Will Wright (game designer)

William Ralph Wright (born January 20, 1960) is an American video game designer and co-founder of the former game development company Maxis, and then part of Electronic Arts (EA). In April 2009, he left EA to run Stupid Fun Club Camp, an entertainment think tank in which Wright and EA are principal shareholders.[1][2][3]

Will Wright
Wright speaking at the 2010 Game Developers Conference
Born
William Ralph Wright

(1960-01-20) January 20, 1960
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
Alma materLouisiana State University, Louisiana Tech University
OccupationGame designer
Known forSimCity
The Sims
Spore
Spouse(s)Joell Jones (divorced)
Anya Zavarzina

The first computer game Wright designed was Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984, but it was SimCity that brought him to prominence. The game was released by Maxis, a company Wright formed with Jeff Braun, and he built upon the game's theme of computer simulation with numerous other titles including SimEarth and SimAnt.

Wright's greatest success to date comes from being the original designer for The Sims. The game spawned multiple sequels, including The Sims 2, The Sims 3, and The Sims 4 and expansion packs, and Wright has earned many awards for his work. His latest work, Spore, was released in September 2008 and features gameplay based upon the model of evolution and scientific advancement.[4] The game sold 406,000 copies within three weeks of its release.[5]

Early life and education

As a child, his interest in game design began with the Chinese/Japanese strategy board game Go. It has a "simple set of rules" yet "the strategies in it are so complex" according to Wright, and he was "fascinated with the idea that complexity can come out of such simplicity."[6]

After graduating at 16 from Episcopal High School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he enrolled in Louisiana State University, transferring two years later to Louisiana Tech. Beginning with a start at an architecture degree, followed by mechanical engineering, he fell into computers and robotics. He excelled in subjects he was interested in—architecture, economics, mechanical engineering, military history, and language arts. His earlier dream of space colonization remained, and was joined by a love for robotics.

After another two years at Louisiana Tech, in the fall of 1980, Wright moved on to The New School in Manhattan. He lived in an apartment over Balducci's, in Greenwich Village, and spent much of his spare time searching for spare parts in local electronics surplus stores. After one year at the New School, Wright returned to Baton Rouge without his degree,[7] concluding five years of collegiate study.[8]

Career

Wright enjoyed playing board wargames like PanzerBlitz as a teenager. While living in New York City he purchased an Apple II+. Wanting to implement Conway's Game of Life on it led Wright to teach himself Applesoft BASIC, Pascal, and assembly language. As others like Bill Budge and Nasir Gebelli were already producing multiple Apple video games, Wright decided to develop for the newer Commodore 64. His first game was the helicopter action game Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984).[9]

In Raid on Bungeling Bay, the player flies over islands while dropping bombs. Wright found that he had more fun creating the islands with his level editor for Raid on Bungeling Bay than he had actually playing the game.[10] He created a new game that would later evolve into SimCity, but he had trouble finding a publisher. The structuralist dynamics of the game were in part inspired by the work of two architectural and urban theorists, Christopher Alexander and Jay Forrester.

I'm interested in the process and strategies for design. The architect Christopher Alexander, in his book A Pattern Language formalized a lot of spatial relationships into a grammar for design. I'd really like to work toward a grammar for complex systems and present someone with tools for designing complex things.[11]

In an interview with The Times, Wright expressed his belief that computers extend the imagination, and posits the emergence of the "metabrain", stating:

Any human institutional system that draws on the intelligence of all its members is a metabrain. Up to now, we have had high friction between the neurons of the metabrain; technology is lowering that friction tremendously. Computers are allowing us to aggregate our intelligence in ways that were never possible before. If you look at Spore, people are making this stuff, and computers collect it, then decide who to send it to. The computer is the broker. What they are really exploring is the collective creativity of millions of people. They are aggregating human intelligence into a system that is more powerful than we thought artificial intelligence was going to be.[12]

Game designer
Wright and other game developers at a BAFTA event in Los Angeles in July 2011. From left: Rod Humble, Louis Castle, David Perry, Brenda Brathwaite, John Romero, Will Wright, Tim Schafer, Chris Hecker.

In 1986, Wright met Jeff Braun, an investor interested in entering the computer game industry, at what Wright has called "the world's most important pizza party." Together they formed Maxis the next year in Orinda, California. SimCity (1989) was a hit and has been credited as one of the most influential computer games ever made. Wright himself has been widely featured in several computer magazines—particularly PC Gamer, which has listed Wright in its annual 'Game Gods' feature, alongside such notables as Roberta Williams and Peter Molyneux.

Following the success of SimCity, Wright designed SimEarth (1990) and SimAnt (1991). He co-designed SimCity 2000 (1993) with Fred Haslam and in the meantime Maxis produced other "Sim" games. Wright's next game was SimCopter (1996). Although none of these games were as successful as SimCity, they further cemented Wright's reputation as a designer of "software toys"—games that cannot be won or lost, but played indefinitely. In 1992, Wright moved to Walnut Creek, California.

