Web 2.0 Expo Preview: Will Wright, Sims and Simulations

by Kurt Cagle | comments: 7

Will Wright has been the foundational genius behind a thirty year string of blockbuster games, from the early Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984 to the first truly fun urban simulation Sim City, a game "universe" that let players create and manage their own cities, dealing with everything from balancing budgets and battling crime to dealing with the aftermath of alien attacks. This game was later expanded to SimCity Societies to better explore the larger social factors that shape society.

From there he delved deeper into the lives of the individual inhabitants of those cities with the Sims, a virtual "dollhouse" that gives players the ability to shape the eponymous sim-people, their houses, careers and relationships (and in subsequent installments, let them start businesses, party, go to college, have pets, and take vacations, among many other activities).

In 2008, Wright produced Spore, where the players can "play gods" - raising new life from Sim-ooze to intergalactic civilizations in a freeform multiplayer environment that's evolving nearly as fast as the spores themselves. Scheduled for June 2009, Wright will release the much awaited Sims 3, in which for the first time, the Sims world comes together in a full immersive environment, perhaps the full merger of Sims and Sim City.

Wright will be speaking on the Sims and games in general at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. O'Reilly editor Kurt Cagle caught up with Will Wright to ask a few questions.

Kurt Cagle: You've been doing this a long time. I can remember distinctly playing Raid on Bungeling Bay back on the old Commodores days back in the late '80s. The thing I find fascinating is every game that you've done in the last 25 years or so would more actually be considered a simulation rather than a game. What have you found most fascinating about simulations as games?

Will Wright: Well, as a kid, I spent a lot of time getting models and an inordinate amount of time dealing with the plastic and with models. That kind of got me into robotics which was kind of a different form of modeling. I bought my first computer, which was an Apple 2, to connect to my robots to control the programs on that. It wasn't too long before I started doing little simulations of the robots I was working on on the computer, and I started realizing this was kind of a new way to make the models that I'd kind of grown up making, except these models had dynamics underneath them rather than just static structure.

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