Interview with Will Wright

Illustration by Tara Sinn

WILL WRIGHT, INVENTOR OF SIMCITY, THE SIMS, AND NOW SPORE

Not only is Will Wright one of the most prominent game designers out there, but he’s also been prominent for a length of time seldom found in the game industry. His latest game,

Spore

, allows players to explore life—like, ALL of life, from single-cell organisms to galactic empires. It was originally going to be released under the title

SimEverything

. It’s been in development for eight years and was initially slated for release in 2006, but the team elected to keep it in testing for an extra two years to ensure the correct level of polish.

I’ve been watching

Spore

since its media debut. I’ve always liked Wright’s games, and the idea of one game with so many different play modes has always intrigued me, but it’s not just the game’s premise that holds my attention.

Spore

makes heavy use of procedural content, a relatively new approach to gaming that’s been picking up steam for the past few years—the Havok physics engine’s procedural methods of determining the behavior of objects in space has been wowing gamers since

Half-Life 2

’s first previews hit the internet. But

Spore

uses procedural content for far more than just animation. I’m not normally one to say a particular game will change everything, but with luck, a lot of other games will take cues from the way

Spore

handles itself.

I caught up with Will Wright over the phone recently to hear his thoughts on

Spore

, procedural content, and a bit of the future of the game industry.

Vice: Could you talk a little bit about Spore?

Will Wright:

Basically it’s a game about life in the broadest possible sense. You start as a single-cell microbe at the beginning, the origin of life, work your way up through evolution, onto land, you become intelligent eventually, start forming primitive tribal societies, then civilizations, cities, technology, and eventually, you move out into space and you start actually exploring the entire galaxy. That’s kind of the theme of the game. In every level the player is creating the stuff, creating the species, the cities, the buildings, the vehicles. Eventually, the user makes entire planets and biospheres, and when they make the stuff, it’s actually used to populate other players’ worlds automatically. And then eventually after that, you go out to space and you’re exploring millions of unique worlds, and these worlds are populated with creatures and civilizations that other players have made as they’ve played the game.

This is what you’ve been calling pollinated content, right?

Right. It’s kind of a hybrid between a single-player and a multiplayer game. Multiplayer games have a lot of design limitations, where you can’t let the players cheat, you can’t let them pause the game, you can’t let them get very powerful relative to other players, so we didn’t want to have all these limitations. Plus you usually have to charge a monthly subscription fee, so we wanted to give the benefit of a million players collectively building this universe without all the design limitations you get with a multiplayer game.

Now, this is a very broad game in terms of the number of platforms it’s appearing on. It’s just starting on the PC, but you’ve also got versions for Mac, Wii, iPhone, and DS. Does pollinated content work across platforms?

Right now it only works across Mac and PC. Going into the future and looking at other platforms, we’re going to try as much as possible to make the pollinated content cross-platform-compatible. Right now the DS is different, it takes a very different kind of style than the PC version, so it’s not compatible or from the same library. But I think going into the future, we’re going to try to utilize the same database across platforms.

We’re seeing a lot of procedural content in video games recently. Obviously everything uses Havok physics nowadays. Grand Theft Auto 4 uses Euphoria for animation, The Force Unleashed uses that plus Digital Molecular Matter for terrain deformation. And Spore is based entirely on procedural content. How far do you see this going? What do you think is the future of procedural content? You’ve been up to your elbows in it for seven years now.

I think we have enough CPU power now to where we can apply it more much broadly than we would have in the past. For

Spore

there were certainly things we could not have done without procedural content. For instance, since players can create whatever creature they want to in the editor, we could not pre-animate these things, so the computer basically has to procedurally animate these things. Same with texturing and the mesh construction and a few other things like that. In

Spore

, it’s a combination of procedural content plus user-created content, because you can also use procedural content to make it easier for players to make content, and it’s really the synergy between those two that’s powerful. Some other instances in

Spore

, like the planets, are procedurally generated, which means that we can have millions of unique planets, because they’re not having to be stored, they’re just stored as a seed value. An entire planet in

Spore

compresses down to about 32 bits of information, and that gives you a huge variety of planet cells as well. So you can use procedural content for different things, but I think probably amplifying the player’s creativity is going to be the most valuable thing by far.

