Interview: Will Wright (Spore Creator)

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P: There's the old concept of the divine clockmaker, where God created this system and flicked it, started it going and the system just went on its own.

WW: When you talk to scientists that are religious, that really comes back to the clean line between where scientific inquiry stops and religious faith begins. A lot of scientists say, “that's outside the role of science” if it was pre-big bang. What initiated the big bang is something you might call metaphysics.

P: You mentioned that you were atheist. During the E3 press conference, you gave a power-point presentation that suggested that Spore gamers are "38% god." That's pretty playful, but it's aimed towards the video game audience, mostly. Is the messaging for Spore going to change slightly, like say, when you advertise on TV? Or aiming at the mass market?

WW: I think a lot of our positioning is going to be very much around the idea that you have the ability to create an entire universe, now how you chose to philosophically categorize that or interpret that, I think we're going to leave fairly unstated. Again, we don't really mean it in a religiously offensive way. In fact after I gave that talk at E3 I started scanning the boards and stuff. The biggest criticism I got, directly, from religious people was that I got my numbers wrong. According to them, God created all plants and animals in two days, not seven, therefore he was far more efficient than I was giving him credit for.

Again, I'm still continually impressed in how they don't feel threatened in their beliefs, when you play around with them. In fact they are very open the idea of playfully engaging. I kind of appreciate that. Whether somebody's coming at it from a scientific point of view or a religious point of view the fact that they're not threatened talking about this stuff, in fact they see value in discussing these things with people that don't share their views, I think is a good thing.

P: It doesn't seem like an antagonistic discussion.

WW: Exactly. And, in some sense, I think we can accomplish this in a way that feels like its catalytic, in a good direction, rather than just trying to stir up trouble.

P: I wanted to talk about your interest and involvement with the organization SETI [Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence]. You wore that shirt mentioning the Aricebo telescope. And you debuted the Spore Creature Creator at the NASA Yuri's Night event?

WW: Yeah, I think it was. SETI also had, at their facility, an open school night a few weeks ago. We had people there so the kids could play with it at that event as well.

P: Is there going to be more participation with SETI?

WW: Yeah we have a lot of things, down the road, planned with them. They're just down the road in Silicon Valley from us. I've gotten to know, while working on Spore, Jill Tarter and Frank Drake, who are actually a large part of the initial inspirations for the game. A lot of the SETI Institutes' charter is around education and getting kids interested in science...which is very much one of the intents behind Spore as well. I'd say our agendas are very well aligned in that sense.

P: The possibility of Spore as an educational tool and the release of experimental software on the fringes of Spore. Do you see this as the beginning of a thrust towards outreach in education? More so than in other games.

WW: Well actually we've done that a lot over the years. Back before Electronic Arts bought Maxis, we published teacher guides for all of our things. We had a set of teachers that would come in twice a year and talk about how they're using their games in their classrooms and stuff. There's been a major change in the way education is approaching computers and the way kids think about and use computers. I think that nowadays, especially with something like Spore, that wants to be primarily entertainment, that I see the value of these things much more in the realm of motivation than education. I'm much more interested in this point in getting kids motivated to be interested in all these different fields whether they're science fields, cultural, engineering or whatever. They have plenty of opportunities and resources to go out there and do further study and learn about these things. If you can get them fundamentally interested in them to begin with. And so that's, I think, more of my agenda, than overtly trying to pour facts into their head.

P: To create something that encourages further exploration.

WW: And I've already heard from a lot of people that will come to me and say, “Oh, I became a civil engineer because I played SimCity when I was twelve.” So I've been making games long enough now that I've actually seen a lot of people growing up being inspired by games and it fundamentally influenced the career path they take. And if you talk to any scientist, actually, they'll have some story about the one little thing that got them into science—they'll have a very personal story about this one thing. And it wasn't flash cards or necessarily even a book, but it was usually some entertaining interaction they had with the real world that got them fundamentally thinking, “Oh, this is way cool. I want to go down this path.” And that's how most scientists wind up where they are.

