For Will Wright, story time is all the time

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For about half an hour, Wright led the audience on a whirlwind tour of his philosophy of interactive (read: video game) storytelling, and how it differs from that of movies.

He said that the most important property of storytelling to him is empathy, and that that is something movies do a good job of establishing.

"So if we know the player has failed at the same miserable level three times, why not just let him skip the level?"

--Will Wright, game developer

But he also said video games can instill a sense of pride and guilt in ways movies cannot.

"I've played (the video game) Black and White and beat up my characters to see what would happen," Wright said. "I've never felt guilty watching a movie."

The point, he said, is that games provide more proactive agency: "I am causing what is going on on the screen."

Still, he also said that any kind of story can open up the "possibility space" for those watching or reading.

For example, he pointed to the famous scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones is running away from the giant rolling stone.

"What if he trips there, or falls down the hole?" he asked. We're "imagining all these little possibilities that don't happen in the film."

And what some interactive storytellers struggle with, Wright suggested, is offering a causal chain of events, presumably one that leads viewers to experience the richest possible palette of emotions.

Wright then turned to what he said was one of his favorite types of stories, the kind where the story line is "going along and going along and then all of a sudden it takes a (major, unexpected) turn."

He used several films as examples, including Memento, which he said had an interactive method of playing with the causal chain.

"At some point," Wright explained, "each future point in the (film's) chain caused you to re-evaluate what you'd seen before. It was kind of an interactive puzzle game."

Another of his favorite stories, he said, is Groundhog Day.

"It's an interactive sequence (the Bill Murray character is) going through," Wright said. "All of a sudden, it's 6 a.m. again. Basically, it was a game (and) he had to restart."

Every succeeding day in the film, Wright said, the audience sees the Murray character skipping over more and more of what he spent his time on, because they already know most of what he does.

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"And that's something that we really should be doing, over and over again," he said. "So if we know the player has failed at the same miserable level three times, why not just let him skip the level?"

After the Spore demo, Wright talked about how computers can expand our imaginations and become powerful tools for self- expression.

He also talked about how every once in awhile, the world goes through major paradigm shifts. That's happening more frequently than in the past, in part due to political issues, in part environmental issues.

Games, he said, are sometimes perceived as meaningless toys, but they can be much more meaningful, and can allow storytellers to build much more elaborate models of the world.

"These things will allow us to change the world," Wright said, "and (people's) awareness of these models, for the rest of their lives, hopefully."

[Christopher Hall]

"Anticipation" doesn't even scratch the surface

I've been following Spore from pretty much the first press release and I've got to say, I think Will may really be on to something. In a sense he's attempting to create the ultimate sandbox, the HMS Dreadnought of the genre. Given his history with creating games that are simply fun to play, I'm inclined to believe that Spore very well may take the cake. I've been playing games, myself, for well over 20 years and it's refreshing to me to see a developer who is so passionate about his creation (and isn't going to call me "his *****" to get the point across). And if Will's excited in all his geeky nerdiness, as a fellow geeky nerd I'm likely to get all giddy inside about it, too.

I can't say whether or not user-created content is necessarily the future, but I do know it's a whole ton of fun to toy around with.

[Christopher Hall]

"Anticipation" doesn't even scratch the surface

I've been following Spore from pretty much the first press release and I've got to say, I think Will may really be on to something. In a sense he's attempting to create the ultimate sandbox, the HMS Dreadnought of the genre. Given his history with creating games that are simply fun to play, I'm inclined to believe that Spore very well may take the cake. I've been playing games, myself, for well over 20 years and it's refreshing to me to see a developer who is so passionate about his creation (and isn't going to call me "his *****" to get the point across). And if Will's excited in all his geeky nerdiness, as a fellow geeky nerd I'm likely to get all giddy inside about it, too.

I can't say whether or not user-created content is necessarily the future, but I do know it's a whole ton of fun to toy around with.