(2006-12-10) Seabrook On Wright

John Seabrook on Will Wright.

• Up to this point in his career, Wright has been including more and more social realism in his games. But Spore is a surprise-at a glance, it looks like a "cartoony bug game," as one contributor to a gaming Web site put it. The buildings don't have the crisp urban lines of SimCity; they look more like the architecture in Dr. Seuss books. Wright has also introduced weapons and conquest. The violence isn't gratuitous-in some cases, you have to kill to survive-but it isn't sugar-coated, either. Not only do you kill other creatures in Spore but you have to eat them.

• At the first level of the game, you are a single-celled organism in a drop of water, which is represented on the screen as a two-dimensional environment, like a slide under a Microscope. By successfully avoiding predators, which are represented as different-colored cells, you get to reproduce, and that earns you DNA points (a double helix appears over your character). DNA is the currency (Money) in the early levels of Spore, and as you evolve you can acquire better parts-larger flippers for faster swimming, say, or sharper claws for defeating predators. Eventually, you emerge from the water onto the second level-dry land-and your creature must compete with other creatures, and mate with those of your own kind which the computer generates, until you form a tribe. You can play a violent game of conquest over other tribes or you can play a social game of conciliation. If you make clever choices, according to the logic of the Simulation, you will survive and continue to evolve.

• In the nineteen-sixties, Wright's father developed a new way of making plastic packing materials and started a successful company, which allowed the Wrights to live comfortably in Atlanta. Will's dad was also an excellent golfer. His mother, Beverlye Wright Edwards, was an amateur magician and actress. Wright flourished in the local Montessori School, with its emphasis on creativity, problem solving, and self-motivation. "Montessori taught me the joy of discovery," Wright told me. "It showed you can become interested in pretty complex theories, like Pythagorean theory, say, by playing with blocks. It's all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori-if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of Urban Design."

• He excelled only in subjects that he was interested in: architecture, economics, mechanical engineering, military history. He had impractical goals-in addition to starting colonies in space (Space Migration), he wanted to build Robot-s. He dropped out again after two years, drove a bulldozer for a summer, and then, in the fall of 1980, went to the New School, in Manhattan, where he studied robotics.

• Wright, though, believes that video games teach you how to learn; what needs to change is the way children are taught (Educating Kids). "The problem with our education system is we've taken this kind of narrow, Reductionist, Aristotelian approach to what learning is," he told me. "It's not designed for experimenting with complex systems and navigating your way through them in an intuitive way, which is what games teach. It's not really designed for failure, which is also something games teach. I mean, I think that failure is a better teacher than success. Trial and error, reverse-engineering stuff in your mind-all the ways that kids interact with games-that's the kind of thinking schools should be teaching. And I would argue that as the world becomes more complex, and as outcomes become less about success or failure, games are better at preparing you. The education system is going to realize this sooner or later. It's starting. Teachers are entering the system who grew up playing games. They're going to want to engage with the kids using games."

• SimCity was slow to catch on, but seventeen years later the game has earned the company two hundred and thirty million dollars. A sizable number of players who first became interested in Urban Design as a result of the game have gone on to become architects and designers, making SimCity arguably the single most influential work of urban-design theory ever created.

• From a technical perspective, Wright's singular achievement in The Sims was to design a new kind of "ObjectOriented" Operating System that modelled the complexity of social dynamics... The original Sims had eight motives or needs-hunger, hygiene, bladder, comfort, energy, social, fun, and room-all of which are affected by objects in the world around them. Life for a Sim is the pursuit of Happiness, but happiness depends on social interaction and consumption (Consumerism), and consumption requires money... The Sims brought a huge new population to gaming-girls. That did not come as a complete surprise to Wright, since women made up forty per cent of his Sims development team, and his daughter Cassidy, then fourteen years old, had helped him tinker with the prototypes.