For almost 30 years, Will Wright’s creations have attracted people who would never have played videogames. He’s also managed the trick of developing games that enthrall hardcore fans while making rabid players out of novices. The secret: In Wright’s worlds, there is no win or lose—there’s just the game.

He’s best known for creating the Sim franchise: SimCity, The Sims, and other titles. These unlikely blockbusters—more than 180 million sold so far—drew on the works of arcane architectural theorists, urban planners, and astrophysicists, yet they were consistently addictive. They thrived thanks to a concept Wright calls possibility space: the scope of actions or reactions a player can undertake. Most videogames give players a narrow possibility space: Do you want to kill the bad guys with bullets or grenades? Take the door on the right or the left?

Wright and his team at Maxis, the development studio he cofounded in 1987, blew past those constraints, creating an infinitely flexible gameworld limited only by the skill and imagination of the player. In Wright’s best work, players have so much leeway to determine their own objectives that the distinction between game player and game designer blurs.

In 2009, after more than 20 years at Maxis, Wright stepped down from day-to-day duties to form Stupid Fun Club, an entertainment development think tank. He sat down with Wired in Stupid Fun’s Berkeley studio to look back at his career, offer hints about upcoming projects, and speculate about what the future holds for us all—gamers or not.

Chris Baker: You grew up before the era of interactive entertainment. Was gaming a part of your early life?

Will Wright: I enjoyed playing strategy games as a kid. A neighbor down the street and I used to play these elaborate turn-based war games—cardboard and paper games like PanzerBlitz.

Baker: How did you start fiddling with computers?

Wright: I was very mechanical, very involved in building models, which evolved into building robots. I got my first computer when I was 20 years old and taught myself to program in order to connect to the robots I was building—to model the motion of a hydraulic robot arm, for example. That’s what first sucked me into writing software. When I learned to program, I realized that you could model the behavior of a system through time, not just a snapshot of it.

Baker: When did you go from playing around with this stuff to saying, “I’m going to be a commercial game designer”?

Wright: I was just fascinated with how the computer worked. Back then it was possible for one person to pretty much fully understand the system—every aspect, from the structure of the hardware to memory management. When I was 20 years old, around 1980, I was living in New York, and there was one computer store in the whole city that sold the Apple II. They had a few simple games in Ziploc bags on the wall and I started thinking, “Maybe I should try making a game, because then I can make all of my computer expenses tax-deductible.” [Laughs.] Then I bought a Commodore 64 when it first came out in 1982 and dedicated myself to learning everything I could about the machine.

Baker: Since then, has there been a common thread that runs through your career?

Wright: It’s really been about trying to construct games around the user, making them the center of the universe. How can you give players more creative leverage and let them show off that creativity to other people?

Baker: That’s there in your first game, 1984’s Raid on Bungeling Bay, but it’s almost invisible to players.

Wright: It’s a very action-oriented game; you’re just a helicopter fighting this military-industrial complex. You fly around this little world and bomb ships, tanks, planes, and factories.

Baker: But there are sophisticated dynamics going on beneath that surface.

Wright: The game tracked resources. The little enemy ships are picking up resources and bringing them to the docks, where they’re picked up by little tanks and brought to factories that are building airplanes and antiaircraft guns. It’s an industrial food chain, and if you understood the underlying system, you could attack it in a strategic way, taking out the supply boats first. But most people just flew around and blew up everything as fast as they could.

Baker: How did Bungeling Bay lead to your next game, SimCity?

Wright: I wanted Bungeling Bay to have a world large enough to get lost in, so I wrote a program that would let me put down coastlines, roads, and buildings. I found that I was having much more fun building these little worlds than flying around and blowing them up. SimCity evolved from that—I got interested in building a game where players are in the role of creators.

Baker: And Bungeling Bay‘s “industrial food chain” morphed into a far more sophisticated system in SimCity.

Wright: I started researching urban planning and urban dynamics, and I came across the work of Jay Forrester, the father of modern system simulations. Back in the ’50s at MIT, he actually tried to simulate whole cities on a rudimentary computer. And then I moved into classic economic theory and urban theorists like Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch.

Baker: You integrated their theories into SimCity. Players assume the role of a mayor, setting policies and tax rates, managing the transportation system and power grid—

Wright: —and meanwhile, the city was being actively simulated as they designed it.





