Before we made the transition over to IndustryGamers we teased our interview and noted that Will Wright confirmed his future involvement in the Spore franchise. Today we're pleased to bring you the entire Q&A in which Wright also talks about the direction at Stupid Fun Club, why it's actually great for EA too, and what he thinks about digital distribution and the future of the industry.
IndustryGamers: Lucy Bradshaw at Maxis tells me that to have your own think tank has been a lifelong dream of yours. Is Stupid Fun Club your lifelong dream?
Will Wright: Yeah, I think it's a kind of evolution of me wanting to branch out a bit beyond games as well. It's stuff I've been dabbling in for a number of years on the side. We're getting to the point where a lot of these projects are ready to be pursued more seriously. Some of it doesn't have a lot to do with games, but we're going to do games stuff as well. We're looking at entertainment almost in a broader sense. Typically people think "I'm going to go do a game" or "I'm going to go do a movie" or build a toy, and rarely do we think of entertainment integrating all these things together working from the inside out. So I found myself more and more just getting interested in that viewpoint and how to think about it as a designer. ... My model for [Stupid Fun Club] is really something between Ideo design or Marvel or Lucas, where you kind of start with the idea first and then work your way up different formats.
IG: Your design approach has always been very non-linear, putting the tools and the storytelling in the hands of the gamers with Sims and Spore. If you're now going to be working in other media, like TV or movies, those are linear by their very nature. Do you see a way around that or are you perhaps happy to do something more linear now?
WW: I think that we're actually learning a lot about storytelling in games that we can start bringing to other media, so taking these ideas to a linear format doesn't necessarily mean that I have to become a storyteller. I think there are ways actually to get collaborative involvement, user-generated content, get the fans and community involved in creating linear media as well. Also, other fields like toys are inherently non-linear, and I think the sensibilities coming from gaming can really get a lot of traction in areas that aren't even storytelling or linear media areas.
IG: Concerning the future of Spore, obviously there are a lot of talented folks at Maxis still working on it, but are you planning on any return to that franchise or your other franchises even though you're not with EA now?
WW: I don't think it was widely reported, but alongside this whole [Stupid Fun Club] thing, I also entered into a consulting agreement with EA. I'm spending a certain amount of time every month actually working with the Spore team on future versions of Spore and expansions. So I will [still] be involved with EA on developing the Spore franchise as well.
IG: Well, fans will be happy to hear that. With that in mind, considering a theoretical Spore 2, what about the first Spore would you like to change or improve upon for a sequel?
WW: As soon as we released it, because we're giving so much involvement to the players, we ended up learning a lot from seeing what the players do; we've already seen a lot of unexpected stuff happening in the player community that we're learning from. We're finding out cool areas the fans want to bring the game in, what direction they want the tools to go, what experiences they're enjoying in the game the most, which levels they enjoy the most. So I think now we're at a maximum learning where the fans are going to be steering the franchise as much as we will – they have their hands on the steering wheel too. We're listening to criticisms of parts of the game, we're looking at parts that were unexpected successes and we're going to go in other directions with Spore.
I think part of it is stuff we wish we had done, but it's more what we see the fans wanting us to do. We're going to probably add more depth to different areas of the game – and we're certainly already doing that with the Galactic Adventures expansion pack – and we're also taking output from the tools in different directions, so you can take your creatures you made in the creature creator and bring them into different experiences.
IG: Maxis is working on bringing Spore to Wii, but what about the high-end platforms, Xbox 360 and PS3?
WW: I know there's been a lot of talk about it internally, but for us it's really an opportunity/cost issue. You know, we either do that or we continue creating new applications on the PC or we kind of go into the handheld arena. I can't specifically say what the plans are right now, but really all these things are measured against each other. We can't do everything at once, so we have to say, "What platforms would it kind of evolve the fastest on?" So you can sort of look at a straight port to the PS3 and Xbox 360 and basically have the same game we have on the PC... or we could say, "What can we do on this platform that will help us explore different parts of the design?" I think the Wii is really unique in that sense, with the things you can do on Wii that you can't do on other platforms right now. It's represented a lot of learning for us in terms of the directions we might take it. So I'd say that's one of the under-appreciated aspects of how we choose to deploy this on different platforms.
