作者：Dean Takahashi

没有人能像Will Wright（《模拟城市》和《模拟人生》等大受欢迎游戏的创造者）那样清楚地谈论游戏。他在本周的Game Horizon Live中通过即时网络广播与我们讨论了未来游戏的发展。在提问与回答环节中，他谈论了许多有关游戏发展方向的主题。（请点击此处阅读第2部分）

他表示自己受到了“寒武纪大爆发”（就像5亿年前的寒武纪时期，涌现出了众多新生命形态）的启发，即在应用商店中面向智能手机，平板电脑和其它平台开发独立游戏。

Wright 与别人共同创建了Maxis，并创造了像《模拟城市》等游戏。艺电在1997年收购了Maxis，而Wright也在艺电继续创造了《模拟人生》和《孢 子》等游戏。他在2009年离开了艺电，并创建了一系列初创公司。他最新的公司名为Syntertainment，主要专注于创造性游戏和娱乐与现实间的 互动。

Will Wright（from venturebeat）

Wright得到了许多奖励，其中便包括Interactive Arts and Sciences学院颁发的“Hall of Fame”奖。Wright建议年轻设计师在一开始可以先研究非游戏领域，并从中获得更多创造性灵感。以下是Wright在Game Horizon 2013年的Q&A环节中的内容。

Will Wright：实际上，你所面对的是2个平台。你需要应对计算机平台（即关于代码，技术等内容）以及人心。当你设计了一款游戏时，它将同时运行于这些平台上。我们也会在计算机上运行我们于模拟中所执行的一些内容。但是也有一些内容是不适用于计算机上，所以我们最终选择在玩家的想象力中运行。

举个例子来说，在《模拟人生》中，当你听到人们在交谈时，你并不是真正听到他们在说什么。经过多次实验，我们决定让角色用英语或其它知名的语言交谈，但它们却很快变得自动化且不断重复。如此真实的面纱便消失了。相反地，如果他们的交谈并不清楚，你的脑子里便会开始想象他们的对话。《模拟人生》具有有声语调。游戏角色拥有情感。你能够感受到他们的愤怒与调情。尽管我们并未真正听到相关话语。从根本上来看，我们所做的便是将模拟部分分解到人们的想象力中。

当我在几十年前开始职业生涯时，那时候人们所关注的焦点还是计算机的快速运行。我们能在屏幕上呈现出多少像素？我们每一次都要与机器相抗衡，就为了呈现出更棒的性能。但是从很大程度上来看，这些限制并未起到多大阻碍。我不认为面前存在着多少技术瓶颈或障碍。而现在，我们的关注焦点在于如何通过有趣的方式去利用人类的想象力，人心，创造性。我们将尝试着把人类的想法带到一个特定的状态，让他们能够在此慢慢感受到乐趣。有时候这会是一种流动状态。他们将在挑战，成就和难度之间徘徊着。而其它时候则是更加自由，富有创造性和表现力的状态，或者与别人进行分享的社交状态。

显然，我们不是很理解人心。从某种意义上来看，游戏设计便是一种应用心理学。我们一直在侵入人类的心理。我们一直在脑子里创造一些能够带给自己乐趣的机制。有时候是通过挑战，寻找模式，有时候则是通过解决问题。而我们的大脑将与之连接在一起去享受这些内容，从根本上看来这也是一种学习过程。我们的大脑将意识到通过学习，推动局限性并突破障碍将能让自己获得奖励。从某种程度上看来，游戏设计是扩展我们思维的一个过程。

我可以坐在那里着眼于计算机的规格，并理解它能执行或者不能执行的所有内容。而关于人心我们却找不到任何指南。这是一个未知的领域。对于游戏设计师而言，这是我们探索人心的一大基本方法。

Game Horizon：世界上有哪个游戏设计师是你最佩服的？他是现在还是历史上的人才？

Wright：这是一个很好的问题。我会毫不犹豫地说出任天堂的宫本茂。我之所以如此欣赏他是因为，他总是将玩家放在最重要的位置上。马上递给某些人控制器会呈现出怎样的感觉？他所致力的触觉和动觉是怎样的？这是由内到外的影响。玩家最初5秒的游戏体验如何？而下个10秒的体验又是如何？他的游戏总是围绕着这些技能展开，这是非常让人惊讶且独特的体验。加上他也会落实各种各样的工作，所以我才会这么钦佩他。

