Stephen Totilo of MTV Multiplayer had a conversation with Will Wright on the future of Spore and what’s next in his line of project. While Will is still tight-lipped on what he is working on, he does cover a few new Spore details and what could be added in expansions (expanding the different stages). Here’s one of the questions from the conversation:
Multiplayer: You mentioned that “Spore” is a way to marshal the creativity of millions of players and channel it in an interesting and specific way. What you and the team have enabled people to do is to create avatars, basically, creatures. Is the next step of this to have them create gameplay? I already see elsewhere in the Maxis studio the “Sims Carnival” as a way of democratizing the development of gameplay. Is that the trajectory that this is on?
Wright: We’ve experimented with that for years, actually. Maxis had a product called Kilk & Play where people could design their own games. We were experimenting with “The Sims” with the internal AI tool called Edith, giving that out to classrooms to let people try to create “Sims” objects and stuff. It’s a tricky path to go down. Programming was one of those things where either you give them a complete machine and they can do a lot of stuff or you really dumb it down, in which case, all the stuff looks the same. It’s something I would love to do if we could think of a good way to do it. I spent a lot of time studying people’s attempts to do this, primarily people in the educational community like … Ken Perlin, who has a project in that direction right now. But that’s something that’s a lot harder than it sounds.
I knew about Edith…but Klik & Play is a new one on me. I never heard of that before! Then again…it was before my time…and I was enjoying myself in SimCity.
