Gaming and Culture

LOS ANGELES--Start saving simoleans, everyone: "The Sims 3" has finally launched.

The latest full iteration of the famous "Sims" franchise--"The Sims" launched in 2000 and became the best-selling PC game of all time, and "The Sims 2" released in 2004--the new game presents a chance for its publisher, Electronic Arts, to bolster its bottom line, even while trying to push the boundaries of what game players are used to.

The original "Sims," from the hit-making game designer, Will Wright, was a game in which players could control a household of, yes, "sims," little people whose daily lives depended on players' attention. The innovations in the game, plus its non-goal-oriented nature, its unique graphics, its ahead-of-its-time game play and a number of other factors quickly made it into a success far beyond what anyone could have imagined. It also spawned a series of expansions that were also successes.

Then came "Sims 2," which improved upon the original title's graphics, incorporated more user-generated content--players could now use a movie feature that allowed players to script and make films starring their sims, while players of the original version figured out a way to do so themselves using the game's "family album" feature--and also spawned a series of hit expansions.

As a result, EA spun "The Sims" off its original studio, Maxis, and turned it into one of the company's main labels. And now, with the release of "Sims 3," EA has both a chance to prove it can continue to maintain its most popular and lucrative franchises, and to win over a new generation of players unfamiliar with the little green diamond that floats over players' characters' heads.

But EA has had a series of layoffs, its much-anticipated "Spore" franchise, which moderately successful, has not been the mega-hit the company likely hoped it would be and it is facing an environment in which the games industry, while still stronger than most, is finally starting to show some cracks.

So how important is "Sims 3" to EA? Well, it's not bet-the-house important--no game could be to such a large company--but it's certainly got to be up there.

And now, as the latest iteration incorporates even more social media, and more user-generated content--players can now not only make films starring their sims, but can also have full editing control over the footage--EA has to deliver with bottom line figures. Will it? Only time will tell. But there's certainly a lot of excitement around the game. And given the franchise's history, it would be tough to bet against them.

With all this hysteria about the pig sniffles, you'd think that an announcement about 100 million strange little organisms would be cause for alarm. That's not the case, however, when we're talking about the oddball life forms that players grow and control as part of video game Spore. The game created by industry legend Will Wright announced Monday that 100 million creatures have been created, far outrunning the number of species on Earth.

The game publisher, Electronic Arts, started counting last June. That's when it first released its Spore Creature Creator, several months ahead of the full Spore game itself.

There's more Spore on the way. Electronic Arts' Maxis studio is releasing the Spore Galactic Adventures expansion pack for PC and Mac players, Spore Hero for the Wii, and Spore Hero Arena for the Nintendo DS. The player who created the 100 millionth Spore creature now has a chance to win a copy of Spore Galactic Adventures as well as a souped-up PC graphics card.

Last month, Will Wright announced his departure from Electronic Arts. Wright, who soared to the heights of video game fame with Sim City and The Sims, has said that his new project is an "electronic think tank" that goes by the interesting name of Stupid Fun Club.

Will Wright, one of the best-known names in gaming, is leaving Electronic Arts to set up his own "electronic think tank."

Wright will be the head of Stupid Fun Club, a venture aimed at developing concepts that can serve as the nexus for video games, movies, TV shows, toys, and other entertainment products. EA will invest in the venture, with the game maker and Wright each owning equal percentages of the company.

"The entertainment industry is moving rapidly into an era of revolutionary change," Wright said in a statement. "Stupid Fun Club will explore new possibilities that are emerging from this sublime chaos and create new forms of entertainment on a variety of platforms."

Wright spoke last week at the Web 2.0 event, talking about the role games can play when they extend one's one life into the digital realm.

"Most people are very narcissistic," Wright said. "The more you can make the game about that person, the more interested, the more emotionally involved they will get."

EA Chief Executive John Riccitiello said he is looking forward to partnering with Wright in his new effort and praised Wright's contributions to EA.

"Will is a great designer, and he's been part of a great legacy of globally recognized game franchises like The Sims, SimCity, and Spore," Riccitiello said. "The teams that have been leading those franchises in recent years have a lot of exciting content coming."