同样地还有Peter Molyneux，我认为他尝试了许多冒险。他的创造在某种方式上刺激着我的感受。我还很喜欢Sid Meier的游戏。他的游戏具有可玩性。它们就像是一把把舒坦的椅子，能让你安心坐着。桌面游戏和战争游戏一直伴随着我成长。而Sid在这两大领域一直非常突出，所以可以说Sid及其游戏重新塑造了我们的青春时代。当然还有许多值得我们尊敬的设计师，但是我却很难一将其一一罗列出来。

我所说的这三个人都属于我们这一代的游戏设计师。当然还有许多其他人，以及拥有大好前途的人正在进行一些很棒，且具有实验性的创作。我觉得，比起以前，我们现在拥有更多技能型设计师，这对于游戏产业来说是个好消息。一部分原因是源自越来越多不同平台的出现。我们不再需要一个拥有100个人的庞大团队。一个非常聪明的小孩也能够与好友一起创造一款应用并呈现在App Store中。有些非常优秀的设计师也才开始采取行动。

GH：什么元素对你的游戏创造带来了最大的影响—-你所创造的模拟不只停留在机制上，它也通过某种方式模拟了生活？

Wright：书籍对我的游戏创造产生了很大的影响。我总是会瞄准一些特定的主题，即关于一些学术性内容。最初我的灵感是源自Jay Forrester，即现代系统动力学（追溯到50年代）的创始人。我阅读了他是如何使用不同系统（包括城市，工厂和整个世界）并模拟这些系统。他想要将其分解成不同配件，并基于这些配件去创建模型。

童年的时候我也花了很多时间去创建模型，包括飞机，船，塑料和木头等等。后来我又沉迷于汽车，坦克等对象的模型创造，并因此让我想要创造自己的机器人。后来我购买了第一台计算机，并开始构建属于自己的早期机器人。在构建机器人的同时，我意识到一些非常复杂的问题，以及AI问题。

同时，我不仅对创建静态实体模型感兴趣，我也很想知道如何去创建动态的世界模型。即创建内在动态世界以及如何运行。在模拟道路上，Jay Forrester带给我很大的灵感。还有其它灵感是来自波兰作家Stanislaw Lem，他写了许多关于微观世界，模拟世界，以及处理这些事物的相关伦理学的内容。对于我所创造的不同游戏，我的灵感来源都是不同的。蚂蚁专家Edward Wilson对于蚂蚁的研究推动着我们创造了《SimAnt》。而Christopher Alexander在建筑领域的观点激发了我去创造《模拟人生》。所以说我的大多数灵感都是来自阅读。

GH：新《模拟城市》中好像面临了一些问题，这对于你的新设计带来了何种影响？

Wright：我现在正致力于创造更多手机体验。从经济和业务角度来看，这完全不同与早前的包装模式。我认为早前的那些基于PC以及陈列在架子上出售的游戏将快速发生转变。我们正处于一个新兴市场中。主机公司及其业务模式也是如此。其过去的业务模式是向用户出售主机和一堆游戏，并因此推断主机的开发。但是现在，人们只需要花费3至5美元，甚至不用花钱（基于微交易）便能在应用市场上买到自己喜欢的游戏。

我们正在从局部最大值过度到一个完全不同的领域。对于许多业务模式而言，这是一种非常不舒服的过度。过去几年里在PC市场上出现了各种盗版行为。而DRM（游戏邦注：数字版权管理）是一种解决方法。免费模式则是另一种解决方法。在我们能够判断消费者将会接受并喜欢哪一款游戏之前，我们将经历一个进化过程。这是关于你该如何在避免经济风险的前提下将玩家带到游戏体验中的问题。

而关于DRM（这是针对《模拟城市》及其发行而言），因为那时我们还未与艺电展开合作，我也不便多说。但是我想说的是，在新项目中我们是不会考虑DRM的。而现在关于我们会选择哪种业务模式（游戏邦注：不管是微交易还是订阅式，或者其它模式）都还是未知数。并不存在已建造的模型。人们一直在尝试不同的内容，并享受着不同程度的成功。

