IG: When we first heard about Stupid Fun Club years ago, it was more about your fascination with robots and human-robot interaction and the social nature of that. What can you tell us about the sorts of ideas you have brewing at Stupid Fun Cub now? It's safe to assume that it's going to go much beyond the initial robot focus, right?
WW: Yeah, it is. We've actually learned a lot from our robots in surprising ways. As we started having robots interact with each other and people, they started sparking these other ideas and projects in different areas, beyond just building hardware. So I think it's going to be a strategy [that combines] what we've learned from the robots and what I've personally learned from the games I've worked on. A lot of the things we've learned on Spore in fact intersect a lot of the stuff we've learned working on the robots; it's going to be an interesting blending of stuff we've done in the past at Stupid Fun Club with stuff that to me feels like a continuation of the lineage of the games I've done. So I think some of the stuff we do at Stupid Fun Club will feel like a fairly smooth evolution from things like SimCity to Sims to Spore to the next thing we do at Stupid Fun Club, but integrated with these other areas.
IG: Roughly how many people do you have working with you at Stupid Fun Club? It's a pretty small group right?
WW: It's going to stay very small. That's kind of the whole point of it. It's about 10 people right now, and we're probably going to keep it under 20. The idea is that we do most development outside, and we're actually doing pre-production and idea generation inside the think tank, and then when we're actually ready to go out and build a product we do that with an external team.
IG: Will the structure within Stupid Fun Club be divided amongst the different media, like films, games, TV, and toys? Or is it a situation where everyone contributes to the project, regardless of the format?
WW: Definitely the second option. Everybody in this core group has sensibilities across different formats, and I want everybody contributing to every idea. I think that's where a lot of the interesting ideas are going to come from – interesting game ideas could come from the guy who's good at building robots or cool television ideas could come from the software guy. I really think what we're trying to do within the Club is to get everybody to think more as entertainment designers and not specifically as TV producers or game makers.
IG: Although this has not been a problem for you, it seems like the game industry has been largely locked into the same types of games, the same genres – shooters, RPGs, sports, etc. I believe Warren Spector commented on this during David Perry's lunch with luminaries session at GDC, where he said that he's sick of seeing space marines fighting for the fate of the universe over and over again. What do you think it's going to take to get more game designers to branch out into entirely new genres?
WW: I think we're already seeing it happen with the independent games movement. There have been some really interesting and creative ideas being explored, with people getting recognition too. Right now, it's very much a financial schism between the triple-A titles on store shelves and something you can download on the Internet for free. I think distribution is starting to change radically with things like apps on the iPhone, Xbox Live Arcade, and all these things are starting to open up avenues. And right now, there's still a deep chasm between the big, money-making hits like the Hollywood blockbusters and the more independent game creative area that doesn't have a lot of financial draw, but I see those two converging pretty rapidly actually. I think we're going to start seeing a much more diverse set of business models deploying – basically a smooth ramp where somebody can start making nice little Flash apps, then iPhone apps, and then work their way up.
At the same time, what we're going to be looking for are entertainment experiences that aren't just targeted at one of these slots – it won't just be a little game you download or play in Flash or a giant, triple-A PC title – but entertainment experiences that are actually being deployed across a number of these things at once. There might be the “lite” experience, almost like the creature creator in Spore that you downloaded for free, but at the same time if you're really into it you can go out and buy the $50 game. Or you can watch the TV show. I think that's where working from a hub outwards, we're going to see these entertainment experiences deployed on a more fractal basis. You have some experiences that are very deep and you pay more for, and some that are very light and maybe free that act as funnels into those deeper experiences.
IG: When do you think we'll start hearing more about the first project from Stupid Fun Club?
WW: I would say it's probably a few months out, maybe six months out. We have a number of projects we're pursuing right now, and just by the nature of where we're at in the development process, they're all fairly unpredictable now. I think in a few months we'll have more predictability behind when these things might see the light of day.
IG: What's the process like for how you go about pursuing these projects? How do you decide what to greenlight?
WW: It's very much a triage situation. We'll have a whole bunch of ideas we'll put up on a board and certain ones have more likelihood for success, more available partners for external development – and we want to have things on different timelines, so we'll have some projects that take many years to complete and others that will be much faster. So you put all these things on the board and start applying these criteria to them and certain ones will bubble to the top.
IG: You talked before about how distribution is changing everything, and it seems like the industry is at a crossroads with retail starting to give way to digital distribution and possibly server-side, cloud based technology. How do you see this all playing out? Will the future be completely digital?
WW: I don't think it'll be completely digital but it's going that way very rapidly right now. I think we're in a phase transition; typically when something like that happens, you'll hear about it for years and years and it seems like nothing's happening and then just overnight it switches. It might be people going to CD-ROM or the rise of the Internet or whatever it is – right around the time people are sick of hearing about it, it happens overnight. I think with digital distribution of games we're right near that steep part of the curve, and I think that's going to change the whole nature of our industry dramatically.
