www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061106fa_fact
GAME MASTER Will Wright changed the concept of video games with the Sims. by JOHN SEABROOK Issue of 2006-11-06 Posted 2006-10-30 In 1972, an engineer and former carnival barker named Nolan Bushnell started a video-game company, in Santa Clara, California. As an engineering student at the University of Utah in the nineteen-sixties, Bushnell had become obsessed with an early computer game called Spacewar. He wanted to manufacture coin-operated game-playing machines and license them to amusement arcades. He foresaw a new kind of midway hustle, in which the hustler would be inside the machine. "The things I had learned about getting you to spend a quarter on me in one of my midway games," he later said, "I put those sales pitches in my automated box." From this unlikely marriage--the computer lab and the carnival--the video-game industry was born. The first product of Bushnell's company, Atari, was Pong, a simple, elegant game in which two players manipulated electronic paddles and sent a blip back and forth across a black-and-white screen. It was a simulation of table tennis, managing to render most of the game's rules, structure, and logic onto the screen. And it was an animation--a moving picture designed to complete the feedback loop between the eyes, the brain, and the fingers on the game controls. The game was designed by a former All-State football player named Al Alcorn, who was Atari's second employee. As Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby tell the story in "Smartbomb," their recently published history of the industry, Bushnell took the handmade Pong game to Andy Capp's Tavern, in nearby Sunnyvale, and within weeks people were lining up outside the bar in the morning, before opening time, to play it. By 1974, Pong had made it to a pizza parlor in Hanover, New Hampshire, where I played it, and for the rest of that summer my dearest desire was to go back and play it again. The games that followed Pong--Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command, and Pac-Man, among others--were even more captivating, but the simulations remained the stuff of arcades and midways: sports, space aliens, zombies, shoot-'em-ups. In the nineteen-eighties, as the speed and storage capacity of computers and game-playing consoles grew, designers continued to improve the graphics. The simulation side of the games, however, never came close to realizing the Tech Model Railroad Club's old ambition of reproducing real-life dynamics on the screen. The best-selling video game this year is Madden NFL, in which you get to play pro football from the perspective of star players. Madden NFL is a far more sophisticated simulation than Pong was, but the content of the game is no closer to real life. In the late nineteen-eighties, a new type of video game quietly emerged--the God game. Computer animation is a brute-force project of converting graphic art into two-dimensional pixels, and, more recently, into three-dimensional polygons, the building blocks of digital pictures. But to create a truly absorbing simulation, one that offers some insight into the nature of real life, is a much more difficult proposition. The designer must play God, or at least the notion of God in Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy"--a god that can anticipate the outcome of the player's actions and yet allows the player the feeling of free will. Among the pioneers of the God game was Peter Molyneux, of Great Britain, who created Populous, in 1989. The game gives the player omniscient power over a variety of simulated societies. But the master of the genre--the god of God games--is Will Wright. Beginning in 1989, with SimCity, in which the object is to design and manage a modern city, and continuing with The Sims, in 2000, in which you care for a family in an ordinary suburban environment, Wright created situations that redefined the boundaries of what a game can be. "It occurred to me that most books and movies tend to be about realistic situations," he has said. To game designers, Wright is the Zola of the form: the man who moved the subject matter of games away from myth, fantasy, and violence and toward ordinary social life. For the past six years, Wright has been working on a new game, which will be released in 2007. It is anticipated with something like the interest with which writers in Paris in the early twenties awaited Joyce's "Ulysses." At first, Wright called the project Sim Everything, but a few years ago he settled on the name Spore. It seeks to replicate algorithmically the conditions by which evolution works, and render the process as a game. Conceptually, Spore is radical: at a time when most game makers are offering ever more dazzling graphics and scenarios and stories, Wright and his backer, Electronic Arts, are betting that players want to create the environments and stories themselves--that what players really like about games is exploring what Wright calls "possibility space." "Will has a reality-distortion field around him," his former business partner, Jeff Braun, told me. "He comes up with the craziest idea you've ever heard, and when he's finished explaining it to you the world looks crazy--he's the only sane person in it." Wright's office is in a corner of a six-story building a few blocks from San Francisco Bay, in Emeryville, California. The walls are covered with drawings in colored markers, which bear cryptic messages like "Star Map Issues." Wright, who is forty-six, is tall and skinny, with a long, narrow face and slender fingers. He dresses in more or less the same clothes every day--black New Balance sneakers, faded black jeans, a button-down shirt, a leather jacket, and thick aviator-style glasses. His skin is shiny and reddish-brown, in that way that a smoker's skin can look--half tanned and half cured. you mention an idea, and that triggers five or ten associations in Wright's mind, which he delivers in quick bursts of data that are strung together with "um"s. When I walked into his office, Wright jumped up and, after shaking my hand, said, "Here, try this, um, it's this really cool toy I found recently," and handed me a wireless controller for a small robotic tank that was sitting on the floor. It was facing another tank, which Wright was controlling. He started moving his tank around and shooting mine, watching me curiously, waiting to see how long it would take me to understand what was going on. I felt an odd tingling sensation in my hands, but I didn't pay any attention to it at first. Eventually, I realized that I was getting shocked: every time Wright's tank shot mine, an electric charge passed from the controller into my hands. Wright had been working on a Power-Point presentation of a talk he had been asked to give about Spore. "It's supposed to be about how I came up with the game, but what I really want to talk about is the history of astrobiology, so I'm doing both," he said. He moved over to the two computers in his office and clicked through some images, while describing the basic structure of Spore. Up to this point in his career, Wright has been including more and more social realism in his games. But Spore is a surprise--at a glance, it looks like a "cartoony bug game," as one contributor to a gaming Web site put it. The buildings don't have the crisp urban lines of SimCity; The violence isn't gratuitous--in some cases, you have to kill to survive--but it isn't sugar-coated, either. Not only do you kill other creatures in Spore but you have to eat them. At the first level of the game, you are a single-celled organism in a drop of water, which is represented on the screen as a two-dimensional environment, like a slide under a microscope. By successfully avoiding predators, which are represented as different-colored cells, you get to reproduce, and that earns you DNA points (a double helix appears over your character). DNA is the currency in the early levels of Spore, and as you evolve you can acquire better parts--larger flippers for faster swimming, say, or sharper claws for defeating predators. Eventually, you emerge from the water onto the second level--dry land--and your creature must compete with other creatures, and mate with those of your ...
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