Making the entire planet a toy

Ingenious computer game designer Will Wright had some rambling but fascinating things to say about games and narrative during his SXSW conference keynote (one attendee’s transcript is available here). The designer of the insanely popular and genre-busting Sims series is hard at work completing his next invention, an evolutionary creature/tribe/civilization design game called Spore.

Wright is tired of games that superimpose the linear and goal-driven narrative of previous media into the game environment. When individual players (or entire communities of players) can be active and material authors of their experience, he believes a different kind of narrative is required. Says he:

Stories are about empathy, and games are about agency. I’m causing what’s going on on screen. Can I do this? Can I accomplish this? These models are cognitive technology. They’re the original educational technology. They involve abstracting the world.

With games like Spore, he hopes to push the envelope of that participatory experience, allowing users to explore and create, free from the traditional constraints of linear narrative or predefined goals. In this approach, the game software doesn’t drive the plot or define the outcomes, but informs them both based on the patterns it recognizes in the user’s behavior:

You can have the computer understand, “Oh I see, this is a boy meets girl story,” etc. If we know what the goal states are, we can present dramatic obstacles, things to amplify the drama…. If we can parse the player’s intended story, we can change the lighting, the music… the events! If it’s a horror story, we can add spooky music… we can add zombies. Maybe we drive events to clarify a story, and then actually you’ve created a movie. I think this [generative power] might happen by observing lots of parallel players and pulling the data out of that.

I’m thinking the Truman Show, where you would allow the player to run around with a certain amount of free will, and the computer is like the director, who controls the envelope around Truman but can’t directly affect his movements.

The aesthetic of every creative expression is defined and refined by the constraints of its medium — the motion picture, the theater stage, the canvas. We’re only just beginning to see the evolution of aesthetic insight for the computer-mediated world. It’s great to know that somebody is nudging that insight forward.