Play’s Republic

I was reading an interview with Will Wright, the developer of the Sims and Spore, and he made a lot of interesting comments about how he views game design. In particular, I thought his comments on social interaction in Spore were interesting. Wright refers to spore as a massively single player online game. Each player plays his character on his home computer, but all of the computer controlled characters, buildings, planets, etc. that the player finds in his personal game have been designed and downloaded from other players. In other words, playing Spore would be somewhat like playing Second Life, but with the computer in control of every other user-created entity. I would see Garrison’s house and Garrison’s avatar, but I would be the only person playing the game. Similarly, if Garrison played, he would see my avatar and my creations, but I personally would never interact with him.

When asked about how this single-player game with multi-player content would affect social interaction among players, Wright conceded that “the face-to-face socializing” would be left out, but that they are “still hoping to have the asynchronous socializing through content, which we’re already seeing in The Sims web community.” In the Sims, another single player game with shared content, Wright and his team have found that “huge communities form” around user-created content, and that a certain fame is attributed to players “based on the content they’ve made, other people taking that content and telling cool stories with it.”

I think this take on the social aspects of play is very interesting. Although each player plays his or her own game, the individual experience is dramatically affected by others. Players who allow the computer to randomly populate their Spore worlds will have an environment dictated by the creativity and design of other players. Some of these random worlds might be naturalistic, others surreal, and others plain boring; but regardless, each environment, and therefore each experience, is shaped by a community of players. Furthermore, this community has built-in feedback mechanisms. Somewhat similarly to the Halo mute button, each individual player can reject or request the designs of other players. If I find a certain creator interesting, or even more generally, a certain style of creation interesting, the game will populate the world accordingly. In this sense, the game is very much a communit, where players interact even when there is no interaction.

And, finally, even beyond the play experience, I think Will Wright is right (horrible sentence) to think that player interaction will continue outside the game itself. We’ve already briefly discussed the fact that games today are seemingly less bounded than before — that play continues outside of the game environment, seeping into everyday life. In this sense, Spore seems to fit right in, allowing player interaction to take place outside of the game, and in discussion forums, wikis, etc. Here we see another aspect of the magic circle, one where the rules of the game are malleable enough for players to reform and create new games among themselves. Players can use the freedom and feedback mechanisms of Spore to recreate their individual environment in new ways — perhaps through mimesis, where a group of players work to create the most “realistic” worlds, or themed worlds, etc. — or perhaps through the agon, where players make new rules, new benchmarks, wherein each player competes against other players towards a group-defined goal.

Link to Will Wright Q&A