Getting ready for Will Wright to take the stage at NYU's Skirball Center.  He's famous for designing Spore, SimCity, SimAnt, SimEarth, and of course, The Sims series.  I'm excited to hear what he says about educational games.  Many of his titles are considered educational games today, though I don't believe they were originally marketed as such, with the possible exception of Spore.  It's very odd, but things that get classified as educational games often aren't games at all.  Things in that category usually more closely resemble interactive worksheets than games.  There's often only one right answer, and sometimes the game is only playable if you already know the material it contains.

There was a discussion on Twitter recently about the poisonous reputation of the term 'educational game'.  Jason McIntosh said a witty metaphor about books that I really liked.  "This is an educational book! It's not like those OTHER books - this one tries to TEACH you something!" It isn't often that people talk about books being educational or not.  I suppose if a person was insistent about getting an educational book, someone would probably hand them a textbook, or at least some non-fiction.  Why do people treat games so differently?  I don't think they should.

photo by Scott TraylorTime to start!  They're having technical difficulties with the presentation.  It's 6:15 and Will is sitting on the stage cross legged with a laptop in his lap.  They've decided to do the question/answer portion first.

6:20pm Introduction:  Will Wright’s games trust in the minds of young people, and it has already influenced a generation.

Demographics important to game publishing.  Information Absorption Constant (3000) ÷ Age = Info you can absorb in a minute.  Games have reputation that's not good at all.  When he helped curate an exhibit that included video games, he got looked down upon by comic book people(!)  Story about book absorbing a monk so thoroughly, people thought it was the devil, back in the early days of books. Television = failed opportunity for education.  "I wish there was a dial to turn up the intelligence of the programming.  There's a dial called 'brightness', but that doesn't work." - Unknown.  Cycle: Entertainment -> Artistic Expression -> Recognized for learning. 

We run models in our heads constantly, to understand what's going on, help us make decisions.  We look for patterns everywhere, even when they don't exist.  Metaphors, schemas & symbols.  How many members of a particular demographic group does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  Schema for what happens when you walk into a restaurant.  Animals have food/danger, flight/flee schemas.  Our ability to read another person through empathy is remarkable.  Act differently around friends/co-workers/family.  We have a limited amount of experience to build schema out of.  Toys help us expand our experiences. Talking to friends helps us build schema off of their experiences.  Stories on TV/books/plays/movies too, and interactive play experiences.

6:35pm People used to play games until they started having kids, but now it's more common to play games with kids.  Casual games are often popular with people who used to play games and have less time now.

Archetypes.  Captain Kirk is a typical captain archetype.  Lost is a remake of Gilligan's Island storyline.  Some stories take place in world's unlike our own, but there are always familiar similarities to our own.  Change small things, different outcome.  Groundhog Day is game like, different sequence of events each time.  Hollywood often exagerrates archetypes from real life.  Even the NYTimes dreamed up a graphic of what Bin Laden's underground hideout must look like.  Games allow us to explore possibility spaces. 

6:46pm Play builds models in imagination.  Games test models.  (You can swap models and imagination in these sentences.)  Treasure Island resulted from drawing a map, Robinson Crusoe looked at it and imagined what could happen there.  Creative abilities in Grand Theft Auto are amazing, don't have to do with the missions.  Games have success/failure loops.  Will's games have interesting failure states.  Failure states are a great way to learn that games do well.

6:53pm People say games don't produce emotional experiences like movies do, but that's not really true.  6:56pm Talking about Russian rockets and failures / survival / things they learned.  6:58pm: People send him a lot of game design ideas.  Many kinds of fields can feed to good game ideas.  The player will build an internal model of your system.  The game designer should consider what model the player will build.  Even looking at the game packaging, a person is building a model in their head of what the game is.  When he made The Sims, first called it a dollhouse, which is accurate, but really turned away males.

7:03pm Future of gaming - games push computer technology forward, mobile devices too.  Graphics, physics, simulation.  Fractal entertainment.  Entertainment is being personalized.  50 people on one airplane could all be watching 50 different movies.  Games used to be immersive if they were good.  The whole outside world disappeared.  Today there's more emphasis on group interaction in games, and NOT ignoring everyone else in the room.  Fun is watching your friends play.  More real world context, like Rock Band.  Future, more games that are aware of where you are.  Future: Turning players into producers, i.e. Spore.

We're running out of time and he's speeding through the rest of his deck.  I could barely keep up the blogging at the regular pace!  Oh noes!  Motivation is the issue, not access.  Lighting fire, not filling pail.  Time playing x social relevance = world impact.  Build different models of where the world goes from here.  300 slides!  Oh my!  We're out of time!