IG: It seems like more game designers these days are trying to branch out into general IP creation – Lorne Lanning and Jason Rubin come to mind. Is this a trend you think we'll see more of, where big name designers take more of an ownership role in creating new IP for use across media? Is this sort of a "Hollywoodization" of the game industry with more of the focus on the people actually creating the games? You and Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto right now are actually a few of the people in the games business who do have more mass market recognition, so will we see more people like yourself going independent?
WW: I think there are two aspects to that. One of them is just wanting the creative and financial independence, where you've had a fair amount of success and you want more creative freedom and that becomes almost more important than financial independence. I think the other part of it is that game designers are actually an interesting group in that, when you think about what goes into a game, you have aspects of storytelling, usability, engineering, user-generated content, community building, etc. I think game designers are uniquely positioned to look at all forms of media in a broader way, because in some sense games involve music, movies, usability, toys, etc., more so than most other forms of entertainment.
Game designers have a unique perspective on the entertainment industry to maybe think cross-media, and we're just now starting to see some game creators go in that direction, get a little bit outside the game box and think about other things from a very fundamental point of view – not just how to take this game and make a movie out of it, which is kind of the opportunistic strategy that's been pursued up until now both ways, you know if there's a big movie how do you make a game out of it? You can do that, and it works ok sometimes – truthfully, it doesn't work very well – but that's why I mentioned Lucas earlier because that's one of the groups that's done it fairly successfully. The games built around Star Wars for the most part are really good, as well as the movies and toys. I think they've taken a very fundamental approach to how you look at an idea and bring it out to different formats.
IG: When we first heard about Stupid Fun Club years ago, it was more about your fascination with robots and human-robot interaction and the social nature of that. What can you tell us about the sorts of ideas you have brewing at Stupid Fun Cub now? It's safe to assume that it's going to go much beyond the initial robot focus, right?
WW: Yeah, it is. We've actually learned a lot from our robots in surprising ways. As we started having robots interact with each other and people, they started sparking these other ideas and projects in different areas, beyond just building hardware. So I think it's going to be a strategy [that combines] what we've learned from the robots and what I've personally learned from the games I've worked on. A lot of the things we've learned on Spore in fact intersect a lot of the stuff we've learned working on the robots; it's going to be an interesting blending of stuff we've done in the past at Stupid Fun Club with stuff that to me feels like a continuation of the lineage of the games I've done. So I think some of the stuff we do at Stupid Fun Club will feel like a fairly smooth evolution from things like SimCity to Sims to Spore to the next thing we do at Stupid Fun Club, but integrated with these other areas.
IG: Roughly how many people do you have working with you at Stupid Fun Club? It's a pretty small group right?
WW: It's going to stay very small. That's kind of the whole point of it. It's about 10 people right now, and we're probably going to keep it under 20. The idea is that we do most development outside, and we're actually doing pre-production and idea generation inside the think tank, and then when we're actually ready to go out and build a product we do that with an external team.
IG: Will the structure within Stupid Fun Club be divided amongst the different media, like films, games, TV, and toys? Or is it a situation where everyone contributes to the project, regardless of the format?
WW: Definitely the second option. Everybody in this core group has sensibilities across different formats, and I want everybody contributing to every idea. I think that's where a lot of the interesting ideas are going to come from – interesting game ideas could come from the guy who's good at building robots or cool television ideas could come from the software guy. I really think what we're trying to do within the Club is to get everybody to think more as entertainment designers and not specifically as TV producers or game makers.