Wright co-founded game studio Maxis, responsible for SimCity, the Sims and, more recently, Spore, with Jeff Braun in 1989. EA bought Maxis in 1997. Upon Wright's departure, EA said Maxis is set to be run by Lucy Bradshaw, the unit's general manager. It is currently working on a Spore Galactic Adventures expansion pack.

SAN FRANCISCO--Are video games really all about feeding your ego? Maybe, suggested legendary game designer Will Wright in a keynote interview at the Web 2.0 Expo on Thursday morning.

"Most people are very narcissistic," said Electronic Arts' Wright, creator of the Sim City and Sims franchises and now last year's avant-garde Spore, onstage with Federated Media's John Battelle. "The more you can make the game about that person, the more interested, the more emotionally involved they will get."

Advancements in technology have made it possible for the customization craze of the social-networking world to permeate the console and PC gaming sectors, and that has begun to open up the industry to new users who didn't see the appeal in hardcore gaming or immersive role-playing virtual universes.

He suggested that virtual world Second Life was on the right track by making it possible for members to create elaborate in-game items, but they were too difficult for most members to partake in. "The sophistication...was pretty high," Wright said. "For a lot of people, programming does not sound like entertainment."

Even though games--especially role-playing games--have a reputation for being a lonely form of escapism, Wright suggested that mainstream appeal can be found in, well, getting to be yourself. And that's where it gets back to the narcissism.

"The more this game can be about me, and my real life, and my real experiences and where I live, and my real friends (can mean more than) 'I'm going to go to the game and become an orc and get a real sword'," he suggested. Granted, Spore is all about building and growing strange creatures in a bizarre, science fiction universe. But there's a lot more out there, he said, as we're seeing a "Cambrian explosion" of ways to play and interact.

"The Wii, to me, represents the idea of non-immersive gaming," he said. "When you think about the Wii...most of the entertainment is not happening on the screen, it's about watching your friend act like a doofus swinging the thing around and maybe throw it into the TV set."

So maybe gaming can temper that ego, too.

SAN FRANCISCO--For Brenda Brathwaite, a longtime video game designer who avoids flying, the annual Game Developers Conference is such a can't-miss event that she is driving cross-country, from Savannah, Ga., to San Francisco (and back again) in order to be there.

GDC, as it's known, kicks off Monday with a series of two-day topic-specific summits and begins in earnest on Wednesday. And while there may not be too many people driving 5,400 miles round-trip to attend, there is no shortage of people who, like Brathwaite, see the show as indispensable.

"It's the mecca of the game development networking industry," said Brathwaite, a professor of game development and interactive design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. "This is where everybody goes. Every other conference has some fraction, but this is where everybody goes."

While the video game business is growing and may even be recession-resistant, it certainly hasn't escaped the wrath of the downturn, with a series of studio closings like those at ACES, the Microsoft division that made the Flight Simulator franchise, game productions shutting down and people losing their jobs. So as what may well be the world's largest gathering of game developers, GDC could not be more important to those in the industry right now.

And though thousands of game developers will flood GDC's Moscone Center halls for keynote addresses and talks by the likes of Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, The Sims and Spore creator Will Wright, Fable creator Peter Molyneux, and countless others, many say the conference really matters most because there is no other place on earth they can network with more of their peers, talk about jobs with more decision makers, or reunite with more of their friends.

"It's the best place both to get business done, as everyone is here, and to keep an ear to the ground to help gauge where the industry is heading," said Kim Pallister, a business planner on Intel's Larabee project. "These are tough times, especially for some studios that have had publisher funding cut and the like...For those affected, it's a time to scramble for new ground by striking deals, finding new work, or leaning about alternative platforms."

Pallister said this year will mark his 16th GDC, and there are many who see the conference as an annual pilgrimage. But it's also seen by many veterans both as a chance to pass the torch to the next generation of developers and to check in with peers about the state of the industry.

"The core of GDC is about making better games," said Robin Hunicke, the lead designer on Electronic Arts' MySims. "For younger developers and students, it's a chance to meet some of the best minds in the business and learn from them. For developers who have been going for years, it's a time to share war stories, swap best practices, and communicate about what makes life as a developer so challenging--and so fun."

This year also marks a changing of the guard for GDC. Longtime behind-the-scenes organizer Meggan Scavio is heading the conference for the first time after former director Jamil Moledina left for Electronic Arts. But while there will clearly be thousands in attendance this week, Scavio faces a challenging environment.

