For all the adulation that comes his way, Will Wright is a modest, self-deprecating, humorous man with a really whimsical approach to giving a keynote speech. A couple of years ago at GDC, for example, he took to the stage as an opportunity to enthuse about one of his favorite topics, the Soviet space program. What does that have to do with videogames? Well, nothing.
Nothing, and everything. This is, after all, Will Wright we're talking about. and he has the kind of hungrily obsessive mind that seeks for consilience in everything - for the links that twine subjects together, for the force that underlies the entire universe.
And that's sort of what he talked about today, splitting time between his latest obsession, astrobiology, and the way the Maxis team prototyped Spore. By the end of the talk it seemed the two threads had converged, and I felt like I had taken an epic journey from microbes to the vast reaches of the universe - and learned a little story about the Russian space program, to boot.
If you've ever seen Will Wright talk, you know that it's nearly impossible to write about it. First, he races with dizzying speed from one point to the next, hardly glancing behind his shoulder to see if you're keeping up. And then the topics he covers - they are extremely complex subjects that people spend their entire lives trying to understand, and he references them and passes to the next in an instant. He dropped a quote that I think is very appropriate to his talk as well as to life: the Irish poet William Butler Yeats said, "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." Wright seeks not to cram you with his knowledge, but I think he really just wants to inspire his listeners to seek it out for themselves, and to knit the disciplines together, as he has done, to reach a greater understanding of humanity, life, the universe, and everything in it.
So is there a recording of transcription of this astonishing talk?
Posted by: Zigbigadoorlue | 03/28/2006 at 04:14 PM