Today at the Masters of Digital Media program at Great Northern Way Campus, Will Wright (does he even need an introduction? okay, the guy behind SimCity, The Sims, and Spore) visited the students for lunch and a preliminary discussion before his evening talk as part of the Krazy! Exhibition through the Vancouver Art Gallery. In his ever-friendly manner, he invited the group to ask questions from the get go, and had helpful advice and insights for people interested in game design.

So how do you become a game designer anyway? To Will, it’s about pitching your ideas with passion in a way that gets imaginations rolling. Not only do you need good ideas, which you should spend time researching and completely immersed in topics to achieve, but you need to sell it and get people excited about making it and playing it.

On a practical level, the more experience you have, the better. He told this story about a pottery class—the teacher split the class into two grading groups, one graded on making one quality pot, and the other on the quantity of pots they made. By the end of the class, the final pots from the quantity grade group were much better than the single pots from the quality group. For a game design portfolio, it’s better to spend a year making several small games and make mistakes along the way rather than focus on one big overdone game.

Immediate small prototypes of game systems are another way to go. All of Will’s interns start off prototyping right away. The faster you iterate, the quicker you can explore ideas and re-iterate. Of course, he added, Spore had around 200 prototypes, only about 20-30 of which ended up in the final gameplay.

Success of a game isn’t just about its new features, but how well it develops those features. Will has often had to take a step back and remember this before moving on to the production phase. Many games, he feels, would benefit from removing features rather than adding them. At a certain point, the more layers you build, the more you’re just blocking out a new audience.

And speaking of a new audience, where’s industry headed as far as Will is concerned? More platforms, more forms of play, and more diverse audiences. He sees game industry more as an evolving entertainment industry. With Spore, he found it helpful to think about the possibilities of where the franchise would go in the form of, say, a theme park or a comic book or a toy line.

Platforms, in this way, have endless possibilities. It shouldn’t be about making Grand Theft Auto for the cell phone, he feels, but about asking how a cell phone can be used for a different form of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, whether that be an Alternate Reality Game or a location-based game.

Interestingly, most of what I’ve heard recently from game designers concerns moving toward downloadable content, but Will is more interested in procedural content that is generated by the computer interpreting the player’s interests and personality. Spore takes new innovative strides like procedural music (he thought it would be too hard to make good quality procedural music at first but the team worked at it). Social play and the metagame (how we create stories from gameplay on web sites and community forums, for example) also offer directions to keep exploring.

After watching some prototypes, I’m even more excited about playing Spore and seeing where Will takes industry as an innovative game designer who brings elements of simulation and toys to an ever-growing sense of what games can be.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Breaking In, Design, Events, INSPIRATION, RESOURCES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.