In an interview in February, Scavio told CNET News that she expected GDC 2009's attendance to be about 18,000, roughly on par with last year. But asked last week about rumors that ticket sales were down, she acknowledged that things have slowed, hardly a surprising development given that many conferences are seeing smaller-than-usual populations.

Still, she said, sales are "strong considering the current economic downturn."

And for people like Ron Meiners, a veteran community manager who recently was laid off from a position in Los Angeles, GDC could not be more important, both as a place to explore possible future employment opportunities and to meet more of the industry's leading thinkers.

"As a consultant or job seeker, the ability to make new ties, or explore existing ties, is key," said Meiners. "I think we're happiest when we have a sense of (who someone is), so we can offer or recommend a job to them. It's a frontier industry still, and there are always very exciting new developments that are hard to understand. The conference gives us a chance to explore them and learn from successful practitioners, those who have made the next great innovations we'll all be talking about for the next year."

Added Meiners, "I think most important, really, for me, (GDC) gets me inspired again about games, about the social aspect of games, about games as a world-changing force and about games as a potentially important part of people's lives."

For many outside the industry, GDC may not have the name recognition of E3, the annual blowout at the Los Angeles Convention Center famous for its ear drum-shattering displays, huge parties, and booth babes.

But over the last few years, E3 has gone through a serious identity crisis, first scaling way down from a 60,000-person free-for-all to a 7,000-person, invite-only show focused on press and analysts. Now, for 2009, E3 looks ready to resume its massive scale, but to some, it may have lost some of its edge.

"We're thinking of vastly scaling down our presence at E3," said Jane Pinckard, a business development analyst for game developer F9. "GDC remains our most important show, in terms of business development...Part of it is, of course, the density of clients and partners and the ability to really focus on meeting them. But also, it's a show that celebrates development qua development. More than E3. So in terms of PR and perception, it's important that we are involved...GDC has credibility."

Asked to quantify GDC's credibility, Pinckard said, "We just look at new business opportunities we can generate by the end of the week. And for GDC, that has historically been really high. Publishers are there to meet with developers specifically. Whereas, at E3, for example, there's some of that, but there are other distractions for them."

Pallister agreed.

"E3 is still trying to find itself following the 'E3 Supernova' of a few years back," Pallister said. "Even in its heyday, though, E3 was a very different show than GDC. E3 was aimed at showing the industry's upcoming wares to the channel and to the customers who would buy them. GDC has always been about developers, about making games."

Electronic Arts said on Tuesday that The Sims 3, the third full iteration of one of the most successful video game franchises of all time, will hit store shelves on June 2.

The game will be released for PCs first, and versions for the Mac, iPhone, and iPod Touch should come later in the summer, EA said.

The original version of The Sims, which launched in 2000, quickly became the best-selling PC game of all time. In the years since, the franchise has surpassed 100 million total units sold, counting The Sims 2 and all of the expansions for both full iterations.

Originally developed by legendary game designer Will Wright's Maxis studio--which is now focused on Spore--The Sims has since become its own division within EA. As such, it is run out of the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters, while Maxis is based in Emeryville, Calif.

On Tuesday, EA also announced its third-quarter earnings and said it would be laying off about 1,100 employees--about 11 percent of its total staff--and closing 12 facilities worldwide.

SAN FRANCISCO--Electronic Arts said Wednesday that it plans this summer to release an all-new, stand-alone version of Spore for kids.

The new game, which will allow multiple children to play together in a very Spore-like universe, will be called Creature Keeper, said Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of EA's Emeryville, Calif.-based Maxis studio, which created Spore.

In addition, at its "State of the Universe" event here, EA also unveiled plans for Galactic Adventures, the first expansion to Spore. It is planned for a spring release and will feature a set of new tools for the massive space stage of the hit evolution game that, in addition to the existing "play," "create," and "share" tools, will let players choose to create their own adventures in space.

And EA topped off its set of announcements by saying that it expects to release all-new versions of Spore for the Nintendo Wii and DS game consoles, titled Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena, respectively.