Wright’s Expanding Universe Will Wright’s game signature—giving users more and more room to be creative and express themselves—was evident in his very first offering. Here’s a look back at his playful career.—C.B. Debuts with the helicopter combat game Raid on Bungeling Bay . A sophisticated underlying system governs the enemy’s supply chain. Two years after cofounding Maxis, releases SimCity , which lets players control the municipal systems of a virtual city. It has since been released on more than 30 platforms, including Facebook in July. Releases SimEarth: The Living Planet , which tasks players with micromanaging climate, continental drift, and disasters—a dry run for the even more ambitious Spore 18 years later. Obsessed with E. O. Wilson’s study of ant colonies, Wright creates SimAnt , in which players help insects colonize and take over a garden. SimCity 2000 adds depth and refinement to the city-building game. ( PC Gamer later dubbed it “the sim game upon which all others rest.”) Gaming giant EA acquires Maxis in a $125 million stock transaction, giving Wright the money he needs to develop a pet project he calls “a dollhouse for adults.” The Sims lets players micromanage the lives of virtual people. The game and its sequels sell more than 150 million units. The Sims Online , a massively multiplayer social game, proves to be tragically ahead of its time. (A recent Facebook reworking called The Sims Social has scored more than 30 million users.) Spore —originally called SimEverything —evolves players from single cells to society-building space explorers. The game’s creature editor, open to players, spawns “sporn.” Wright leaves day-to-day work at EA to form Stupid Fun Club, dedicated to creating new properties that span media from games to film to toys and beyond. Click the arrows to move through the timeline.

Timeline images: Electronic Arts

Baker: SimCity gave players a level of freedom that was unprecedented in 1989. You could be a benevolent leader or a despot. Or a blithering incompetent, which is how I usually played it.

Wright: MacPaint had just come out when I started working on SimCity, and the game was almost like a painting program. The more open-ended the game, the more it becomes an avenue of self-expression for people. And the more of themselves they can pour into it, the more emotional connection they have to it.

Baker: That being the heyday of bulletin board systems, you were able to go online and witness their creativity.

Wright: People would post things they had designed in SimCity. It revealed a lot about them. SimCity doesn’t tell you how to win; the player decides what the goal is. Do you want a city that makes money, has low crime, low pollution? You could look at what somebody designed and get a good sense of what they valued.

Baker: A year after SimCity came out, you went global with SimEarth: The Living Planet .

Wright: We were modeling as many different aspects of the planet as we could wrap our minds around: continental drift, the evolution of life, ocean currents, atmospheric composition, the interaction of the climate with the biosphere. James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, became an adviser on the project. It was probably one of the most cerebral games ever created, but it wasn’t very fun. [Laughs.]

“It was one of the most cerebral games ever—but it wasn’t very fun.”

Baker: In a Wired interview in January 1994 (issue 2.01), you mentioned a project you were working on in which players could guide simulated characters through their daily lives. You said it offered “tools to design what is basically a dollhouse,” but you feared that “a dollhouse for adults may not be very marketable.” That game ended up being The Sims.

Wright: The dollhouse concept is what The Sims started out as. You were designing architecture at a human scale, and the game was scoring the usefulness and efficiency of your design. I soon realized that to test the spaces, we had to have little people living in these structures, walking around and making decisions.

Baker: So a player could see how characters responded to whatever environment they created: a ranch-style home, a hovel, a room with no bathrooms or exits but hundreds of coffee tables …

Wright: We had to design an artificial intelligence that could behave plausibly in any environment created by the player, no matter how crazy. The way ants do that is that a lot of their intelligence is environmentally distributed. They drop marker chemicals, and their behavior can change because the environment is telling them what to do, changing their programming. The Sims does that with people. The objects in the environment are influencing the behavior of the Sims themselves.

Baker: The game was a blockbuster—and again, passionate fans were eager to share their designs online.

Wright: I spent a lot of time studying the community that built up around the first-person shooter Quake; I was just amazed at the amount of time and effort people were pouring into making their own custom levels. So when we started working on The Sims, we wanted to make it possible for everything to be modified—from how the Sims looked to the details of their environment. Players could use it as kind of a storytelling platform: take screenshots, annotate them like a graphic novel, and upload them to our website with a single button. At first, the stories were predictable superhero and fantasy stuff. But as the demographics of the game widened, we started getting stories that had a message.

Baker: And a lot of those fans were nontraditional gamers, not the 18- to 25-year-old dudes who loved Quake. All of the Sim games seem to attract a much wider audience and cut across gender lines.

Wright: SimCity had a much higher number of female players than most games, and by “higher number” I mean like 20 percent instead of 5 percent. But The Sims was predominantly female—55 or 60 percent. For a lot of these girls and women, it was the only game they ever played. Plus every three or four months, we’d come out with an expansion pack for about $30. So they were in essence paying $10 a month for a game that was continually being expanded.

Baker: That sounds a lot like the subscription fee structure of later titles like World of Warcraft—which brings to mind your next project, 2002’s short-lived Sims Online.

Wright: The Sims Online was basically taking the Sims into a giant shared world. People could still build properties and manage their Sims. But it was kind of Darwinian: Who can build the coolest place that the other Sims want to hang out in?

Baker: It lasted only a year, but it foreshadowed things that became popular later in the decade, from Second Life to social games like Farmville, or even just social networking in general.

