Will Wright does SimPassive

Will Wright has raised the stakes on gaming. The Sims enabled millions of people to use their computers as laboratories to experiment with human relationships. SimCity did the same for city planning - how would you run your home-town?

By making everyone an urban planner or a family psychiatrist, he's used computer games to alter our sense of power. We can practice manage the complexity of modern living through his toys.

Will Wright routinely gives lectures to large crowds of game developers hungry for his insights, drawn from calculus, weather patterns, psychology, Japanese comics and network theory. He runs a social robots laboratory in Berkeley, regularly competing in Robot Wars with his daughter.

He's a brilliant guy, completely unassuming considering he invented the best-selling computer game series of all time.

Maybe games were only a stopover as he expressed himself across culture: according to Yahoo News, Wright has just inked a TV show deal with Fox.

He's already reprogrammed millions of minds with interactive media, how could he do so with broadcasting? Fortunately, it doesn't sound like he intends to do a stiff product tie-in cartoon show:

"I'd like to fast-forward into the future a bit and explore how machines and artificial intelligence will impact human beings and how robots will help us define ourselves," Wright said. "The trick is going to be to hook a mass audience with a new concept and then Trojan-horse these ideas into the show."

Wright said there are a lot of things that he has learned in creating original franchises for interactive entertainment that he can apply to linear entertainment.

"I think there are ways to get a deeper level of creative input from an audience of a TV show," Wright said. "I'd like to explore ways to connect the loop between a show and its audience, going beyond the current methods of phoning in a vote."

I'm eager to see how America's greatest living toy maker takes to television.

Comments

[ragmana]

"By making everyone an urban planner or a family psychiatrist, he's used computer games to alter our sense of power. We can practice manage the complexity of modern living through his toys."

...Huh? Interesting point, but is it from somewhere else where there is more detail, or is it just a snazzy intro? I only ask becasue I'm in that tiny minority who didn't much care for The Sims precisely because it failed to emulate "the complexity of modern living" for me. Too simplistic, all the interesting options are fundamentally materialist (which gets old fast), etc. So the idea of people learning applicable management/coping skills from the game took me by suprise. (My only guess is that it is an extension of the "RPG inventories influence the way I pack my suitcase" principle.)

[hyhy]

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