The announcements were the first EA has made that showcase the video game giant's future plans for Spore, a game that it has clearly invested huge resources in. The game, from legendary designer Will Wright, tasks players with navigating five distinct stages--cell, creature, tribe, civilization and space. Though it has sold fairly well, some have argued that it hasn't lived up to its advance billing, particularly because it was years in the works. Also, the game was originally released with a version of digital rights management that limited the number of installs consumers could have. Many people resisted the DRM restrictions, and late last year, EA removed them.

However, either because of the DRM or in spite of it, Spore became one of the most pirated games of 2008.

Now, with Creature Keeper, EA and Maxis hope they can attract a much younger audience to the Spore universe. Unlike the original game, the kids version will allow multi-player play. It does not require Spore to play, but it will allow kids to import creatures from the original game. It will be released for PC and Mac, just as the original game was.

The idea, said Bradshaw, is to give kids an easier way to experience the fun and exploration of Spore, and to do so with other friends.

"They can invite friends over," Bradshaw said, "and have play dates with their creatures."

With the Galactic Adventures expansion (see video below), meanwhile, EA is attempting to address one of the biggest criticisms of the main space stage of Spore: That players could not directly interact with the worlds they encountered during their interstellar journeys. Instead, they would be restricted to flying above any planets they found along the way.

Now, however, they will be able to beam down to new planets. More important, however, may be that Maxis is making available to Spore players a set of planetary adventure creation tools they've previously only had in-house.

Among other things, the expansion offers players terra-forming tools, making it possible to build all-new planets from scratch, and populate them with all manner of buildings, creatures, rivers and other geographical features. Players can choose any creation from the 65 million item-strong, player-created Sporepedia, the official Spore social media system.

Bradshaw said that the tools that will be available in Galactic Adventures were not ones that were originally planned to be included in Spore. Nor was the expansion long in the works, she said. Instead, she explained, the team at Maxis saw the ways that people were playing Spore and listened to requests from players to have more interaction and control over the space stage.

While EA isn't talking about total sales figures for Spore at this point, Bradshaw did say that to date, there have been more than 65 million creations uploaded to Sporepedia, and more than 6 million downloads of the Creature Creator, a tool that allows people to make their own Spore creatures without owning the full game.

Electronic Arts' much anticipated evolution game, Spore hits store shelves Sunday in North America, and for those that have been on the project since the beginning, it has been a long road from concept to completion.

The game's creator, Will Wright, who is famous for previous games like SimCity and The Sims said recently that the game has been seven years in the making, meaning the project was getting under way not long after The Sims launched and became the best-selling PC game of all time.

Wright has talked at length about how Spore's origins lie in the SETI project and other flights of his fancy.

"The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore," Wright told me last month. "As we thought about, it became apparent that evolution was a very important component. Some of the very first prototypes involved how you would move around and visualize the galaxy."

In the highly anticipated lead-up to the Spore's release from EA studio Maxis, in Emeryville, Calif., almost all the attention has been on the game itself or on its Creature Creator, which gives users an easy and sophisticated way to create complex beasts and which was made available in June as a free download.

But for many people, an equally exciting element has been the series of prototypes available for free download on the Spore Web site, each of which provides a look at the origins of a small piece of the larger game.

In fact, the prototypes were a crucial part of making Spore a reality. For example, since the procedural animation of the creatures in the game is one of its most-heralded elements, it's notable that before the system was ever built into the game, it started as a prototype.

"The earliest prototypes were making strange topology creatures and seeing if we could teach the computer to make them move plausibly, and later, show emotion and behavior," Wright said. "We had to find out whether the project was doable or not, or if some part of it wasn't doable, where we have to scale it back."

The first programmer on the Spore team was a Maxis veteran named Jason Shankel. Prior to joining Wright on his evolution project, he'd been working on a project known as SimMars, which was essentially a Mars terraforming game that was supported financially by NASA before the plug was finally pulled.

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On September 7, Electronic Arts will release its long-awaited and much-anticipated Spore. For many, this will be the biggest video game event of the year, and possibly even the last several years.

Spore, which was first announced in 2005, takes players through the process of evolution, from simple cell-like creatures, step by step, on out into space, is the latest from The Sims and SimCity designer Will Wright.

There is little question that Wright is one of the industry's most important figures, as evidenced by the packed houses he always speaks to and the reverence everyone from gamers to other designers to reporters have for him.

