so compelling to you? And what do you want to create in that space? WW: Well, one thing I’ve always really enjoyed is making things. Out of whatever. It started with modeling as a kid, building models. When computers came along, I started learning programming and realizing the computer was this great tool for making things, making models, dynamic models, and behaviors, not just static models. I think when I started doing games I really wanted to carry that to the next step, to the player, so that you give the player a tool so that they can create things. And then you give them some context for that creation. You know, what is it, what kind of kind of world does it live in, what’s its purpose? What are you trying to do with this thing that you’re creating? To really put the player in the design role. And the actual world is reactive to their design. So they design something that the little world inside the computer reacts to. And then they have to revisit the design and redesign it, or tear it down and build another one, whatever it is. So I guess what really draws me to interactive entertainment and the thing that I try to keep focused on is enabling the creativity of the player. Giving them a pretty large solution space to solve the problem within the game. So the game represents this problem landscape. Most games have small solution landscapes, so there’s one possible solution and one way to solve it. Other games, the games that tend to be more creative, have a much larger solution space, so you can potentially solve this problem in a way that nobody else has....