Changing The World With Videogames 33
Will Wright gave the keynote address at the Texas SXSW event, showing off Spore to a packed crowd and offering up hopes that 'Toys' will change the world. His hope is that offerings like Spore might force kids to rethink their understandings of nature. Likewise, non-linear storytelling via 'branching' gaming is what he sees as the future of the medium. He cites the movie Groundhog Day as an example, a movie which told the same story over and over again but never did it the same way twice. "'I think if we can teach the computer to listen to the story that players are telling,' Wright said, a game could detect patterns of what the player wants, and adjust music, lighting, and other immersive elements to reflect the story that a player wants to play. He thinks this modeling would best be accomplished by networks that constantly mine and refine player information." Alice, of the Wonderland blog, helpfully provides extensive notes, and Kotaku has a video of the demo the attendees saw.
Confusing kids (Score:2, Informative)
Confusing kids more like. Animals don't evolve faster as they eat more... I can imaging playing this with my son and having to explain to him afterwards "evolution isn't really like that at all".
If you want to improve kids understanding of nature, get them outside and actually looking at the real thing. And/or buy some of the David Attenborough series, which many kids enjoy watching and are actually educationally very sound.
He's so smart! (Score:3, Informative)
Will Wright is probably so smart because he's been working out [slashdot.org]. Did you see how buff he is in that article [gamasutra.com]?
All kidding aside, yeah, video games do have the potential to change the world, both for the better, and the worse. In instances like WoW or Evercrack, people have let it ruin their lives through loss of jobs, divorces, etc. That's not the games' faults though. I play WoW for maybe 4-5 hours a week, sometimes less. It can still be fun, and it doesn't dominate my life.
But then there's the "Serious Games" [seriousgames.org] that can be used to train people on doing many real world tasks while helping to keep them from making deadly mistakes.
Not branching, not groundhog's day (Score:2, Informative)
1 - Story Parsing. Like Natural Language Parsing, this would be a system of metrics that would allow the game to figure out what kind of story the player was trying to play. E.g. if the player was trying to play a horror story, the game would dim the lights, thunder would crash, etc. However, these superficial effects would be coupled with:
2 - Story Building Blocks. These small bits and pieces of story would have various compatible inputs and outputs. For example, lets say you have the story bit "boy leaves home", and another story bit "girl gets hurt". These would not have any compatible connection - the first bits outputs might be compatible with other story building blocks that are about maybe an adventure, or something happening to the boy. Likewise, the second story building block would have compatible inputs to other story devices about girls or injuries. So when you add the story block "boy meets girl" then you can have a smooth, dynamic story - "boy leaves home", "boy meets girl", "girl gets hurt". But of course you would be drawing from a massive pool of dramatic elements.
Obviously that is a very high-level look at the system, but Mr. Wright seemed to think that there was some considerable promise in that powerful, combined approach. He also went on to say some very insightful things about who to tweak this system to create a believable and organic climax at the end of the story, so that there is still an end state and a sense of satisfaction for players. He called this tweaking "dramatic amplification", and it was a method of creating larger and larger world state changes with smaller and smaller events until you reach some apex; e.g. in Star Wars, when Luke is shooting his torpedoes into the exhaust vent, there are only two possible outcomes: either he misses, and alderan (or whatever planet they were trying to explode at the time) is destroyed utterly, OR the death star itself explodes. Minor event, massive world state changes; dramatic amplification!
It was a fascinating speech delivered at his apparently usual whirlwind speed, inspiring stuff!
Re:Wright's educational concepts are outdated... (Score:1, Informative)
If you were either at or even read the transcript for Will Wright's speech (or many of his previous tv or conference appearances), you would know that he spent five years in Montessori school - that's right, the progressive learn-through-experimentation program. You might say, learning intuitively through simulation. His exact example was if you give kids the right toys, they don't have to memorize the pythagorean theorem, they learn it intuitively from experience. So, exactly what you said, only precisely the opposite.