Will Wright (game designer)

For other people named Will Wright, see Will Wright (disambiguation).

Will Wright
Will Wright speaking at South by Southwest in 2007
Born	(1960-01-20) January 20, 1960 Atlanta, Georgia
Occupation	Game designer
Spouse	Joell Jones

William Ralph Wright, Jr. (born January 20 1960 in Atlanta, Georgia) is an American computer game designer and co-founder of the game development company Maxis, now part of Electronic Arts.

He is best known as the original designer of computer games such as SimCity and The Sims. Currently, he is working on the life simulation game Spore.

Biography

Early life

Wright was born in Atlanta, the son of Bill Wright, Sr., and Beverlye Wright Edwards; his father was a graduate of Georgia Tech's engineering school, and an entrepreneur in the field of plastic packing materials. In the early 1960s, Wright Sr. founded a successful company, which allowed the Wrights to live comfortably in Atlanta. Beverlye was an amateur musician and actress. Wright was educated at a local Montessori school, where he enjoyed its emphasis on creativity, problem solving, and self-motivation. Wright admitted to having been inspired to create certain elements of SimCity from his experiences in the school.

Montessori taught me the joy of discovery...It showed you can become interested in pretty complex theories, like Pythagorean theory, say, by playing with blocks. It’s all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori—if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design.

Wright later described himself as "obsessive" in his pursuits. "I would usually get very obsessed with some subject or area of interest for six months or a year, and just totally learn everything I (could) about it." As a child, Wright was an avid builder of models, "ships, cars, planes-I loved to do that", he told the New Yorker in October 2006. At 10, he built a scale model in balsa wood of the USS Enterprise's flight deck. Wright later found these early experiences to be formative in his vision of game design. "Well, one thing I’ve always really enjoyed is making things. Out of whatever. It started with modeling as a kid, building models...I think when I started doing games I really wanted to carry that to the next step, to the player, so that you give the player a tool so that they can create things. And then you give them some context for that creation." Wright would discuss with his father the possibility of life on other worlds, NASA, and the stars. His ambition was to be an astronaut, and form colonies in space to relieve overpopulation. His father was sympathetic to his ambitions. He was also a fan of Avalon Hill's board games, which he enjoyed particularly for their propensity to descend into a form of rules lawyering.

When Will, Jr., was 9, his father died of leukemia. His mother moved the family to her hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Wright was enrolled in the local Episcopal High School. He enjoyed it for the chance to debate the faculty. During his time at the school, he decided that he was an atheist. Overall, he found the methods of the school inferior to the Montessori, and came off with a bad impression of conventional schooling in general. In 1994, he declared that he'd

always been somewhat disillusioned with the educational system. Some people have said it was originally based on the idea that we're training factory workers, so it was very important to teach them to do some repetitive task for eight hours a day. What's going to be really exciting is when this Nintendo generation gets a little bit older and starts becoming teachers in schools. I think that's going to make a bigger difference than any kind of educational reform ever will. In the future a lot more learning will happen in the home.

Education

After graduating at 16 from Episcopal High School, he enrolled in Louisiana State University, transferring two years later to Louisiana Tech. Beginning with a start at an architecture degree, followed by mechanical engineering, he fell into computers and robotics. He excelled in subjects he was interested in — architecture, economics, mechanical engineering, and military history — but was held back by his impractical goals. His earlier dream of space colonization remained, and was joined by a love for robotics. After another two years at Louisiana Tech, in the fall of 1980, Wright moved on to The New School in Manhattan. He lived in an apartment over Balducci’s, in Greenwich Village, and spent his spare time searching for spare parts in local electronics surplus stores. After one year at the New School, Wright returned to Baton Rouge without his degree, concluding five years of collegiate study.

During a summer break from college, he met his future wife Joell Jones, an artist who was visiting Louisiana from California. In an interview published in February 2003, Will claims that games were absorbing so much of his time, he decided that perhaps making games was the way to go. Wright's first game was the helicopter action game Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984) for the Commodore 64.