Wright has a great interest in complex adaptive systems and most of his games have been based around them or books that describe them (SimAnt: E.O. Wilson's The Ants, SimEarth: James Lovelock's Gaia Theory, SimCity: Jay Forrester's Urban Dynamics and World Dynamics, Spore, Drake's Equation and Powers of Ten) Wright's role in the development of the concepts from simulations to games is to empower the players by creating what he dubs "possibility spaces", or simple rules and game elements that add up to a very complex design. All Maxis, and later games that Wright had a hand in designing, adhere to these design principles.[13]

Maxis went public in 1995 with revenue of US$38 million. The stock reached $50 a share and then dropped as Maxis posted a loss. EA bought Maxis in June 1997. Wright had been thinking about making a virtual doll house ever since the early 1990s, similar to SimCity but focused on individual people; after losing his home during the Oakland firestorm of 1991, he was inspired to turn his experiences of rebuilding his life into a game. The Sims would be based on Wright's focus on building homes, which came from inspiration he found first-hand.[14] Wright, was even sure to include many fires in the game, which were extra difficult for the player to extinguish. Themes like carpentry, home construction, and bare ground in need of landscaping, are common throughout the game. Originally conceived of as an architectural design game called Home Tactics, Wright's idea changed when someone suggested the player should be rated on the quality of life experience by the homeowners. It was a difficult idea to sell to EA, because already 40% of Maxis's employees had been laid off.

When Wright took his idea to the Maxis board of directors, Jeff Braun said, "The board looked at The Sims and said, 'What is this? He wants to do an interactive doll house? The guy is out of his mind.'" [15] Maxis gave little support or financing for the game. However, EA was more enthusiastic. Steven Levy wrote: "Wright's games were so different from EA's other releases that it was hard to imagine the two being united in the same enterprise."[16] However, the success of SimCity had already established Sim as a strong brand, and EA, which by then, fifteen years after its founding, was becoming a Procter & Gamble-style brand-management company, foresaw the possibility of building a Sim franchise.[13]

EA published The Sims in February 2000 and it became Wright's biggest success at the time. It eventually surpassed Myst as the best-selling computer game of all time and spawned numerous expansion packs and other games. He designed a massively multiplayer version of the game called The Sims Online, which was not as popular as the original. By November 2006, the Sims franchise had earned EA more than a billion dollars.[13]

In a presentation at the Game Developers Conference on March 11, 2005, Wright announced his latest game Spore.[17] He used the current work on this game to demonstrate methods that can be used to reduce the amount of content that needs to be created by the game developers. Wright hopes to inspire others to take risks in game creation.

As for his theories on interactive design, Wright has said:

Well, one thing I've always really enjoyed is making things. Out of whatever. It started with modeling as a kid, building models. When computers came along, I started learning programming and realizing the computer was this great tool for making things, making models, dynamic models, and behaviors, not just static models. I think when I started doing games I really wanted to carry that to the next step, to the player, so that you give the player a tool so that they can create things. And then you give them some context for that creation. You know, what is it, what kind of kind of world does it live in, what's its purpose? What are you trying to do with this thing that you're creating? To really put the player in the design role. And the actual world is reactive to their design. So they design something that the little world inside the computer reacts to. And then they have to revisit the design and redesign it, or tear it down and build another one, whatever it is. So I guess what really draws me to interactive entertainment and the thing that I try to keep focused on is enabling the creativity of the player. Giving them a pretty large solution space to solve the problem within the game. So the game represents this problem landscape. Most games have small solution landscapes, so there's one possible solution and one way to solve it. Other games, the games that tend to be more creative, have a much larger solution space, so you can potentially solve this problem in a way that nobody else has. If you're building a solution, how large that solution space is gives the player a much stronger feeling of empathy. If they know that what they've done is unique to them, they tend to care for it a lot more. I think that's the direction I tend to come from.[18]

Wright has said that he believes that simulations, as games, can be used to improve education by teaching children how to learn. In his own words:

The problem with our education system is we've taken this kind of narrow, reductionist, Aristotelian approach to what learning is. 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.[13]

Post-Maxis career

After building his reputation as one of the most important game designers in the world, Wright left Maxis in 2009. His first post-EA venture was the Stupid Fun Club startup company and experimental entertainment development studio, with a focus on "video games, online environments, storytelling media, and fine home care products", as well as toys.[19] In October 2010, Current TV announced that Will Wright and his team from Stupid Fun Club will produce a new show for the network.[20][21] The program, entitled Bar Karma, began airing in February 2011, and featured scenes and twists pitched by an online community, using an online story creator tool designed by Wright.[22] Stupid Fun Club ran for four years before closing down, with much of the team following Wright to found the social media app and graphic novel builder Thred.

