Will Wright: Computers Should Play US.

March 14, 2007

It's a crazy time of the year. The Game Developer's Conference ended just as the South by Southwest (SXSW) Music and Film festival began. SXSW takes place in Austin every year, which also happens to be ground zero for a lot of quality PC game development. So it was only natural for a little bit of the gaming industry to spill over into the hip SXSW show.

That's how game designer Will Wright ended up giving one of the keynote speeches. You can find a write-up of Wright's keynote speech here on Gamasutra or here on C|Net. What's great is that speaking at SXSW gave Wright an opportunity to talk about games in a non-gaming context -- he got to loop back and talk big picture about things like story and character. If you want to talk about games as entertainment, what makes them so different than movies?

Wright made two very interesting observations here. The first is about the type of experience you get from games but not movies -- he related the story about him delivering a devastating beatdown to his creature in the game Black & White until it started sobbing uncontrollably. He caused that! "I've never once felt guilty watching a movie," Wright admitted. Games can engage you in deep ways.

His second point was that movies tell stories to people, but games allow people to tell stories. And here the games industry -- at least in my opinion -- still falls short of its potential. Wright envisions a day when games do more. "We can teach the computer to listen to the story that players are telling,” he explained. I'm hoping we'll see some of this with Wright's upcoming game Spore. The final phase of the game Spore is totally open-ended: you can soar around the galaxy being whatever kind of species you want to be. Will the game respond accordingly, tailoring your experience for you? I think that's what Wright is aiming for.

It's an exciting time for gaming. A couple days ago I blogged about how developers are looking at user-generated content. I think between that movement, the connection of consoles online, the rise of casual PC and mobile gaming, and the ease of downloadable content are all coming together to allow for a lot of experimentation in the industry.

It's about time!

      -Fargo

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