SimCity German City(from ea.com)

GH：你谈论了在过去5年里游戏产业中出现的所有改变。有许多内容是围绕着该产业的构建方法，销售方式。对此你提及了微交易和章节游戏。这是关于业务方面的内容。你是否认为这会对游戏设计带来积极影响，或者影响游戏设计方式？

Wright：当你转向免费模式时，你会发现，它其实就是我们之前所谓的游戏演示的扩展版。我们可以下载一个演示版本，如果喜欢它的话便可以选择购买完整的游戏。我们已经经历过这种过程。

我坚信，如果游戏对于玩家来说具有价值，如果玩家真的喜欢游戏体验，那么他们便会愿意以某种形式去支付游戏。而这将在某种意义上赋予游戏更大的稳定性，如此便不再是关于你拥有多少市场营销预算的问题了。虽然这一点仍很重要，但却不如之前那么重要了。过去我们需要考虑货架空间以及如何在有限的渠道中进行分配等问题。这是一个巨大的过滤器，有可能导致发行商退却或不愿承担风险。而最大的销售策略一直都是游戏续集。发行商们总是愿意投入上百万美元于一些已经大获成功的游戏的续集中。但是却不愿尝试一些初出茅庐的作品。

从这个意义上来看，我们所拥有的全新业务模式将非常适于游戏开发。我们也看到了越来越多人敢于在此冒风险，因为他们不再需要投入大量的市场营销费用。并且我们现在所面对的平台也不再是要求投入数千万美元去开发一款顶级游戏的平台。

我们正转向一个全新的世界，在那里玩家从游戏中所获得的价值与你从玩家身上获得盈利的能力具有更加直接的关系。我便从一些亲身尝试的游戏中感受到这一点。我下载过一些真的很棒的免费游戏，甚至能让我在几个月后仍然沉浸于其中。那时候我真的很乐意在游戏中消费。其实这主要是因为游戏向我证明了它拥有这样的价值。我是否真的想要反复玩这款游戏？我是否沉浸在其中？如果答案是肯定的，我便会为它打开钱包。我认为，如果玩家从游戏中所获得的价值与你从玩家身上获得盈利的能力间拥有更直接的关系，便会有更多人认可这个产业。没有什么比在游戏中花费了40美元但在玩了半个小时后发现它其实很无聊更糟糕的情况了。我们一直在避免这种情况。

GH：你是否认为自己之前的游戏也能从新系统中受益？

Wright：这很难说，因为我们也发现游戏的目标玩家群体不断扩展着。我想，我们的一些游戏之所以能够取得巨大的成功是因为它们吸引了更广泛的玩家群体。但是它们却仍只能出现在一些有限的平台上。也就是它们都是基于PC的游戏。而当提到我所创造的游戏的续集，如《模拟人生2》，《模拟城市2000》等，玩家们便更加乐意投入30美元或40美元去购买这些游戏，因为它们已经拥有了一定的知名度。可以说第一个游戏版本起到了推广作用。这是口口相传的效果。人们会说：“你应该试试这款游戏”。你可能会在好友的家中接触到这款游戏，并在后来自己也买了同样的游戏。

现在，这种即时性更能推动着我们去尝试一款游戏。如果有人说起我的iPhone上的一款游戏，我便能在2分钟内去尝试它。我不再需要到商店购买，将其带回家并进行安装了。这种即时性让用户能够尝试更广泛的内容。另一方面，你还拥有无数工具能够帮助游戏吸引玩家的注意。如信号或者声音。

GH：你是否有想要尝试的游戏类型或设计理念，但却从未有机会落实行动？现在的开发周期远比以前短，并且风险性也大大减小了，所以是否有哪些内容是你有机会进行尝试的？

Wright：我拥有许许多多理念，甚至有可能超越我的寿命。我曾投入了数个月时间致力于一个理念，即一款战术模拟游戏。它基于3D流体动力学。我想要采取一些有趣的方式去抓住空气并移动它。而现在，基于多触屏界面，我能够更轻松地实现它（相比之前用鼠标和键盘操作的方法）。不过还有许多理念是我因为技术或模拟难度等种种原因而未能付诸行动。不过我觉得真正让我感兴趣的还是实践过程，即更深入地理解玩家，并且与一些特定的成员共同开发并完善一款游戏。