Wright found that he had more fun creating levels with his level editor for Raid on Bungeling Bay than he had while actually playing the game. He created a new game that would later evolve into SimCity, but he had trouble finding a publisher. The structuralist dynamics of the game were in part inspired by the work of two architectural and urban theorists, Christopher Alexander and Jay Forrester.

I'm interested in the process and strategies for design. The architect Christopher Alexander, in his book A Pattern Language formalized a lot of spatial relationships into a grammar for design. I'd really like to work toward a grammar for complex systems and present someone with tools for designing complex things.

Game designer

In 1986, he met Jeff Braun, an investor interested in entering the computer game industry, at what Wright calls "the world's most important pizza party." Together they formed Maxis the next year in Orinda, California. SimCity (1989) was a hit and has been credited as one of the most influential computer games ever made. Wright himself has been widely featured in several computer magazines — particularly PC Gamer, which has listed Wright in its annual 'Game Gods' feature, alongside such notables as Roberta Williams and Peter Molyneux.

Following on the success of SimCity, Wright designed SimEarth (1990) and SimAnt (1991). He co-designed SimCity 2000 (1993) with Fred Haslam and in the meantime Maxis produced other "Sim" games. Wright's next game was SimCopter (1996). Although none of these games were as successful as SimCity, they further cemented Wright's reputation as a designer of "software toys" — games that cannot be won or lost. In 1992, Wright and his family moved to Orinda, California near the San Pablo Reservoir, off Miner Road.

Maxis went public in 1995 with revenue of USD$38 million. The stock reached $50 a share and then dropped as Maxis posted a loss. Electronic Arts bought Maxis in June 1997. Wright had been thinking about making a virtual doll house ever since the early 90s, similar to SimCity but focused on individual people. Originally conceived of as an architectural design game called Home Tactics, Wright's idea changed when someone suggested the player should be rated on the quality of life experience by the homeowners. It was a difficult idea to sell to EA, because already 40% of Maxis's employees had been laid off.

EA published The Sims in February 2000 and it became Wright's biggest success yet. It eventually surpassed Myst as the best-selling computer game of all time and spawned numerous expansion packs and other games. He designed a massively multiplayer version of the game called The Sims Online, which was not as popular as the original.

Wright was given a "Lifetime Achievement Award" at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001 . In 2002, he became the fifth person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame. Until 2006, he was the only person to have been honored this way by both of these industry organizations. In 2007 the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded him a fellowship, the first given to a game designer.

He has been called one of the most important people in gaming, technology, and entertainment by publications such as Entertainment Weekly, Time, PC Gamer, Discover and GameSpy. For bringing simulations to the mass market, Wright was awarded the PC Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award in January 2005 .

In a presentation at the Game Developers Conference on March 11 2005, he announced his latest game Spore [1]. He used the current work on this game to demonstrate methods that can be used to reduce the amount of content that needs to be created by the game developers. Wright hopes to inspire others to take risks in game creation.

Personal interests

In 1980, along with co-driver and race organizer Rick Doherty, Wright participated in the U.S. Express, a cross-country race that was the successor to The Cannonball Run. Wright and Doherty drove a specially outfitted Mazda RX-7 from Brooklyn, New York to Santa Monica, California in 33:39, winning the illegal race. Wright only competed once in the race, which continued until 1983.

Since 2003, in his spare time, Wright has collected leftovers from the Soviet space program, "including a 100-pound hatch from a space shuttle, a seat from a Soyuz,... control panels from the Mir", and the control console of the Soyuz 23, as well as dolls, dice, and fossils. During E3 2004 he passed off an old lapel pin commemorating the Soviet space program to a reporter.

I'm uncollecting. I buy collections on ebay, and I disperse them out to people again. I have to be like an entropic force to collectors, otherwise all of this stuff will get sorted.