For Wright, the release of Spore, is the completion of seven years of work and the finished product is a far cry from its earliest concepts, which he and a small team were first discussing while The Sims was still fairly new. Yet by then, he was already seen as perhaps the industry's leading innovator for the entirely new genre of games he'd created.

Now, Spore is set to push that innovation envelope even further. And while no one yet knows if it will be a commercial or even critical success, it's safe to say that the excitement over the game--which has been raised in part due to the fact that it has taken Wright and his Maxis studio much longer to get the game to market than originally planned--is as high as any game in recent memory.

Proof of that excitement level was borne out by the more than 2 million people who downloaded the Spore Creature Creator after its June release. This free feature allowed anyone to make creatures for the game in advance of its release, something that served two key purposes. First, it got people energized and gave them something to play with before the game was out. And second, it provided millions of creatures to populate the game with on day one, since everything that individual users created for the game is shared with everyone else, despite it being a single-player game.

Earlier this month, the day before Wright set off on a worldwide, four-week publicity tour, I sat down with him at Maxis' Emeryville, Calif., headquarters for a discussion about the evolution of his evolution game. I wanted to know about the conceptual origins of a game unlike any other, and Wright was happy to tell me all about it

Q: What were the origins of Spore?
Will Wright: The earliest evolution of it had to do with the SETI Project. The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore. As we thought about, it became apparent that evolution was a very important component. Some of the very first prototypes involved how you would move around and visualize the galaxy. And then on procedurally generated creatures. Could we actually generate creatures through evolution so there was a vast variety of creatures rather than just the 20 or 30 fixed things that games typically include.

Were you inspired by other video games?
Wright: I played a lot of space and strategy games, but one thing that always disappointed me in space games was that you're presented with a galaxy with maybe 100 worlds. It was never vast like a real galaxy. Even the Spore galaxy is a tiny percentage of a real galaxy, but you get the sense it's immense, with countless worlds to explore. And I'd never seen an evolutionary game where, again, there was a vast set of possible creatures you could come across and that could convey the diversity of real biology. So we started thinking about procedural solutions. Very early on we wanted to give players a really cool design editor so they could design a wide variety of creatures. A lot of our early prototypes explored whether we could do procedurally generated animations and textures and could we build an editor that was easy to use?

You had to invent all the systems, right?
Wright: We researched what little had been done in computer science around things like procedural animation, which was mainly around humanoids, procedurally generating human animations. But almost nobody was generating animations where you didn't know what the shape of the creature was. We had to basically invent our own kind of computer science for that.

What was that like to have to do that invention?
Wright: It was risk assessment: Can we solve enough of this problem to be confident we could solve it well? The earliest prototypes were making strange topology creatures and seeing if we could teach the computer to make them move plausibly, and later, show emotion and behavior. We had to find out whether the project was doable or not, or if some part of it wasn't doable, where we have to scale it back.

What are some steps or systems that you found weren't doable?
Wright: Surprisingly, some I thought weren't doable were. I'd never heard decent procedural music and I'd given up on it until Brian Eno came on the project. He'd been thinking about the problem for years. So we reincorporated it after rejecting it in the early phases.

Does Spore seem like the same game as what you showed at E3 in 2005?
Wright: It seems like basically the same game. We expanded areas that we didn't originally think would be important or fun, especially things like content sharing. We'd thought you would just play the game and stuff would appear. But as we developed more content and the ability to browse and explore it, we discovered how fun that process was and the social currency you get making something really cool and sharing it with other people. We borrowed the language of social networking and Web 2.0 to present what we're calling the Sporepedia.

Did the development of Sporepedia and the Web 2.0 elements contribute to the game taking until now to finish?
Wright: You can't really say it took five months, three days and 47 seconds more because of that. We're always looking at what we have, like we realized on the browser side that, Wow, it'll be great if we add these extra features but that's going to push us out a few more months, so let's also change the Creature Editor and some game levels and add achievements and mission-based systems. You're doing these things in parallel. Eventually, they have to be ready the same day. If one thing slips, you continue to polish and add a few little features you didn't think you'd have time for.