GH：几年前我们曾采访了Ken Perlin，我知道你们时不时也会进行交流。如果你能够组建一个梦想开发小组，你会希望邀请哪些人？

Wright：这要依项目而定。在过去几年里我已经与一些非常优秀的人一起工作。特别是在编程领域中，一个优秀的程序员的效率比一个不错的程序员高出100倍。但这也完全取决于人们对于一个项目的积极性。如果你能够想出一个理念并计划哪些人适合该项目，那么他们便是你理想中的团队成员。所以我很难在此说谁更有资格加入梦想团队。

Ken及其作品带给我很大的启发。在开发《孢子》的早期，我们向他咨询了许多程序生成内容。很多时候我都能够很幸运地与自己所欣赏的一些人合作，如Christopher Alexander和James Lovelock。他们不同程度地参与了我们的项目制作。而我的梦想便是让那些带给我们灵感的人参与其中，并给予我们适当反馈。

GH：你现在玩的哪款游戏能够带给你一定灵感，或者你喜欢玩哪一款游戏？

Wright：有趣的是，在我玩游戏的时候，我完全不觉得它们会成为灵感来源。我只是单纯地在打游戏，并享受着游戏乐趣。在生活中的某些时候，我会放下游戏设计师的身份，忘记我是以此谋生，而只是坐着玩游戏。现在能够带给我最大的乐趣便是《World of Tanks》。在童年的时候我很喜欢“第二次世界大战”这段历史（游戏邦注：甚至创建了许多坦克模型），而《World of Tanks》拥有许多不同于“第二次世界大战”的坦克。我之所以会觉得它很有趣是因为它很像第一人称射击游戏。玩家无需拥有快速的反应，反而更加需要策略型思维能力。这些坦克的行驶速度较慢，炮塔的转向也不快。当我在玩第一人称射击游戏时，我还被一名14岁的小孩击中过。所以《World of Tanks》是像第一人称射击游戏那样许多人都能够轻松获取胜利的游戏。

world-of-tanks(from gamingshogun)

我也会在iPhone和iPad上玩许多应用。但是通常情况下我都不会陷太深。我之所以尝试这些应用是为了寻找一些真正有趣的内容。有时候是为了研究一个新奇的界面或者不同的方法。它们对于我来说也是灵感的来源。许多基于回合制的策略游戏伴随着我的成长，所以我一直都很喜欢这类型游戏。就像我便连续好几年都在DS上玩《Advance Wars》。Sid Meier的《文明》以及最新面向iPad的《文明：变革》也是我很喜欢的游戏。我会花大量时间去玩这些游戏。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Game Horizon’s Q&A with Will Wright on the future of games

Dean Takahashi

Nobody talks about games as lucidly as Will Wright, the creator of blockbuster franchises from SimCity to The Sims. He discussed the future of games at the Game Horizon Live event in a live webcast this week. During his Q&A session, he talked about a wide variety of topics about where games are going.

Wright said that he was inspired by the “Cambrian” explosion of games (as in the meteoric growth of life during that epoch in Earth’s history) that has come from indie game development on app stores for smartphones, tablets and other platforms.

Wright cofounded Maxis and created games like SimCity. EA acquired Maxis in 1997, and Wright went on to create titles like The Sims and Spore while at EA. He left Electronic Arts in 2009 and set up a series of startups. His latest company is Syntertainment, which focuses on creative play and the interaction between entertainment and reality.

Wright has won multiple awards and was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame. For young game designers getting started, Wright advised them to study nongaming fields so they can get more creative inspiration. Here’s an edited transcript of a portion of the Q&A with Wright at Game Horizon 2013. This is part one of the Q&A and we’ll run part two on Sunday.

Will Wright: Really, you’re dealing with two platforms. You’re dealing with the computing platform, which is code and technology and all that stuff, and you’re dealing with the human mind. When you design a game, it’s running on both of these platforms at once. A lot of the things that we can crunch numbers on in a simulation, we do that on the computer. But a lot of other things that the computer is not well-suited for, we actually run that in the player’s imagination.