P: As an entertainment product, is Spore capable of replicating the processes of science such as experimentation? Do you feel those processes are occurring when people play Spore?

WW: I think they occur in almost any game that's made. If you look at any kid playing a game, what they do is they go up and they grab the controller and they start pushing buttons randomly. They observe the results. They start building a model in their head for how the buttons are mapped. Then they start trying to set high-level goals. They start building a more and more elaborate model in their head of the underlying simulation in our game. And they're doing it purely through the scientific method. They observe data. They craft and experiment and do interactions to test their experiment. They observe their results then they increase the resolution of their model. And that's pretty much exactly what the scientific method is. So I think any kid, almost inherently, knows that and recognizes it as such. If you look at adults, they're really the problem case. Adults generally don't want to touch these things until they know what the rules are. They don't want to fail. Whereas kids are totally comfortable with failure-based learning. And so the kids are the whole time experimenting and actually learning much faster as a result of inherently knowing the scientific method. Whereas adults basically want to know all the rules, they're afraid to press the wrong button, they're afraid to experiment, etc., etc.

P: In the New Yorker profile on you, John Seabrook mentioned that you attended an Episcopal School in Louisiana. It suggested that it was there that you formed your atheistic beliefs.

WW: I think I was an atheist before then. I never had a lot of intelligent discourse around why I was an atheist. I've always been fairly impressed with people that are, not fringe, but more mainstream. There were priests and fathers in my high school, that in fact, taught a lot of courses. I took courses in comparative religions with them. At the same time I had a fair amount of interesting theological debate with them about belief systems. And they weren't threatened by it. In fact they grew up in seminary having these types of debates. So it was very engaging to talk to somebody else who had really, fundamentally thought about these questions and arrived at their belief systems through exploration rather than through accident of birth.

In some sense I can really respect people that arrived, even to disagreeing points of view, like certain religious viewpoints, if they've really thought about it and they can sit there and justify in their head why they really believe it. It feels like they've actually gone through the mental exploration to arrive at that belief system. Again, as opposed to just the lazy path of “my parents were Catholic therefore I'm going to be Catholic and I don't even know what ‘Catholic’ means.” They haven't actually followed all the repercussions of what that belief system is actually based on.

P: You admire the rigor in people's beliefs, if there's such a thing.

WW: In fact, I partially think that people should almost invent their own religions. If you fundamentally thought about all these questions that religious systems were built upon you'd probably end up with a more diverse set of potential answers. As opposed to these ten major categories that people gravitate toward. You know, “what church am I going to go to?” That's the biggest problem I have with organized religion at this point. I think it makes people never have to confront these questions and somebody gets up and tells them this is why I'm going to believe this and therefore I'm just going to accept it as a worldview. It's almost like going to a buffet.

P: It's a one-way discussion.

WW: They don't sit there and have discussions exploring all these different branching points of why you may believe something. They basically get up and tell you what the doctrine is. And you're expected to maybe memorize the doctrine or not. But you never question the doctrine.

P: That's the appeal of the Unitarians, I'd imagine. It's a fairly open system. People can come and discuss what they believe and there's no wrong answer there.

WW: Edward O. Wilson, who is one of my favorite scientists, has explored that stuff a lot. He's actually looked at religions over time and he's found that religions like the Unitarian religion they have not built up strong cellular walls, so as a result of that, what happens is all these people come in with different belief systems and it gets pulled and diffused in all these different directions and those religions generally do not last long over generations. It's ones like Catholicism that have this very strong cellular membrane that rejects all other forms of belief. They're the ones that actually last five hundred to a thousand years.

P: The ones that have viral behaviors, “I will make you fishers of men.” They're always expanding.

WW: Wilson was showing that only the dogmatic belief systems have immune systems to reject invaders and will survive over the millennium. Which is kind of depressing.