'Spore' is Will Wright's latest game-changer

You’ve said previously that “The Sims” really didn’t have much competition, other than, say, Second Life, which came much later. Do you think that “Spore” will stand alone as well  — or do you hope that it doesn’t?

First of all, I don’t know if I would characterize Second Life as a competitor for “The Sims.”  One is a game in which you’re creating stories, creating environments, playing with these little artificial people. Second Life is more of a graphic chat room. On the surface, they look kind of similar, but underneath, looking at the play experience, they’re really quite different.

And yes, it was surprising to me that we haven’t really had a viable competitor to “The Sims” since it was released. Which, I kind of almost would like to see at this point, to see what an alternative version of it would be.  “Spore” … I’m not sure if it’s the kind of game that you’d really want to compete with. I can see taking aspects of “Spore” into other forms of gaming…the idea that players can create the content, for instance.

The game is very different than anything else that’s out there. And there’s so much pressure for this game to be revolutionary. How does that pressure affect you, considering your name is attached to it?

Well, at the end of the day, you want people to enjoy it. It’s getting a lot of visibility because it is different, and so when players interact with this thing, you kind of hope that they walk away from it with a different perspective than they can get from other games.

It’s actually kind of exciting where you have a game like this where the players get involved creatively and they start doing cool, amazing stuff. A lot of the success of “The Sims” was due to the players, and the player communities and what they were making in it and I think the same will be true with “Spore.”

So, not too much pressure on you, the pressure’s going to be shifting to the players?

Yeah, we’re going to share that pressure with the players. (Laughs) And they’ve already kind of surprised us with the depths of their creativity, so I have a lot of faith in them.

In your previous games, “SimCity” and “The Sims,” you were literally simulating real life. In “Spore,” you’re allowing players to travel through the life cycle of an organism. But much of the game is pretty fantastical — interstellar travel, cartoony-looking creatures. What was it like to create a game that wasn’t a strict simulation of real life? Was it freeing to work without those constraints, or was it maddening?

I think we learned a lot from some of the earlier simulations that we did –“SimEarth,” “SimLife” —  in that you want to leave a big role for the player’s imagination. I think that helps a lot. Even though we’re dealing with these fantasy creatures, in some senses they’re still dealing with a lot of the same issues that humanity dealt with, evolving, building civilizations and so forth. That’s kind of the point. By seeing this occur with some alien species, it gives you a different triangulation on what it means to be human. What’s the meaning of competition and cooperation, sociology, religion and economics?  All these themes that we’re familiar with, we’re just not playing out the history of mankind.

In some senses, yeah, it’s creatively very freeing. You’re dealing with a much larger potential palette…and it gives you a wider palette of stories that players will use in their storytelling. But at the same time, it should all feel fairly familiar and be something you can relate to on some level.

You mentioned at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, Calif., that you think of video games as toys. Considering that the average age of game-players is around 32, are you making toys for adults that don’t want to grow up?

(Laughs) Well, I don’t necessarily think of toys as a kid thing. I think of them as abstract little mechanisms that we can manipulate model worlds with, in our heads. In some senses, they’re tools for imagination. We tend to think of kids as imaginative … and it’s kind of “taught out” of us, as adults. I think of the best toys as things that can spark and enhance your imagination. I think that imagination is probably our most powerful tool.

What do you think about the current level of innovation and creativity in the game industry today?

I think it’s gotten a lot better over the last few years. I think primarily because the market has started to broaden out a lot because of things like the Nintendo Wii. We’re starting to hit different groups of people that didn’t play games before, and so I think we were stuck in this chicken-and-egg thing before, where we only made games for gamers because gamers were the only ones who bought games.

“The Sims” is the best-selling PC game in history, but at the time it was released, it was pretty unlike any other game on the market. Do you think a game like “The Sims” would be greenlighted today?

I think it might be today, again, because of this explosion of game diversity that’s happening. But I think five years ago — probably not. I remember I had a long, uphill battle convincing people that we should do “The Sims” because it didn’t match any known genre, and, worst of all, it didn’t sound like an empowering game. You know, it was a game where you’re cleaning the toilet and taking out the trash and most games were about saving the galaxy. I think the fact that it ended up being a very deeply personal experience for players was a lot of the elements of the success of the Sims.

Your interests outside gaming include science, space travel and robotics. And your games definitely don’t fit the mode of traditional video games. So, do you consider yourself a video game designer, or a scientist who’s performing experiments through video games?

(Laughs) I think it’s more like I’m a video game designer who wants to make other people feel like scientists.

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