Will Wright Rox SXSW With One Arm & Empathy
The ineffable Alice from Wonderland did the world a solid and transcribed as much of Will Wright's impassioned, speedy keynote at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas as her poor fingers would allow. It's immensely long, even only partial as it is, but as always with the mysterious Mr. Wright, it's worth a read. Some randomly juicy morsels:
I hate stories that my computer tries to tell me... But empathy is really important to me. Movies have these wonderful things called actors, which are like emotional avatars, and you kinda feel what they’re feeling, it’s very effective... There are things you feel in games - like pride, accomplishment, guilt even! – that you’ll never feel in a movie. I felt so bad about beating my creature to death in Black & White.
So with Spore... if we could give a player a tool to build a tinker toy, and the computer takes that and presents it back in hi-res output: this is creative amplification on the player’s efforts. What if we could take those assets and collect them all on a server and categorize those, and then predict what they’d like and bring it back into their world? This is what Spore is like. I wanna take the player out of the protagonist of Luke Skywalker, and put them in the world of George Lucas.
So in some sense the entire planet is a toy. One of the really nice things with a toy like this is you can give people long term dynamics over short term sense. It’s so hard for us to think over the long term, longer than 100 years, but by using these toys we can help people to think and understand...
Every star system will have planets you can interact with, and many will be inhabited by other players’ species. We’re seeing thousands of stars... but this is a small fraction of the galaxy we’re building here. So basically that is Spore.
/Melt. Read the whole she-bang at Wonderland, should you dare...
SXSW: Will Wright Keynote [Wonderland]
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Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany, Video Games on 13 March 2007
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There are many times I wish I was in Austin, closer to my parents...and shitloads high technology & game developers.