Will Wright is famous for creating The Sims and, before that, SimCity. His experience with The Sims has led him to move toward user-created content. From Will Wright Presents Spore… and a New Way to Think About Games:
Wright opened his presentation by explaining how he’s seeing firsthand how budgets are going up. For Sims 2, the characters had over 22,000 separate animations. All of those were done by hand by an army of animators. Modern games demand more and more content.At the same time, what he calls the ‘value to gamers’ levels off after a while. A game with 22,000 animations isn’t twice as good as a game with 11,000 animations. But fortunately, Wright learned another lesson from The Sims: People love to make their own content. They love to customize their experience. By way of example, he put up a slide showing his Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas character — who wore a fedora and red-heart boxer shorts. His character was ridiculous-looking, but it made the experience custom for him. Players get a huge value out of content they make for themselves.
‘Owning’ the content in this way means that all the stories that the gamer creates are much more meaningful.
Putting two and two together, Wright concluded that there had to be some way where users could create content, instead of armies of developers, and a way to make a game craft itself around the user’s contribution.
I’d never heard of this “demo scene”:
For inspiration, Wright looked to the “demo scene,” a group of (mostly European) coders who specialized in doing a whole lot with a little bit of code. Their procedural programming methods were able to, for example, fit an entire 3D game in 64K, using mathematics to generate textures and music, etc. “I just found this incredibly exciting,” Wright confesses, describing the kinds of work that he saw come out of the demo scene.
His Spore game concept sounds a lot like an idea I was playing with (but did nothing about) maybe ten years ago:
Clicking on the egg brought up a creature editor, and allowed the player to “evolve” with a new generation of critters. The editor was amazingly flexible. Wright could give his creature extra vertebrae, he could give it fins or tails to move faster, he could add claws or extra mouths, whatever he wanted. More importantly, all the creature animations weren’t hard-coded; they were dynamic. If he put six tails on his creature, the game would figure out how a six-tailed creature would move. The critter was completely his.