Will Wright was the first ever games designer admitted into the fellowship of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts this week, giving an impassioned lecture at BAFTA’s HQ on Wednesday night defending his beloved artform from the constant barrage of misplaced criticism it receives from certain older sectors of the establishment and the media.
Wright speaks a lot of sense, and now that he is a BAFTA Fellow his voice will no doubt be heard by many members of that older audience that misunderstands gaming and vitally needs reassurance and educating about the very many positive aspects of playing games.
Following his BAFTA lecture, Wright told an interviewer that he thinks, “there's always been a generational divide between people who play games and people who don't. As people get older you see more and more parents that played games as they were kids now playing games with their kids. In some sense I think the cultural acceptance of games is inevitable just because people are going to have grown up having this technology.
“As you get a broader set of people playing games, you get a broader set of games to appeal to those people. I think that's the slow, inevitable process going on here… It goes in fits and starts over time – if there's a school shooting, it's a case of 'did they play games or not': you don't really hear much about what movies they watch or what books they read. But 50 years ago that's exactly what you heard, did they read To Kill A Mockingbird or whatever it is. They would blame social ills on anything that was at hand.”
So, what is going to be the next bugbear, when games become fully accepted into society?
“Who knows. At some point we're going to have direct neural connections, where you plug the thing into your brain, and the first people who do that are going to be seen as social outcasts: how dare you do that to your body, it will be almost like tattoos or body piercing and parents will all be up in arms about it. Thirty years later those people will be the parents and it will be totally accepted…. they actually have some interesting devices available commercially right now that involve reading your brainwaves and controlling software."
Talking about the state of the current console wars, Wright notes that, “the only next gen system I've seen is the Wii – the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement. But the Wii feels like a major jump – not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that's happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while."
Finally, on reaching the release of Spore - due sometime in 2008 - Wright noted that, “this is the most difficult part of the process, because for so long you've been dealing with potential. It depends on how it's ending up, and Spore is ending up very nicely... There are a lot of little things that we've achieved that I didn't think we would – things like procedural music, with computers composing music on the fly. In general it's about how seamless we could make these different genres. It's really trying to find the sweet spot between what you can do and what you want to do.”
Source: The Guardian
Wright speaks a lot of sense, and now that he is a BAFTA Fellow his voice will no doubt be heard by many members of that older audience that misunderstands gaming and vitally needs reassurance and educating about the very many positive aspects of playing games.
Following his BAFTA lecture, Wright told an interviewer that he thinks, “there's always been a generational divide between people who play games and people who don't. As people get older you see more and more parents that played games as they were kids now playing games with their kids. In some sense I think the cultural acceptance of games is inevitable just because people are going to have grown up having this technology.
“As you get a broader set of people playing games, you get a broader set of games to appeal to those people. I think that's the slow, inevitable process going on here… It goes in fits and starts over time – if there's a school shooting, it's a case of 'did they play games or not': you don't really hear much about what movies they watch or what books they read. But 50 years ago that's exactly what you heard, did they read To Kill A Mockingbird or whatever it is. They would blame social ills on anything that was at hand.”
So, what is going to be the next bugbear, when games become fully accepted into society?
“Who knows. At some point we're going to have direct neural connections, where you plug the thing into your brain, and the first people who do that are going to be seen as social outcasts: how dare you do that to your body, it will be almost like tattoos or body piercing and parents will all be up in arms about it. Thirty years later those people will be the parents and it will be totally accepted…. they actually have some interesting devices available commercially right now that involve reading your brainwaves and controlling software."
Talking about the state of the current console wars, Wright notes that, “the only next gen system I've seen is the Wii – the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement. But the Wii feels like a major jump – not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that's happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while."
Finally, on reaching the release of Spore - due sometime in 2008 - Wright noted that, “this is the most difficult part of the process, because for so long you've been dealing with potential. It depends on how it's ending up, and Spore is ending up very nicely... There are a lot of little things that we've achieved that I didn't think we would – things like procedural music, with computers composing music on the fly. In general it's about how seamless we could make these different genres. It's really trying to find the sweet spot between what you can do and what you want to do.”
Source: The Guardian
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hollywooda 26 Oct 2007 12:19
1/1
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