In October 2011, Will Wright became a member of the board of directors of Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life.[23]

At the Game Developers Conference in March 2018, Will Wright announced a new project, the upcoming mobile game Proxi.[24]

At GalaVerse on December 11, 2021, Will Wright announced a new project, in partnership with Gala Games, called VoxVerse. Wright said VoxVerse will be a blockchain game, where players will be able to create areas to explore and interact with and share these with other players of the game, incentivizing creators through the ability to trade or sell their works as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) using cryptocurrency. Wright stated that the use of blockchain and NFTs are mechanisms needed to support the vision he has, but has no interest in selling NFTs directly to players as other blockchain games or NFT schemes have had done in the past. He likened it to early players in The Sims that found ways to modify the game to include their own creation. The game is being developed by Gallium Games, a studio he co-founded with Lauren Elliott, and being created in the Unity engine.[25]

Awards

Wright was given a "Lifetime Achievement Award" at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001. In 2002, he became the fifth person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame. Until 2006, he was the only person to have been honored this way by both of these industry organizations. In 2007 the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded him a fellowship, the first given to a game designer.[26]

He has been called one of the most important people in gaming, technology, and entertainment by publications such as Entertainment Weekly, Time, PC Gamer, Discover and GameSpy. Wright was also awarded the PC Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award in January 2005. Later that year, Wright earned the Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Progress and Service awarded by the Georgia Institute of Technology. He delivered a forward looking acceptance speech entitled "Stealth Communities".[27]

Personal life

In 1980, along with co-driver and race organizer Rick Doherty, Wright participated in the U.S. Express, a cross-country race that was the successor to The Cannonball Run. Wright and Doherty drove a specially outfitted Mazda RX-7 from Brooklyn, New York to Santa Monica, California in 33:39, winning the illegal race. Wright only competed once in the race, which continued until 1983.[28] Wright had a daughter, Cassidy, in 1986, which motivated him greatly over the next five years to hone his craft.

I'm uncollecting. I buy collections on ebay, and I disperse them out to people again. I have to be like an entropic force to collectors, otherwise all of this stuff will get sorted.[29]

Since 2003, in his spare time, Wright has collected leftovers from the Soviet space program, "including a 100-pound hatch from a space shuttle, a seat from a Soyuz ... control panels from the Mir",[29] and the control console of the Soyuz 23,[7] as well as dolls, dice, and fossils.[29]

He once built competitive robots for BattleBots with his daughter,[30] but no longer does so. As of November 2006, Wright still had remnant bits of machined metal left over from his BattleBots days strewn about the garage of his home.[7] Wright was a former Robot Wars champion in the Berkeley-based robotics workshop, the Stupid Fun Club.[29] One of Wright's bots, designed with the help of Wright's daughter, Cassidy, "Kitty Puff Puff", fought against its opponents by sticking a roll of tape onto its armature and circling around them, encapsulating them and denying them movement. The technique, "cocooning", was eventually banned.[7]

Following his work in BattleBots, he has taken steps into the field of human-robot interactions:

We build these robots and we take them down to Berkeley and study the interactions that people have with the robots... We built this newer one that has a rapid-fire pingpong cannon. It will fire about 10 per second. So we give people this plastic bat and we say, "It's set up to play baseball. Do you want to play baseball? It's going to shoot a little ball and you try to hit it." And all of a sudden it's like da-da-da-da, and it's pelting them with balls.[29]

Wright lives in Oakland, California, with his son. He is an atheist.[31] Wright lost his home and most records of his early career in the Oakland firestorm of 1991.[9] He is on the board of trustees of the X Prize Foundation, a non-profit organization that designs and hosts public competitions intended to encourage technological development to benefit humanity.[32]

Games
  • Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984)
  • SimCity (1989)
  • SimEarth (1990)
  • SimAnt (1991)
  • SimLife (1992)
  • SimCity 2000 (1993)
  • SimCopter (1996)
  • The Sims (2000)
  • The Sims Online (2002)
  • Spore (2008)
  • Spore Creature Creator (2008)
  • Proxi (TBA)