He once built competitive robots for BattleBots with his daughter, but no longer does so. As of November 2006, Wright still had remnant bits of machined metal left over from his BattleBots days strewn about the garage of his Oakland home. Wright was a former Robot Wars champion in the Berkeley-based robotics workshop, the Stupid Fun Club. One of Wright's bots, designed with the help of Wright's daughter Cassidy, "Kitty Puff Puff", fought against its opponents by sticking a roll of gauze onto its armature and circling around it, encapsulating it and denying it movement. The technique, "cocooning", was eventually banned.

Following his work in BattleBots, he has taken steps into the field of human-robot interactions.

We build these robots and we take them down to Berkeley and study the interactions that people have with the robots," says Wright. "We built this newer one that has a rapid-fire pingpong cannon. It will fire about 10 per second. So we give people this plastic bat and we say, 'It's set up to play baseball. Do you want to play baseball? It's going to shoot a little ball and you try to hit it.' And all of a sudden it's like da-da-da-da, and it's belting them with balls.

Games designed by Wright

• Raid on Bungeling Bay
• SimCity series: SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000 (Will Wright was not on the SimCity 4 or SimCity Societies design teams)
• SimEarth
• SimLife
• SimCopter
• SimAnt
• The Sims (Wright is credited for, but did not design most of The Sims 2)
• Spore

Portrayals

Dr. Wright

In the SNES version of SimCity and SimCity 64 (released only in Japan), there is a character that is based on Will Wright named "Dr. Wright". He has green hair, wears a burgundy-colored suit and acts as an advisor to the player.

Two characters based on Dr. Wright appeared in The Legend of Zelda series. In Link's Awakening and Oracle of Seasons, a character named Mr. Write appears. In the former game, Dr. Wright's theme from SimCity can be heard inside the houses of Mr. Write and Christine (Write's pen pal). In The Minish Cap, a character name Mr. Left makes an appearance (his name is an obvious pun off of Wright and Write, which sounds like the word "right".)

A collectible trophy of Dr. Wright can be acquired in Super Smash Bros. Melee and he appears as an Assist Trophy character in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, making skyscrapers appear out of the ground which damage the opponents of the character that summoned him.

The Simpsons Game

In The Simpsons Game, Will Wright is portrayed as a villain who tries to destroy the 8-bit version of The Simpsons From "The Simpsons: Escape from Krusty Island". Wright complains about his latest failure, "Sim Sandwich" which is why he chose to live in "The Game Engine". The player has to defeat him in order to progress further in the game.

References

• Cifaldi, Frank (2005-05-20). "E3 Report: The Path to Creating AAA Games". Gamasutra. Retrieved 2007-05-26.
• "Lifetime Achievement". PC Magazine. 2004-12-22. Retrieved 2007-05-26.
• Lobo, Chris (2004-10). "Playing With Urban Life: How Simcity Influences Planning Culture". Archived from the original on 2004-12-11. Retrieved 2007-05-26. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Remo, Chris (2005-11-16). "Will Wright Feature Interview". Shacknews. Retrieved 2007-05-26.
• Wright, Will (2006-04). "Dream Machines". Wired. Retrieved 2007-05-26. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

See also

• Sid Meier

External links

• Will Wright at MobyGames

Audio/Video

• ITConversations.com SDForum Talk : Lessons from Game Design
• Will Wright keynote at the Game Developers Conference 2005. (View video after registration).
• Spore Video on Google Video
• Presentation at SDForum, Lessons from Game Design
• Presentation at Accelerating Change, Sculpting Possibility Space
• BBC Interview, User-generated future for gaming
• Stanford Lecture - 2003, Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
• Will Wright and Brian Eno talk about "generative" creation at The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, June 26, 2006
• Will Wright on Comedy Central Will Wright on the Colbert Report talks about Spore, Dec. 5th 2006
• Will Wright on TED.com, talking about Spore and his theory of learning, March 2007