Will Wright, the innovative creator of Sim City, The Sims, and Spore (among others), values the power of imagination during the learning process, and his passion is to create games that allow for an easier synergy between those two. During his one-hour presentation at Skirball last night, Wright touched upon not just his own games, but the medium as a whole and how it can be used to both entertain as well as spur creativity and knowledge. The presentation started a bit late due to technical problems (the irony was not lost on anyone). Speaking in front of a varied crowd of undergraduates, 20-something graduate students, and a hefty amount of industry professionals, Wright attempted to convince the audience that while games such as Halo are important, open-ended games (such as the Grand Theft Auto series, which he expressed a passion for) are more valuable to him because they allow gamers to transform from consumers to creators (in this case, creators of a story).

The gaming industry is looked down on by nearly every other media, a fact that the self-aware Wright joked about at the start of the lecture: “You know its bad when even comic books are looked upon better than games.” Wright feels the need to not just create games, but defend their value and their importance, and who’s to say he shouldn’t? But he also wants to take a different direction with gaming, one in which games are used as a tool to teach, while still being fun. The problem with learning, Wright said, isn’t access to material (after all, you can get the entire Library of Congress in the palm of your hands via thumb drives), but the motivation to learn. If you light the fire of education under a child, they will not only learn faster, but because they want to, and in this case, because it’s fun.

The most interesting part of the presentation for me, however, was how Wright applied these concepts to his own games. He spoke about the process behind Sim City, how it first seems like a computerized train set, but after heavy usage, the consumer realizes they aren’t just playing with a set of possibilities; instead, they are creating worlds (he compared it to gardening). He designed The Sims to allow people to succeed or fail. He established that failure is just as much part of learning as is success. Therefore, he wants his games to have consequences (if your Sim dies, the people around it realize this and mourn) instead of just a simple restart that allows you to feel nothing.

The audience that packed Skirball seemed to be Wright’s target audience: gamers who understood his points and laughed at his jokes (I’ll admit, some were hilarious). My question is: how can we get this process out into the public? The Sims is one way of doing that. As Wright put it, “The Sims showed people that not only boys liked computer games.” Casual gamers are more interested in games such as The Sims, where they can control what happens, and the designers allow failure while giving very basic guidelines. This is why a game like The Sims, which has a huge following, becomes important and why Wright is as valuable as he is: he is literally teaching through his games.

(As a side note, thanks to a bit of confusion beforehand, I ended up in a meeting of game developers who were showing off prototypes of their learning games to Wright himself. I ended up actually meeting Wright, who then realized I was press, and laughed at my presence in the wrong room. Needless to say, nerdgasm achieved.)

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