Will Wright Is A Lemur
By virtue of his thought process.
I managed to catch half of his “What’s Next in Design” talk in the Civic Auditorium at GDC, before sadly having to scoot out to a scheduled meeting. What I did see though, what the scattered mind of sharp intelligence, working so furiously, so fast, and at such a wavelength as to appear nearly incomprehensible to the average person.
He began by saying that every year they ask him to speak and every year they give him a bigger venue, though it was my distinct impression that he would be much happier if just left alone to do his thing. His creative process is highly personal, as most people’s are, and so his presentation resembled what it must be like to think like Will Wright. Here’s where the post title comes in…try picturing Wright’s train of thought like a lemur, bounding from tree to tree, following the scent of this or that, investigating out of curiousity, and all with an impish glee that comes from pure enjoyment. Images yanked from astrobiology books, Darwin, a beaker containing the goo of life, X-Files theme music, design concept diagrams, and many other seemingly unconnected audio/visual aids were woven to produce a glimpse of how Wright’s games come to life.
Research.
Now there may have been some other take-away message from the talk that I missed due to my early exit, but through all the layers of complexity, he seemed to be prodding developer’s not to get so wrapped up in the technical aspects of game production, but to…dare I say it…read. Read widely, take inspiration from these works, mix, mangle, mould and mesh them; be creative and innovative by looking far outwith the bounds of the industry to draw your ideas from. For Spore, as an example, he not only read sci-fi, biology texts, and biochemistry, but also played around with SETI, chatted with high profile scientists, and pondered the various possible scenarios that led to the creation of this tiny little planet.
By making connections between ideas and having a breadth of base knowledge games, it would seem, will piece themselves together in your head with ease. If you’re Will Wright. I’m curious to see if this spastic, iterative process will be tried by anyone else (and if they’ll admit to it), and if they will have similar successes. It takes a particular kind of mind, with a particular sort of thinking, to be able to pull it off, but I think that it could result in some truly unique work.
Game Dev Challenge: Be a lemur.
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