Will Wright: Game Industry Focused on 12-Year-Old Boys

Speaking to the Chronicle of Higher Education recently, video game legend Will Wright (Sims, Spore) took some time to talk about the idea of games as an educational tool. Ultimately, Wright believes that many games can inspire students to learn about certain subjects on their own rather than teaching them directly.  

Interestingly, Wright sees a lot of potential for the video game medium still, because he thinks that up to this point, the industry has been a bit too focused on young boys.  

“We've had this cultural bias against games for the last 20 years, and a lot of it I think is self-deserved, because if you look at what people are doing with this technology it is for the most part  directed toward 12-year-old boys. But that doesn't mean the format doesn't have the potential to do a whole lot more. I think you can look back at any other form of media and see in its early stages that it was used in ways that didn't fulfill its total potential,” he remarked.  

Wright continued, “Games in some sense, if you look far enough back, have been with us for hundreds of thousands of years, with some of the earliest games like Go or Chess. People have looked at those as ways to sort of learn strategic thinking, to expand their minds in certain abstract, symbolic areas... So I think adults that didn't grow up with games, don't play games, have gotten disconnected from the idea of play. I don't think it's so much games as it is 'play.' We sort of think of play as disposable, useless, time-wasting activity when in fact play really is a fundamental educational technology. We've, as a culture, just kind of forgotten that.” 

Check out the full video interview below, and for more on Wright and his new Stupid Fun Club company, read IndustryGamers' recent interview.

Thanks to Kotaku for the tip.