For example, in The Sims, when you hear the people talk, you don’t actually hear them saying anything. You hear this kind of gibberish language. Through a lot of experiments, we determined that we could actually have them speaking in English or some other known language, but they very quickly became robotic and repetitive. That veil of reality disappears. On the other hand, if they speak gibberish, your mind naturally fills in the blanks and imagines a conversation. The Sims have vocal intonation. They have emotion. You can tell if they’re angry or flirting or whatever it is. We don’t hear the exact words, is all. In essence, what we did is we offloaded that part of the simulation into the human imagination.

When I started out in my career many decades ago, it was all about how fast the computer can run. How many pixels can we put on the screen? We were always fighting the machine at every turn to get more performance out of it, to do more tricks. Those limitations, for the most part, have just fallen by the wayside. I don’t feel like I have any meaningful technological bottlenecks or barriers ahead of me. At this point, it’s about how we best exploit the human imagination, the human mind, human creativity, in interesting ways. We’re trying to get somebody’s brain into a certain state that they enjoy. Sometimes it’s a kind of flow state. You’re at this border between challenge, accomplishment, and difficulty. Other times it’s more of a free-form, creative, expressive state, or something where you want to share, more of a social state.

Obviously, we don’t understand very much about the human mind. Game design, in some sense, is applied psychology. We’re hacking human psychology. We’re dealing with these mechanisms in our brains that give us joy, enjoyment. Sometimes it’s through challenge, or through finding patterns, or through solving problems. Our brain is wired to enjoy these things, which fundamentally is the process of learning. Our brain is wired to reward us for learning and pushing our limits and doing things outside of our barriers. Game design is in some ways a process of getting us into that state of expanding our mind.

I can sit there and look at the specs of a computer and understand all the stuff that it can and can’t do. The human mind, though, we have no manual for. That’s uncharted territory. As game designers, this is one of the fundamental ways in which we’re exploring the human mind.

Game Horizon: Which game designers in the world do you most admire? Current or historical?

Wright: That’s a good question. Obviously, [Shigeru] Miyamoto and Nintendo. What I admire most about him is that he always takes the player first. Right off the bat, giving someone the controller – what does it feel like? How tactile and kinesthetic is what he’s working on? It works from the inside out. What’s the first 5 seconds of the player experience? What’s in the next 10 seconds? His games have this craftsmanship around them that’s amazing and unique. Plus, the variety of things he’s done. So I very much admire him.

Also, Peter Molyneux. I think he takes a lot of risks. He’s got this vicarious thing about dealing with little worlds full of little people, which very much matches my sensibilities in a way. Sid Meier, I’ve always enjoyed his games. His games are just playable. They’re like a comfortable chair you sit in. I grew up playing board games and war games and stuff. Sid did as well, so I think Sid in some ways is re-creating our youth, the kinds of games we would play back then. There are lots more. It’s hard to pick them out.

All three of these are from my generation of game designers. There are a lot of other people, up-and-coming people, doing weird, cool, experimental stuff right now. I feel like we have a much wider crop of very skilled, talented designers now than we ever have, which is great for the industry. Partially it’s the result of having all these different platforms. You don’t need the 100-person team. A really smart kid can go out there with a couple of his friends and put an app out on the App Store inside of a year. Some of the greatest designers out there are just getting their start right now.

GH: What were the biggest influences for the kind of games that you’ve created – the simulations you’ve built that are more than just mechanical, that simulate life in a way?

Wright: A lot of my influences for my games come from reading, from books. Specific themes and subjects usually are very targeted, coming from academic stuff. I was very inspired initially by Jay Forrester, who was the father of modern system dynamics theory back in the ‘50s. I was reading about how he was trying to take different systems – cities, factories, the whole world – and simulate them. He wanted to deconstruct them into component parts that he could build a model of.

As a kid I spent most of childhood building models – planes, ships, plastic and wood. I started putting in motors and building tanks and stuff like that, which led me to the idea of robots. I bought my first computer to control my early robots. Doing robotics, I started realizing that most of the really hard problems in robotics and AI were software problems.

