Before we made the transition over to IndustryGamers we teased our interview and noted that Will Wright confirmed his future involvement in the Spore franchise. Today we're pleased to bring you the entire Q&A in which Wright also talks about the direction at Stupid Fun Club, why it's actually great for EA too, and what he thinks about digital distribution and the future of the industry.
IndustryGamers: Lucy Bradshaw at Maxis tells me that to have your own think tank has been a lifelong dream of yours. Is Stupid Fun Club your lifelong dream?
Wright hopes to bring his innovative ideas to other media besides games
Will Wright: Yeah, I think it's a kind of evolution of me wanting to branch out a bit beyond games as well. It's stuff I've been dabbling in for a number of years on the side. We're getting to the point where a lot of these projects are ready to be pursued more seriously. Some of it doesn't have a lot to do with games, but we're going to do games stuff as well. We're looking at entertainment almost in a broader sense. Typically people think “I'm going to go do a game” or “I'm going to go do a movie” or build a toy, and rarely do we think of entertainment integrating all these things together working from the inside out. So I found myself more and more just getting interested in that viewpoint and how to think about it as a designer. ... My model for [Stupid Fun Club] is really something between Ideo design or Marvel or Lucas, where you kind of start with the idea first and then work your way up different formats.
IG: Your design approach has always been very non-linear, putting the tools and the storytelling in the hands of the gamers with Sims and Spore. If you're now going to be working in other media, like TV or movies, those are linear by their very nature. Do you see a way around that or are you perhaps happy to do something more linear now?
WW: I think that we're actually learning a lot about storytelling in games that we can start bringing to other media, so taking these ideas to a linear format doesn't necessarily mean that I have to become a storyteller. I think there are ways actually to get collaborative involvement, user-generated content, get the fans and community involved in creating linear media as well. Also, other fields like toys are inherently non-linear, and I think the sensibilities coming from gaming can really get a lot of traction in areas that aren't even storytelling or linear media areas.
IG: Concerning the future of Spore, obviously there are a lot of talented folks at Maxis still working on it, but are you planning on any return to that franchise or your other franchises even though you're not with EA now?
WW: I don't think it was widely reported, but alongside this whole [Stupid Fun Club] thing, I also entered into a consulting agreement with EA. I'm spending a certain amount of time every month actually working with the Spore team on future versions of Spore and expansions. So I will [still] be involved with EA on developing the Spore franchise as well.
IG: Well, fans will be happy to hear that. With that in mind, considering a theoretical Spore 2, what about the first Spore would you like to change or improve upon for a sequel?
WW: As soon as we released it, because we're giving so much involvement to the players, we ended up learning a lot from seeing what the players do; we've already seen a lot of unexpected stuff happening in the player community that we're learning from. We're finding out cool areas the fans want to bring the game in, what direction they want the tools to go, what experiences they're enjoying in the game the most, which levels they enjoy the most. So I think now we're at a maximum learning where the fans are going to be steering the franchise as much as we will – they have their hands on the steering wheel too. We're listening to criticisms of parts of the game, we're looking at parts that were unexpected successes and we're going to go in other directions with Spore.
I think part of it is stuff we wish we had done, but it's more what we see the fans wanting us to do. We're going to probably add more depth to different areas of the game – and we're certainly already doing that with the Galactic Adventures expansion pack – and we're also taking output from the tools in different directions, so you can take your creatures you made in the creature creator and bring them into different experiences.
IG: Maxis is working on bringing Spore to Wii, but what about the high-end platforms, Xbox 360 and PS3?
WW: I know there's been a lot of talk about it internally, but for us it's really an opportunity/cost issue. You know, we either do that or we continue creating new applications on the PC or we kind of go into the handheld arena. I can't specifically say what the plans are right now, but really all these things are measured against each other. We can't do everything at once, so we have to say, “What platforms would it kind of evolve the fastest on?” So you can sort of look at a straight port to the PS3 and Xbox 360 and basically have the same game we have on the PC... or we could say, “What can we do on this platform that will help us explore different parts of the design?” I think the Wii is really unique in that sense, with the things you can do on Wii that you can't do on other platforms right now. It's represented a lot of learning for us in terms of the directions we might take it. So I'd say that's one of the under-appreciated aspects of how we choose to deploy this on different platforms.
IG: It seems like more game designers these days are trying to branch out into general IP creation – Lorne Lanning and Jason Rubin come to mind. Is this a trend you think we'll see more of, where big name designers take more of an ownership role in creating new IP for use across media? Is this sort of a “Hollywoodization” of the game industry with more of the focus on the people actually creating the games? You and Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto right now are actually a few of the people in the games business who do have more mass market recognition, so will we see more people like yourself going independent?
WW: I think there are two aspects to that. One of them is just wanting the creative and financial independence, where you've had a fair amount of success and you want more creative freedom and that becomes almost more important than financial independence. I think the other part of it is that game designers are actually an interesting group in that, when you think about what goes into a game, you have aspects of storytelling, usability, engineering, user-generated content, community building, etc. I think game designers are uniquely positioned to look at all forms of media in a broader way, because in some sense games involve music, movies, usability, toys, etc., more so than most other forms of entertainment.
Game designers have a unique perspective on the entertainment industry to maybe think cross-media, and we're just now starting to see some game creators go in that direction, get a little bit outside the game box and think about other things from a very fundamental point of view – not just how to take this game and make a movie out of it, which is kind of the opportunistic strategy that's been pursued up until now both ways, you know if there's a big movie how do you make a game out of it? You can do that, and it works ok sometimes – truthfully, it doesn't work very well – but that's why I mentioned Lucas earlier because that's one of the groups that's done it fairly successfully. The games built around Star Wars for the most part are really good, as well as the movies and toys. I think they've taken a very fundamental approach to how you look at an idea and bring it out to different formats.
