HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017566.jpg

“Well, one thing I’ve always really enjoyed is making things. Out of whatever. It started with modeling as a kid, building models. When computers came along, I started learning programming and realizing the computer was this great tool for making things, making models, dynamic models, and behaviors, not just static models. I think when I started doing games I really wanted to carry that to the next step, to the player, so that you give the player a tool so that they can create things. And then you give them some context for that creation. You know, what is it, what kind of kind of world does it live in, what’s its purpose? What are you trying to do with this thing that you’re creating? To really put the player in the design role. And the actual world is reactive to their design. So they design something that the little world inside the computer reacts to. And then they have to revisit the design and redesign it, or tear it down and build another one, whatever it is. So I guess what really draws me to interactive entertainment and the thing that I try to keep focused on is enabling the creativity of the player. Giving them a pretty large solution space to solve the problem within the game. So the game represents this problem landscape. Most games have small solution landscapes, so there’s one possible solution and one way to solve it. Other games, the games that tend to be more creative, have a much larger solution space, so you can potentially solve this problem in a way that nobody else has. If you’re building a solution, how large that solution space is gives the player a much stronger feeling of empathy. If they know that what they’ve done is unique to them, they tend to care for it a lot more. I think that’s the direction I tend to come from.”

Wright believes that simulations as games can be used to improve education by teaching children how to learn. In his own words:

“The problem with our education system is we’ve taken this kind of narrow, reductionist, Aristotelian approach to what learning is. It’s not designed for experimenting with complex systems and navigating your way through them in an intuitive way, which is what games teach. It’s not really designed for failure, which is also something games teach. I mean, I think that failure is a better teacher than success. Trial and error, reverse-engineering stuff in your mind—all the ways that kids interact with games—that’s the kind of thinking schools should be teaching. And I would argue that as the world becomes more complex, and as outcomes become less about success or failure, games are better at preparing you. The education system is going to realize this sooner or later. It’s starting. Teachers are entering the system who grew up playing games. They’re going to want to engage with the kids using games.”

Wright will appear as a character in the video game Mr. T, where he will team up with Mr. T to fight Nazis.

Wright was given a “Lifetime Achievement Award” at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001. In 2002, he became the fifth person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame. Until 2006, he was the only person to have been honored this way by both of these industry organizations. In 2007 the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded him a fellowship, the first given to a game designer.

He has been called one of the most important people in gaming, technology, and entertainment by publications such as Entertainment Weekly, Time, PC Gamer, Discover and GameSpy. Wright was also awarded the PC Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award in January 2005.

In 1980, along with co-driver and race organizer Rick Doherty, Wright participated in the U.S. Express, a cross-country race that was the predecessor to The Cannonball Run. Wright and Doherty drove a specially outfitted Mazda RX-7 from Brooklyn, New York to Santa Monica, California in 33:39, winning the illegal race. Wright only competed once in the race, which continued until 1983.

Since 2003, in his spare time, Wright has collected leftovers from the Soviet space program, “including a 100-pound hatch from a space shuttle, a seat from a Soyuz... control panels from the Mir”, and the control console of the Soyuz 23, as well as dolls, dice, and fossils. During E3 2004 he passed off an old lapel pin commemorating the Soviet space program to a reporter.

“I’m uncollecting. I buy collections on eBay, and I disperse them out to people again. I have to be like an entropic force to collectors, otherwise all of this stuff will get sorted.”

He once built competitive robots for BattleBots with his daughter, but no longer does so. As of November 2006, Wright still had remnant bits of machined metal left over from his BattleBots days strewn about the garage of his Oakland home. Wright was a former Robot Wars champion in the Berkeley-based robotics workshop, the Stupid Fun Club. One of Wright’s bots, designed with the help of Wright’s daughter Cassidy, “Kitty Puff Puff”, fought against its opponents by sticking a roll of gauze onto its armature and circling around them, encapsulating them and denying them movement. The technique, cocooning, was eventually banned.

Following his work in BattleBots, he has taken steps into the field of human-robot interactions.

“We build these robots and we take them down to Berkeley and study the interactions that people have with the robots,” says Wright. “We built this newer one that has a rapid-fire pingpong cannon. It will fire about 10 per second. So we give people this plastic bat and we say, ‘It’s set up to play baseball. Do you want to play baseball? It’s going to shoot a little ball and you try to hit it.’ And all of a sudden it’s like da-da-da-da, and it’s pelting them with balls.”

After building his reputation as one of the most important game designers in the world, Wright in 2009 left Maxis, the Electronic Arts owned studio he founded. His first post-E.A. venture was the Stupid Fun Club.

In October 2010, Current TV announced that Will Wright will produce a new show for the network. The program, entitled Bar Karma, began airing in February 2011.

In October 2011, Will Wright became a member of the Board of Directors of Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life.

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017566