At the same time, I got very interested in not just modeling the world with static, physical models, but also how to model the world dynamically. Modeling the internal dynamics of the world and the way things work. I’d say that Jay Forrester was a big inspiration down the simulation path. Another inspiration was a Polish writer named Stanislaw Lem, who wrote a lot about micro-worlds, simulating worlds, and the ethics of dealing with these things. A lot of philosophical questions that these little worlds bring up. For the different games I’ve done, for almost every game there’s some major inspiration. Edward Wilson’s work with ants inspired SimAnt. Christopher Alexander’s work on architecture inspired The Sims. So I get most of my inspiration from reading.

GH: There have obviously been a few issues with the new SimCity. How has that affected you in the design of your new work?

Wright: What I’m working on now is going to be much more of a mobile-based experience. It’s in a totally different ballpark economically and business-wise from the old shrink-wrap model. I think a lot of the old titles, the old franchises that are PC-based and whatnot, are going to have to evolve very rapidly. We’re in a new market. It’s true of the console companies and their business models as well. Their business model used to be that you’d buy a console and they’d sell you a bunch of games and that would pay for the console development. Now people are being conditioned, in the app markets especially, that games cost three to five dollars, or they’re freemium, with microtransactions.

We’re going from one local maximum, in the business landscape of games, to a whole different one. For a lot of business models that’s going to be a very uncomfortable transition. There’s obviously been a lot of piracy over the years in the PC market. DRM is one approach to it. Freemium is another. There’s a Darwinian process happening right now before our eyes as to which ones consumers will accept and which ones they’re going to be comfortable with. It’s a question of how you pull somebody into an experience, without frontloading the economic exposure from the consumer’s point of view.

As far as DRM – and this is relative to SimCity and what happened with the SimCity launch – I wasn’t really working with Electronic Arts at that point, so I can’t say much about that specifically. But I’d say that kind of DRM issue isn’t really much of a concern for me on the new project working on. The business model that we do choose, whether it’s microtransactions or subscription or however we try to monetize it, is a very big unknown right now. There is no established model. People are experimenting with all these different things and meeting varying levels of success.

GH: You talked a bit about all the changes that have come over the industry in the last five years. A lot of that is centered around the way the industry is structured, how things are sold. You mentioned microtransactions and episodic games. That’s all been on the business side of things. Do you feel that any of that has been a positive for the way games are designed, the way that design is approached?

Wright: As you move to something like a freemium model, what’s happening is, it’s really just an expansion of what we used to call game demos. I’d download a demo and if I liked it I’d go buy the game. We’ve granularized that process.

I am a firm believer that if the game has value to the player, if the player is enjoying that experience, then the player will be willing to pay for it in some form. I think that it puts games on, in some sense, a more even footing, in that it’s not so much about how big of a marketing budget you can put behind it. That’s still a large component, but it’s not as huge as it used to be. It used to be about things like shelf space and how you’d get distribution in very limited channels. That was such a huge filter that in some ways it was causing the publishers to fall back and be very risk-averse. The biggest-selling category was always sequels. Publishers were comfortable investing millions of dollars into the second and third versions of something they knew was successful. They were much less comfortable with trying something totally experimental.

In that sense, the new business models that we have are very good for game development. We’re seeing much more experimentation and risk-taking, because you don’t necessarily have to plunk down as much money on marketing and distribution as you did on game development. The platforms are such that I don’t just spend tens of millions of dollars to develop a top-level game on the platform.

We’re moving to a world where there’s a more direct correlation between the value a player gets from a game and your ability to monetize from the player. I’ve experienced this myself with certain games that I’ve played. There are games that I’ve downloaded, freemium games, that I’ve really gotten into and that I’m playing months later. I’m willing, at that point, to put money into the game – significant amounts of money. In some sense it’s up to the game to prove itself to me first. Do I really want to play this thing again and again? Am I getting into it? Then I’ll open my wallet and start putting money into it. I think the more direct the correlation between the value a player gets from a game and the amount of money we take from the player, the more people will feel good about the industry. Nothing feels worse than dropping down $40 on a game that you buy at a software store, bringing it home, playing it for half an hour, and finding out that it sucks. We’re moving away from that.