Wright: I wanted the social structures to be as emergent as possible, like I was an anthropologist game designer. Players organized into guilds. A group of players formed a vigilante mob, which evolved into the Sims Online Mafia, with capos and territories. There was a godfather, and it turned out to be the woman who managed the housekeeping staff at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. [Laughs.] She obviously had organizational skills—maybe even some familiarity with Mob tactics, I don’t know.

Baker: Next up was your game Spore , which got a lot of attention for its ambition.

Wright: Your creatures start at the microscopic scale. They grow and become multicellular. The game moves up onto the land, and they become more intelligent. Your creatures start having tribal structures, then building cities. They develop spaceflight, and then eventually they’re going across the galaxy, discovering other races, terraforming new planets. I wanted a toy galaxy to play with.

Baker: There were a lot of sharing features in there as well, which was prescient.

Wright: When you’re playing the game, the content that’s coming into your world—creatures, planets—are what other players have made. We wanted somebody to be able to create a character in minutes that would have taken a Pixar artist a couple of weeks, and I think we hit that bar. A couple of months before the game came out, we released a creature editor that would let you create your own character, and we were hoping that we’d get 100,000 creatures made by the players in a few weeks. We passed that in 22 hours, and hit a million in the first week.

Baker: Players could also upload video of their creatures to YouTube. Some of it was mind-blowingly unique. And, of course, some of it was really unsavory.

“We could create games that were potentially more addictive than any drug.”

Wright: One of our joking test-case questions was always “Could somebody build a penis in this?” And the players of course did that, but to a much higher level of quality than we ever expected. Sites sprang up overnight dedicated to what they called sporn. [Laughs.] That was kind of unexpected. But the volume was the biggest surprise.

Baker: The game got good reviews and sold several million copies—but was nowhere near as successful as The Sims.

Wright: That’s possibly because of the approachability of The Sims. It’s just about regular life and everyday people. Spore was a game about everything. In fact, the original name for it was SimEverything.

Baker: Since then, you’ve focused more on Stupid Fun Club.

Wright: SFC was originally more of a playground, a little shop area where we would build funny, cool things. After I finished Spore, I decided to come to the Stupid Fun Club full-time, at which point EA invested in it and it became more like a real company.

Baker: What’s the mission?

Wright: It’s an entertainment think tank, but a lot of it is taking gaming sensibilities into areas outside of games. Games have been at the forefront of things like crowdsourcing, community development, and user-generated content. So how do we make television—or toys or whatever—more interactive, in a way that the audience feels ownership of?

Baker: And while you’re bringing more interactivity to nongame media, what do you think is going to happen with games?

Wright: I don’t think anybody can look two years out and have the slightest clue what the industry is going to look like. Which is exciting. The social-gaming market is attracting that untapped group of players that The Sims stumbled upon. That really broadens the types of games that we can create.

Baker: With social games these days, a game launches and people like one feature, so a week later the developers tear the game up and build everything around that one feature.

Wright: Exactly. It used to be that companies would commit years and millions of dollars to a game, then roll the dice and release it. Now it’s “Let’s do it slowly based on audience reaction.” Part of what’s driving this approach is that we’re able to observe every little thing they do in the game. We can get that feedback within hours and change the game underneath them while they’re playing it. We’re to the point now where we can begin customizing these games for each individual.

Baker: What would a game like that look like?

Wright: I can imagine a system that tries to design the ultimate game for every player. Imagine if Steven Spielberg spent time talking to you, observing what you watched, and then went off to make a movie just for you. It’s a little scary when you think about it: We’re talking about something that’s potentially more addictive than any drug.

Baker: Does this relate to games that Stupid Fun Club is developing now?

Wright: We have two major things that we’re working on. I can’t talk much about them, but one is about how to turn your life into a game. Your real life, not some virtual fantasy world. The other one is about taking all of your digital content—movies, pictures, music—and making it feel tangible and playful, kind of a window into the cloud of your stuff. I’ve been very interested in various forms of mapping. How can you get a gestalt for something without fully understanding what you’re getting a gestalt of?

Baker: You think data visualization is something that’s going to play a bigger role in our life?

Wright: I think it’s a literacy that people will start developing, now that we’re able to capture so much personal information. You’re going to have a strong interest in understanding and interpreting that data. It’s about how people find ways to get insights into themselves, almost like you would get through a horoscope or through a psychology test, except through much more empirical means.

Baker: Both of these concepts seem to be about interactivity becoming more and more ingrained in what we do.

Wright: Storytelling is around you all the time—you’ll tell your friends a story in front of the watercooler or you might watch a story on TV or you might go to a movie theater and see a very slick, professionally told story. Games are evolving to have the same pervasiveness in our lives.

Senior editor Chris Baker (@chrisbaker1337) wrote about the future of seasteading in issue 17.02.