IG: Although this has not been a problem for you, it seems like the game industry has been largely locked into the same types of games, the same genres – shooters, RPGs, sports, etc. I believe Warren Spector commented on this during David Perry's lunch with luminaries session at GDC, where he said that he's sick of seeing space marines fighting for the fate of the universe over and over again. What do you think it's going to take to get more game designers to branch out into entirely new genres?
WW: I think we're already seeing it happen with the independent games movement. There have been some really interesting and creative ideas being explored, with people getting recognition too. Right now, it's very much a financial schism between the triple-A titles on store shelves and something you can download on the Internet for free. I think distribution is starting to change radically with things like apps on the iPhone, Xbox Live Arcade, and all these things are starting to open up avenues. And right now, there's still a deep chasm between the big, money-making hits like the Hollywood blockbusters and the more independent game creative area that doesn't have a lot of financial draw, but I see those two converging pretty rapidly actually. I think we're going to start seeing a much more diverse set of business models deploying – basically a smooth ramp where somebody can start making nice little Flash apps, then iPhone apps, and then work their way up.
At the same time, what we're going to be looking for are entertainment experiences that aren't just targeted at one of these slots – it won't just be a little game you download or play in Flash or a giant, triple-A PC title – but entertainment experiences that are actually being deployed across a number of these things at once. There might be the "lite" experience, almost like the creature creator in Spore that you downloaded for free, but at the same time if you're really into it you can go out and buy the $50 game. Or you can watch the TV show. I think that's where working from a hub outwards, we're going to see these entertainment experiences deployed on a more fractal basis. You have some experiences that are very deep and you pay more for, and some that are very light and maybe free that act as funnels into those deeper experiences.
IG: When do you think we'll start hearing more about the first project from Stupid Fun Club?
WW: I would say it's probably a few months out, maybe six months out. We have a number of projects we're pursuing right now, and just by the nature of where we're at in the development process, they're all fairly unpredictable now. I think in a few months we'll have more predictability behind when these things might see the light of day.
IG: What's the process like for how you go about pursuing these projects? How do you decide what to greenlight?
WW: It's very much a triage situation. We'll have a whole bunch of ideas we'll put up on a board and certain ones have more likelihood for success, more available partners for external development – and we want to have things on different timelines, so we'll have some projects that take many years to complete and others that will be much faster. So you put all these things on the board and start applying these criteria to them and certain ones will bubble to the top.
IG: You talked before about how distribution is changing everything, and it seems like the industry is at a crossroads with retail starting to give way to digital distribution and possibly server-side, cloud based technology. How do you see this all playing out? Will the future be completely digital?
WW: I don't think it'll be completely digital but it's going that way very rapidly right now. I think we're in a phase transition; typically when something like that happens, you'll hear about it for years and years and it seems like nothing's happening and then just overnight it switches. It might be people going to CD-ROM or the rise of the Internet or whatever it is – right around the time people are sick of hearing about it, it happens overnight. I think with digital distribution of games we're right near that steep part of the curve, and I think that's going to change the whole nature of our industry dramatically.
IG: You've accomplished a ton in the game industry already. Have you ever had any thoughts about retirement creeping into your head? Did that perhaps factor into your move away from EA, needing to branch into other things?
WW: As a designer I was definitely very interested in branching into other things for the creative challenge, but in terms of retirement, I can't imagine anything more boring than being retired. [laughs] So that thought hasn't crossed my mind, no.
IG: Working with games like Sims and Spore, AI is obviously a very important part of the design, but AI in general seems to perhaps lag behind others areas in gaming (graphics, sound, etc.). What kind of advancement do you think we'll see when it comes to AI in video games?
WW: Well AI is a funny term because it means so many different things to different people. For some people it's route planning, for some people it's conversational ability, for others it's strategic goal planning. AI is really just a bunch of tricks... One thing I think we've found in general, especially with the net and things like Google, is that computers are much, much better at kind of collecting and distilling human intelligence than they are at fundamentally recreating it. If you think about Google's search results, that's what they are – a distillation of thousands of people's decisions of what pages they've decided to link to. But it gives this impression of this search engine that's very smart at figuring out places you might find useful.
