Audio Review: Will Wright – Simulation Design

Article by Steve Rayson, Sales & Marketing Director, Epic

At Epic we have all been excited recently by the potential of audio files and iPods as learning devices. Thus when I came across an audio file by Will Wright on www.itconversations.com I downloaded it to my iPod and began listening. Will Wright for those that don’t know was the founder of Maxis, the company that created the world’s best selling PC game The Sims. This is a game that my daughter spends many hours playing and hence I was also interested to understand the way the game was designed.

In terms of the audio file I must state at the outset that it wasn’t really designed as piece of learning. It was a recording of a lecture including the question and answer session. The file was quite lengthy, 1 hour 44 minutes long! On the positive side the site allowed me to download it as an iPod file. Initially I wasn’t sure I would listen to it all but as I listened, I became very interested owing to the enthusiastic delivery style and fascinating nature of the content.

Will is a very amusing speaker and interesting individual. He explained that when he gets a new game the first thing he does is work out what you have to do and then do the complete opposite i.e. drive the wrong way on a racing game. He also likes his children to experiment in the same way and added “do you know that Barbie’s hair is flammable?” I personally liked his style which made me listen on.

In terms of content I became engaged early on by Will’s concept of possibility space or game space. Part of his driving the wrong way or more amusingly how he tried to get everyone in a war game to make peace (he failed by the way) is to explore what the possibility space is. He likes to see what the possibilities are early on and understand how open ended the game is. I was also interested in how simulation designers were drawing on theories of evolutionary biology.

I think these two factors led me to listen further rather switch to my music.

One difficulty of audio files emerged quite quickly and reflected the particular fact this was a lecture. Will kept referring to his slides which of course I couldn’t see. Later I actually went on the internet and after a few Google searches found the set of slides. The subject matter was quite technical and the slides helped me grasp concepts which the audio left me wondering about. Will went through a bewildering array of such models from network theory, to propagation models, to system dynamics, adaptive theory, cybernetics, population models, etc. All of which can be used to help create the possibility space in a game and how things can change over time during the game. Diagrams added a lot to my understanding of these concepts.

However, I think the audio worked in the sense I listened to whole lecture when I might not have read an article or book. It was easy and convenient, I actually listened while walking the dog. I was also sufficiently engaged to find out more and I got a feel for Will Wright through the audio. His anecdotes worked well; for example Maxis stands for ‘six am’ backwards and the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey was so named because these letters appear immediately before the letters IBM. I also liked his cautionary tale of market research - after extensive analysis, it was estimated he would sell 30,000 games. The Sims actually sold over 30m.

It would be unfair to be too critical of this audio as it was never designed as a learning object. It would clearly have been structured, broken down into smaller objects and included reflective/practice exercises. However, I enjoyed the experience and it made me think about design issues in a very different way. If you want to hear Will yourself go www.itconversations.com, and if you want his slides I have a set!