GH: Do you think that any of your previous games would have benefited from this new system?

Wright: It’s hard to say, because at the same time, what we’ve seen is a huge widening of the demographics of our players. The reason why some of my games have been fairly successful, I think, is because they pulled in a much wider group of people. But still, they were on a very limited set of platforms. They were typically PC-based. When you get to the sequels to some of the games I did – The Sims 2, SimCity 2000, and so on – at that point people knew what these things were, and they were much more likely to drop the $30 or $40 to buy the game. In the first versions, it probably did mitigate the spread of these things. It was just word of mouth. People said, “You should check this game out.” You’d play at your friend’s house and then go order it.

Right now, there’s such immediacy to being able to try a game. If someone tells me about a game on my iPhone, I can be playing it in two minutes. I don’t have to find it in the store, bring it home, and install it. That immediacy allows the consumer to experiment with a much wider variety of things. Now, on the flip side of this, you have a thousand cool games competing for your attention. It’s about signal and noise.

GH: Are there any game genres or any design ideas that you’ve had and that you wanted to work on, but you never had a chance to do so? Now that development cycles are shorter and risks might be mitigated, is there anything like that you might have a chance to work on?

Wright: I’ve had so many ideas, some that could go way beyond my lifespan. There’s an idea I worked on for many months that was kind of a tactical storm simulator. It was based on 3D fluid dynamics. I wanted to be able to go in and grab the atmosphere and move it and manipulate it in interesting ways. By now, with a multi-touch interface, it’s probably much more achievable than it was with the old mouse and keyboard approach. But yeah, there are so many ideas that I got into at one point in time or another, and then for whatever reason – technology or simulation difficulty – they dropped by the wayside. For the most part, though, I think that the thing that’s interested me the most is the path that I’m going down, which is understanding the player very deeply and having a game that develops and evolves with particular people.

GH: A couple of years ago, we had Ken Perlin come and give a speech. I gather that you talk to him from time to time. If you had a dream team of people that you’d put together, who would they be?

Wright: It would depend on the project. I’ve worked with a number of great people over the years. Typically, in programming, it’s one of these fields where a great programmer is 100 times more effective than a really good programmer. But it also depends entirely on how motivated people are towards the project. That’s another huge multiplier. If you can come up with an idea and figure out who would be really into it, those are the people you want on the team. So it’s hard for me to say that there’s one dream team.

Ken and his work have been a huge inspiration to me. He was doing a lot of the early consulting for us on Spore, the procedural generation stuff. At various times I’ve had the privilege to work with some of the people who’ve inspired me with their writing — Christopher Alexander, James Lovelock. I’ve gotten them involved to various degrees on projects. When you get the person who inspired the idea to come in and start giving feedback, to me that is the dream.

GH: What are the games that you are playing at the moment that you’re getting inspired by, or that you just love to play?

Wright: It’s interesting. When I play games, I don’t necessarily feel like I get inspired by them at all. I just sit and play them. I enjoy them. There’s some part of my life where I put aside the fact that I’m a game designer, that I do this for a living, and I just want to sit and blow things up. My current guilty pleasure is World of Tanks. As a kid I always loved World War II history — I built a lot of tank models — and World of Tanks has all these different tanks from World War II. It’s fun for me because it’s kind of like a first-person shooter for old people. You don’t need to have fast reflexes to play this game. It’s much more about strategic thinking. These tanks go slowly and the turrets don’t turn fast. When I play first-person shooters I just get my butt kicked by 14-year-old kids. So World of Tanks is like a first-person shooter that someone like me can play fairly successfully.

I play a lot of apps, too, on my iPhone and iPad. Usually I don’t play them very deeply. I try a lot of them just to look around for cool things. Sometimes it’s a novel interface or a different approach. Those are probably a little more of an inspiration for me. I grew up playing a lot of turn-based strategy games, too, so I’ve always enjoyed those. Advance Wars on the DS, I spent many years playing that. Sid Meier’s Civilization, as well as the new one on the iPad, Civilization Revolutions. Those are the kinds of games I spend most of my time playing.

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