Will Wright on Game Design

Torill writes "Celia Pearce interviews Will Wright in the article "Sims, Battle Bots, Cellular Automata Gods and Go", in Game Studies, volume 2. Wright talks about the philosophy behind his games, one of which is The Sims: '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.'"

Re:The only good...

[Oculus Habent]

A good FPS may entertain for some time, but a simulation game is great. It ends when you want it to, you control how things happen, You can save, come back, do something different and have the game go an entirely different way (try that with Duke Nukem).

Don't get me wrong, a good multiplayer FPS is great now and then. But I still turn to sim games more often than not.

Maybe it's my God complex : )

Re:read the article??

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you heard about something called "books"?

Some of them are actually several hundred pages long!

Weird, huh?

Please be careful if you see one, for those things will really make you tired!

Re:why they ever don't get it right about game des

[Paolomania]

Good game design lets you slip in a role of an actor, not a designer, thats what all the arcade stuff was all about. Gaming is adrenaline (defender, robotron) not administration(warcraft, sim xx) and should be not to time-consuming indeed.

I see, thats why mod'ability is becoming more and more of a standard feature on games these days. I guess all this time I've been having a blast designing a Warcraft III map, I really just been proving how bad the game is ... mmm hmm

Re:why they ever don't get it right about game des

[Anonymous Coward]

What they're not saying is that their Sim games don't put the player in the design role. Not at all. Sim City takes about an hour to master. The only real trick is to space the roads 6 squares apart. After that, its a solved problem, and everything else is just doodling. Most people who play it consistently just drool and look at the miniature graphics of buildings and push the feeder button when they want stimulation. It's really an exercise in behavioral training. The new Sims is moving towards ringing bells measuring saliva, but more than that, its about rewards for certain behaviors and punishments for others. It isn't being used for it now, but it makes a great focus group, and an even more powerful training tool.

The most revealing part is the bit about "Sim Health", how it came down to the rule assumptions. If you want to prove hospitals are understaffed, you set the slider bar to "more nurses per patient" or whatever. Same thing with Sim City. If you want prove that inner cities always turn to crime, set a #define. If you want to show that higher taxes means a cleaner environment, adjust a properties file. Of course there's less at stake, it's just a game. But there are billions of dollars going into scientific studies that predict the weather or something else based on simulations with slider bars labelled "political agenda" and "funding level".

The creators are going to be in for a shock, though, when the new Network Sims comes out and people just stand around and chat or tickle each other and talk dirty. They'll realize pretty quickly though, and put the pellet dispensers in. That's something the Ultima/Everquest designers never really learned. Maybe its too small a segement of the population yet to care about.

The game Will Wright plays

[wormbin]

I'm trying to basically chronicle the average model that the players have made in their heads. It's like cultural anthropology. Already it's having a huge impact on what we do with our expansion packs and the next version of The Sims. We're getting a sense of when people like to play the house building game vs. the relationship game, and what types of families they like to create, what objects they like the most. Eventually, in the not too distant future, we're working towards having this be dynamic on a daily basis so the game in some sense can be self-tuning to each individual player based on what they've done in the game.

So Will is playing a game where he has to make sure that a million Sims players are happy playing their Sims game. I guess you could call him the only Sims player who is getting paid for playing. :)