GDC Day Two: Will Wright Gives the Best Speech I've Ever Heard

After the Iwata press conference, I was pretty sure I had seen the highlight of GDC. It was so well put together and so easy to digest, I hardly felt like I was actually listening to someone pitch their product to me. And it was fun, I felt like everyone involved was really enjoying themselves.

That’s why, when I saw Will Wright, I was completely blown away. I mean here is a guy who I’ve never met and barely even seen speak before, and I was certain that he’d get all crazy and heady and start talking about a bunch of things I wouldn’t properly appreciate and I knew he wasn’t going to give away any hot secrets on Spore like he did last year. What he gave instead was the most humorous speech I’ve ever heard that perfectly infused his stream-of-consciousness way of thinking and his love of research and science, and the ways in which he sets about putting together his projects, in particular Spore.

I’m going to apologize in advance if I geek out too much, but Will Wright used the words “video games” and the “Hubble Space Telescope” in the same breath and that’s something that’s worth getting a little crazy about. So yeah, Will Wright.

The name of his talk was “What’s Next in Game Design” which sounded like the rather bland merging of Wright’s specialty and the theme of GDC this year “What’s Next.” Turns out, he didn’t come up with it at all, but because he’s a fly by the seat of his pants kind of speaker, they just made the title up for him. So he crossed it out and told us that he was in fact going to speak on the Fundamentals of Astrobiology. Silence in the room. Explaining that that probably wouldn’t fly either, he changed the title of his talk one final time to “Why I Get Too Obsessed With My Game Research” and off he went.

[Side Note here: It impossible to document what is about to follow. Will Wright’s method of presentation is almost entirely the product of the tone of his voice. He gets extremely excited and talks so fast that you have to use every muscle in your body to focus on him and follow each word he’s saying, and then he just shifts and with most people you might lose them, with Will Wright it feels like you’re along for the ride. He actually cut himself off in the middle of his presentation to talk about Russian space stations. It was awesome.]

I know I just said I couldn't document what Will Wright said, but I'm going to try... and fail. Some highlights include Will Wright suggesting we all learn to develop our inner otaku. He commented, in regards to what didn't work about The Sims Online that "When you're stuck in realtime in The Sims, it is a pretty boring game." He then compared developing TSO to the Bagger 288 a giant German excavator (and the largest tracked vehicle in the world). In case you're wondering, developing for Spore is like a Ferrari.

Off he went again. He kept switching between his "research" and his "astrobiology" sections, in the former he talked about how much reading he did to figure out the principles of Spore (approximately 100 books says Wright), in the latter he would just talk about neat principles in astrobiology that he learned from his research (such as Drake's equation which is "used" to approximate how much intelligent life there is in the universe).

Things Will Wright likes: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Magic Pengel, David Brin, Kubrick.

Will Wright has us vote on what buzz expression he should use instead of "procedural content" since his team is so sick of hearing it, they've created a drinking game out of how many times he says it. (Incidentally when Wright says the—soon to be the former—expression procedural content, he means things like player creativity and an unbounded world) The choices are algorithmic content, parametric content, and generative content. Generative content wins. We go on.

Wright is clearly a confident designer. Not only does he embrace abdicating the authorship of his work, but he also encourages creativity among the community to boot. Some of the slides he showed for Spore came from fan websites that he really liked. Many others were working slides of selectable bodyparts within the game. Lots of eyes, mouths, hands, the like. In the end his theory of game design involved these guiding principles: Enjoy obsession, cultivate obsession in your team, become a teacher "things well understood are explained well", and change your players (help your people to grow). With Will Wright's unbounded energy, his enthusiasm for learning on all levels, and his infectious presentation method, it's clear that he has the passion and the ability to do all of those things. Here's hoping we can as well.