Photo: Nigel Parry
For almost 30 years, Will Wright’s creations have attracted people who would never have played videogames. He’s also managed the trick of developing games that enthrall hardcore fans while making rabid players out of novices. The secret: In Wright’s worlds, there is no win or lose—there’s just the game.
He’s best known for creating the Sim franchise: SimCity, The Sims, and other titles. These unlikely blockbusters—more than 180 million sold so far—drew on the works of arcane architectural theorists, urban planners, and astrophysicists, yet they were consistently addictive. They thrived thanks to a concept Wright calls possibility space: the scope of actions or reactions a player can undertake. Most videogames give players a narrow possibility space: Do you want to kill the bad guys with bullets or grenades? Take the door on the right or the left?
Wright and his team at Maxis, the development studio he cofounded in 1987, blew past those constraints, creating an infinitely flexible gameworld limited only by the skill and imagination of the player. In Wright’s best work, players have so much leeway to determine their own objectives that the distinction between game player and game designer blurs.
In 2009, after more than 20 years at Maxis, Wright stepped down from day-to-day duties to form Stupid Fun Club, an entertainment development think tank. He sat down with Wired in Stupid Fun’s Berkeley studio to look back at his career, offer hints about upcoming projects, and speculate about what the future holds for us all—gamers or not.
Chris Baker: You grew up before the era of interactive entertainment. Was gaming a part of your early life?
Will Wright: I enjoyed playing strategy games as a kid. A neighbor down the street and I used to play these elaborate turn-based war games—cardboard and paper games like PanzerBlitz.
Baker: How did you start fiddling with computers?
Wright: I was very mechanical, very involved in building models, which evolved into building robots. I got my first computer when I was 20 years old and taught myself to program in order to connect to the robots I was building—to model the motion of a hydraulic robot arm, for example. That’s what first sucked me into writing software. When I learned to program, I realized that you could model the behavior of a system through time, not just a snapshot of it.
Baker: When did you go from playing around with this stuff to saying, “I’m going to be a commercial game designer”?
Wright: I was just fascinated with how the computer worked. Back then it was possible for one person to pretty much fully understand the system—every aspect, from the structure of the hardware to memory management. When I was 20 years old, around 1980, I was living in New York, and there was one computer store in the whole city that sold the Apple II. They had a few simple games in Ziploc bags on the wall and I started thinking, “Maybe I should try making a game, because then I can make all of my computer expenses tax-deductible.” [Laughs.] Then I bought a Commodore 64 when it first came out in 1982 and dedicated myself to learning everything I could about the machine.
Baker: Since then, has there been a common thread that runs through your career?
Wright: It’s really been about trying to construct games around the user, making them the center of the universe. How can you give players more creative leverage and let them show off that creativity to other people?
Baker: That’s there in your first game, 1984′s Raid on Bungeling Bay, but it’s almost invisible to players.
Wright: It’s a very action-oriented game; you’re just a helicopter fighting this military-industrial complex. You fly around this little world and bomb ships, tanks, planes, and factories.
Baker: But there are sophisticated dynamics going on beneath that surface.
Wright: The game tracked resources. The little enemy ships are picking up resources and bringing them to the docks, where they’re picked up by little tanks and brought to factories that are building airplanes and antiaircraft guns. It’s an industrial food chain, and if you understood the underlying system, you could attack it in a strategic way, taking out the supply boats first. But most people just flew around and blew up everything as fast as they could.
Baker: How did Bungeling Bay lead to your next game, SimCity?
Wright: I wanted Bungeling Bay to have a world large enough to get lost in, so I wrote a program that would let me put down coastlines, roads, and buildings. I found that I was having much more fun building these little worlds than flying around and blowing them up. SimCity evolved from that—I got interested in building a game where players are in the role of creators.
Baker: And Bungeling Bay‘s “industrial food chain” morphed into a far more sophisticated system in SimCity.
Wright: I started researching urban planning and urban dynamics, and I came across the work of Jay Forrester, the father of modern system simulations. Back in the ’50s at MIT, he actually tried to simulate whole cities on a rudimentary computer. And then I moved into classic economic theory and urban theorists like Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch.
Baker: You integrated their theories into SimCity. Players assume the role of a mayor, setting policies and tax rates, managing the transportation system and power grid—
Wright: —and meanwhile, the city was being actively simulated as they designed it.