And in Spore it's almost a distillation of human creativity. Spore as a program is not creative at all, but it does a very good job of distilling the creativity of millions of individuals and presenting them back to you. I think you can get a lot more traction using that approach, and I think reversing that we're also starting to look at how we can analyze human metrics inside of a game or any kind of computer experience, and then change that experience to customize it to that person. Using the intelligence of other people is kind of the base data set for that. So I think we're going to see a lot more progress in what we think of as AI from that approach. For the future, there are still people out there fundamentally trying to recreate human intelligence... but they're still on this very slow, linear slope, whereas the other approach is really taking off exponentially.
IG: Regarding Stupid Fun Club's investors, we know EA is a partner with you, but is there another investor in this?
WW: The only other investor is the partner I started Stupid Fun Club with, Mike Winter. He's kind of a minority shareholder as well.
IG: Obviously you're front and center with Stupid Fun Club, but what kind of recognition will the other team members receive?
WW: I think as things develop, they're going to be each championing their own projects., bringing them out into the world. One of the guys is Marc Thorpe who's actually the guy who started Robot Wars, which is how Mike [Winter] and I met. He used to work as a model maker for Industrial Light and Magic; so it's people like him who I've known for many years that inherently have done a lot of cross-media design who are involved in this.
IG: When the news first broke that you left EA, a number of analysts and industry pundits categorized it as a big negative for EA, especially since they just had a down year fiscally. Do you feel this is going to hurt EA?
WW: I don't think so. I think actually with what I'm expecting to come out of the club and the success I'm aiming for... EA is a financial participant in that, not just on the games that come out but as an investor. I think overall – and I know most people don't see it this way – EA is going to earn a lot more from me as I branch out into these other formats and they're a participant in that than if I just stayed in the game box.
IG: The iPhone has taken the game industry by storm. Have you personally thought about creating some games for iPhone? Is that something that appeals to you or you're more focused on these other projects at Stupid Fun Club?
WW: I actually find the iPhone very intriguing. Not just the iPhone in particular, but that it's representative of the first generation of smartphones. When you look at all the competitors, they're scrambling to catch up with Apple. By the next generation, these things are going to be very widely distributed. That very much excites me, that next generation and even this current generation of smartphones and what that means for gaming... how you integrate these mobile devices and that experience with larger entertainment experiences. I think [smartphones] will be one of the major legs upon which we build new things going forward, but they're helping support experiences on other platforms as well – they're not just standalone little "lite" games.
IG: A lot of people think iPhone is hurting the portable market for Sony and Nintendo, taking away DS or PSP sales. Do you think that's the case?
WW: I personally spend as much time playing games on my DS as I do on my iPhone, and they're very different platforms. And especially with the demographics of it, most people aren't going to give an iPhone to their 8-year-old to play, and it's not nearly as rugged as the DS. But I'm kind of platform agnostic in that sense. I don't really care who makes the platform or where it comes from, but just knowing what the capabilities of these mobile platforms are for me as a designer, I can now count on that going forward as one of the foundations of the entertainment experience. It might be the next generation DS or iPhone, I don't really care.
IG: So as a designer, what do you think about what the DSi offers?
WW: I've not spent much time with the DSi yet, but I have to say that Nintendo continually impresses me, even when they have weird ideas. When I first saw the DS, I remember thinking, "Oh what a horrible idea. Who's going to want that? A clunky machine with two screens." Then over time I started playing with it and there was some really cool, innovative software coming out, and it just became one of my favorite platforms. I'd say the Nintendo people are probably smarter than I am because whenever they come out with something that looks like a bad idea to me, it ends up being a great idea. So I'm not going to say anything about the DSi. [laughs]
IG: Will, thanks very much for your time. It was a pleasure chatting with you.
Reader Comments (0)