On the topic of player creativity, the Spore Creature Creator has been out for two months now, so you’re starting to see the sort of things players are creating. Have they done anything that’s surprised you?

Yeah, right off the bat they surprised us both with the volume of the stuff they made, which I think is approaching 3 million creatures now, and the quality as well. They were doing things with such a high level of quality, just after the first couple of weeks. They were even discovering bugs in our editor that they could make use of to do strange things. Then they started writing petitions to us not to fix the bugs, because they were able to exploit them in interesting, creative ways. Some of these things took us a while to figure out how they were even doing. What’s also interesting is how quickly they’re learning from each other. They’re able to tag content, to apply tags that say whether it’s a monkey or a bird. One of the tags they started applying was “Creator Tip.” Whenever they found a cool trick in the editor for creating something, they put that as the tag, and in the description they would describe the trick. So now they’ve built up a little database of tutorials and tricks you can do in the editor, and all you have to do is search for that tag, Creator Tip, and it will come up with a few thousand features, each one showing an interesting trick somebody discovered. And by doing that, the creators—the players—are actually learning from each other at a pretty accelerated rate.

So as inspirations for Spore, you’ve talked about Powers of 10 and the Drake equation, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the SETI program. Are there any inspirations for the game that you haven’t really talked about in the media yet?

Depends on how deep you go and in what directions. Yeah, there were a lot of inspirations from the biological side, Richard Dawkins and Edward Wilson, primarily. There was a lot of inspiration that was fairly intangible—things like the origin of life. Also, one project was trying to decide how we were going to present the origin of life. Was it going to be biogenesis on earth or panspermia? We went down a lot of those paths researching. I’d say there were also a lot of inspirations that came more on the design side, like in the editors. So if you look at something like the creature editor, we were actually studying a lot of toys and constructive systems, and taking inspiration from those. The creature editor ended up being a combination of Mr. Potato Head, Erector sets, and clay.

What other recent games have you seen that seem innovative to you?

I think a lot of the stuff on the Wii seems fairly innovative not only in terms of how they use the controller or even the Wii Fit, but also in terms of the audience that they’re capturing. I think that one of the dangerous trends in games five years ago was the fact that we were catering so much to hardcore gamers, and we were in danger of cutting off a lot of new players who would come in and enjoy these things if they were more geared to them. We’ve started to see that trend reverse a little bit, and now we’re starting to see a broader variety of games appealing to nongamers, which I think is really good, and I think the Nintendo Wii is probably one of the prime examples of that. But you’re also seeing stuff like Xbox Live and Xbox Arcade, and experimental stuff on the web as well. Some of the DS stuff has been fairly innovative as well, things like

Brain Age.

Yeah, Brain Age actually got my mother into gaming, which I thought was impossible.

All of a sudden someone has their parents playing or their grandparents. Now they have senior-league bowling on the Wii in retirement homes. That was a market a lot of people basically figured they would never capture ever.

What influence do you think Spore will have on the game industry?

I think that technically we’ve demonstrated certain things that we can do procedurally that were not available before. In particular, things like procedural animation that will open a lot of new avenues in design. I also think the editors and the ease of use of the editors in

Spore

are going to potentially open new directions. People won’t realize it, but probably the deepest AI in

Spore

is inside our editors, not inside the opponent AI. There’s a lot of AI in the editor to try to guess what the player intends as they’re moving things around in there. And that’s why it seems easy to use. So, it’s one of those things that when it works well it’s totally transparent and you don’t even realize how much technology is behind it, but it required a lot of time and effort to get right. When you see the results, all of a sudden you can enable millions of people to make things that used to be more in the realm of the professional artist. That just opens whole new areas of design.