References
  1. "Will Wright Leaves EA, Does Something Stupid". Kotaku. April 8, 2009. Archived from the original on April 10, 2009. Retrieved April 8, 2009.
  2. "Stupid Fun News". spore.com. April 8, 2009. Retrieved April 8, 2009.
  3. Stewart, Kemuel (April 8, 2008). "Will Wright Leaves Electronic Arts". GamerCenterOnline. Archived from the original on April 12, 2009. Retrieved April 8, 2009.
  4. Margaret Robertson (August 9, 2008). "The Creation Simulation". Seed. Archived from the original on September 9, 2008. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  5. Gibson, Ellie (September 25, 2008). "September Sales 08". Eurogamer. Retrieved October 8, 2008.
  6. "Will Wright on creating 'The Sims' and 'SimCity'". CNN. November 30, 2000. Retrieved October 30, 2021.
  7. Seabrook, John (November 6, 2006). "Game Master". The New Yorker. Retrieved September 21, 2007.
  8. Yi, Matthew. "PROFILE: Will Wright: Unsimulated success". San Francisco Chronicle. November 3, 2003.
  9. Wright, Will (2011). Classic Game Postmortem – Raid On Bungeling Bay (YouTube). Game Developers Conference. Event occurs at 3:25. Archived from the original on December 11, 2021. Retrieved April 9, 2020.
  10. "75 Power Players". Next Generation. Imagine Media (11): 54. November 1995.
  11. Kelly, Kevin. "Will Wright. The Mayor of Sim City". Wired, 1994
  12. Bryan Appleyard (March 16, 2008). "Bryan Appleyard tries out Spore and creates his own species". The Times. London.
  13. "Profiles: Game Master: The New Yorker". The New Yorker. October 29, 2006.
  14. Seabrook, John (November 6, 2006). "Game Master: Will Wright changed the concept of video games with the Sims. Can he do it again with Spore?". The New Yorker. Retrieved January 10, 2015.
  15. John Seabrook (November 6, 2006). "Game Master". The New Yorker. Retrieved November 5, 2014.
  16. Levy, Steven (2007). The Best of Technology Writing 2007. University of Michigan. p. 198. ISBN 978-0-472-03266-2. Retrieved November 5, 2014.
  17. "Spore Gameplay Video". February 21, 2006. Archived from the original on February 24, 2008. Retrieved June 1, 2008.
  18. "Game Studies 0102: Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata, God and Go. By Celia Pearce". Gamestudies.org. Retrieved December 15, 2021.
  19. Terdiman, Daniel (October 7, 2009). "Will Wright speaks about his Stupid Fun Club start-up". CNET. Retrieved November 4, 2021.
  20. Daw, David (October 8, 2010). "Bar Karma is Will Wright's First Collaborative TV Show | TechHive". Pcworld.com. Retrieved November 29, 2012.
  21. Crecente, Brian (May 7, 2015). "How Will Wright is turning your life into his next simulation". Polygon.
  22. Terdiman, Daniel (February 10, 2011). "So Will Wright walks into a Bar Karma, see". CNET. Retrieved November 4, 2021.
  23. "Management | Linden Lab". March 17, 2010. Archived from the original on March 17, 2010. Retrieved December 15, 2021.
  24. Hale, James Loke. "'The Sims' Creator Is Making A New Game — With A Super Creepy Twist". Bustle. Retrieved April 30, 2018.
  25. Tolito, Stephan (October 20, 2022). "Sims pioneer Will Wright is making a blockchain game, but is down on NFTs". Axios. Retrieved October 23, 2022.
  26. "Will Wright inducted into BAFTA Fellowship". gamesindustry.biz. Archived from the original on February 16, 2008. Retrieved October 23, 2007.
  27. Wright, Will. "Stealth Communities". vimeo. Retrieved January 21, 2015.
  28. Sims Designer Had the Wright Stuff for Street Racing Way Back When from Wired
  29. Kent, Stephen L. (May 22, 2001). "'Sims' creator is Livin' Large". Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Retrieved November 4, 2021.
  30. Pearce, Celia (November 5, 2001). "Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata God and Go". Game Studies. Retrieved December 18, 2006.
  31. "When Wright was nine his father died of leukaemia and he moved with his mother and younger sister to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There he enrolled in the Episcopal High School and duly became an atheist." Ajesh Partalay interviewing Wright, 'Master of the Universe', The Observer, 14 September 2008 (accessed 15 September 2008).
  32. Alexander, Leigh (November 15, 2007). "Will Wright Joins X Prize Board Of Trustees". Gamasutra.com. Retrieved January 16, 2021.

Further reading
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Will Wright.
Wikiquote has quotations related to Will Wright.

Audio/Video
  • Presentation at SDForum, Lessons from Game Design, November 20, 2003 (audio)
  • Presentation at Accelerating Change 2004, Sculpting Possibility Space, November 7, 2004 (audio only)
  • Keynote at the Game Developers Conference, August 31, 2005 (view video after registration)
  • Interview with the BBC, User-generated future for gaming, May 19, 2006
  • Presentation at the Long Now Foundation with Brian Eno, Play With Time, June 26, 2006
  • Interview on the Colbert Report, talking about Spore, December 5, 2006
  • Presentation at TED, Spore, birth of a game, March 2007
  • Presentation at the Inventing the Future of Games Symposium, Reality, Perception, and Culture, April 15, 2011
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