What are some ways creating Spore has been different than your other games?
Wright: One big way is the art team. Typically, we would just build a larger and larger army of artists to make more and more content, like in The Sims. But because we were doing this procedurally, our art staff was mainly concentrated on teaching the computer and giving players tools to make stuff. Another difference was the design density in Spore. Because there's so many different genres and levels, I had a designer for every game level and the editors and Sporepedia.

Originally, you referred to Spore as "massively single player." And now?
Wright: Spore is a hybrid. There's huge unexplored space between single-player and multiplayer games. With multiplayer games, there's tremendous design limitations: Nobody can peak, nobody can pause time, no one player can be super powerful. These limit the experience you can give someone. But there is a huge benefit of getting a million people collectively building an interesting world. So our hybrid model aims for the best aspects of a multiplayer game without the worst drawbacks.

Virtual world publishers talk about the benefit of aggregating the all the content their users make. What's your take on that?
Wright: I like the idea. I was trying to figure out how to lower the friction of creation to getting into the game but also how do you make the creation process fun, so you don't have 1 percent of people making stuff for the other 99 percent. Rather, how do you get 99 percent of people making stuff for the 100 percent.

What are some of the research influences for Spore?
Wright: A lot of Richard Dawkins' work. Edward O. Wilson, back in the very early origin of light phase. Stuart Kauffman wrote about autocatalytic sets, which are theories about the origin of life, like did life come to Earth on a comet or did it originate out of self-organizing chemical sets.

How would something like that manifest in the game?
Wright: Well, we actually took a different direction. At the beginning of the game you see this comet hitting the planet, which is a panspermia theory, which is the alternative theory to bio-genesis, which is that life formed naturally through chemical complexity on Earth. We ended up prototyping and exploring a lot of spaces that are not in the game. We're trying to look for the most interesting 20 percent out of the 100 percent of what we could put in the game.

What's the prototyping exploration like?
Wright: In the early phases it entails me talking to a programmer about some system we want to explore and we build a very simple prototype like the ones we're putting on our website. So start poking and prodding and playing with this little toy. It's fun to watch stellar formation animation. It's fun to play with autocatalytic sets. We'd build prototypes for each one of these and play with them and imagine a singular experience that involves some subset of these prototypes that use similar concepts that can be ramped in the players' mind so they're not having to learn, you know, 20 different things that are totally unconnected.

In the recent Electronic Arts quarterly earnings call, CEO John Riccitiello suggested Spore might one day become a label of its own. Are some of tehse directions you're talking about the basis for the expansion packs an ongoing label requires?
Wright: When a game is released, we have a good sense of how we can expand it in different directions. But you do first have to get it out to the public and see what they do with it. As we see the fans doing various things with it, it will become pretty clear to us that, Oh, yeah, this would be probably the best direction and we already have an expansion map, so we know how to navigate that terrain. But we're also exploring entire other forms of media and starting to think, what does this brand mean. We want Spore in a very general sense to become this intersection between science and creativity.

What do you hope fans will learn about science from Spore?
Wright: I want this to be more on the motivational side than the education side. I really want to spark people's interest in these subjects. People still tell me they went into, you know, civil engineering because of SimCity. It wasn't that SimCity taught them how to build a city, but it got them interested in how fascinating the subject is. That motivation is far more powerful than just trying to pour facts into their head. So, if nothing else I'd like people to come out, sit back, look up at the stars and think a little bit deeper about what a galaxy is.

I've heard Spore was originally known as SimEverything.
When I design a game, at the very beginning, I design a box, and with Spore many, many years ago, the title on the box was SimEverything. I can show the team my box and say, Look, we want to build this, imagine what will be in this box. Spore was feeling pretty unique and SimEverything almost felt like a parody of the Sims brand, which is why I liked it. But my lead artist, Ocean Quigley, actually came up with Spore as the code name for the project. But after a couple of years of calling it Spore, the name seemed to fit on so many different levels, especially as we thought deeper about the pollination and things like that. At some point we said, Let's just call it Spore.

What is it like to be at the end of this process?
Wright: It feels nice. It's a big transition, because we've been working, working, working on this thing and it's kind of like, a Frankenstein thing where you flip a switch and it comes alive and roars off into the world, and you don't know what kind of hell it's going to raise. So it's kind of scary and exciting at the same time.