Esteemed video game designer Will Wright was invited to speak for part three of the Krazytalk! speakers series. Wright is best known for his work on the SimCity series and later, The Sims, but his most ambitious project to date, the upcoming Maxis/EA game Spore, is probably one of the most-awaited games ever.

So, was it all about Spore? Actually, no -- to my personal relief. I'm excited about Spore. It seems like a cool game, and I'm definitely interested in the "tide pool" stage. However, when it comes to Spore, everything Wright can talk about has already been talked about elsewhere.

I found the contrast between the formal Krazytalk! presentation and the earlier, more casual talk he gave to the Masters of Digital Media students to be fascinating. They definitely focused on fairly different areas of gaming: for the students' talk, Wright's focus was on game mechanics and simulations. In his Krazytalk! presentation, Wright touched on a number of topics, but his primary focus was something that really struck me -- his interest in storytelling. I would never have considered that to be a huge motivator for him, going by his work alone.

Think about it: you have SimCity, The Sims, Spore... these aren't exactly epic narratives; they're fairly abstract rulesets for playing in -- but that's the point. A game doesn't have to be Castlevania or Mass Effect to tell a story. What Wright's interested in is emergent storytelling. Rather than a pre-packaged experience where the author or director says, "and this is what happened," he's simply providing us the tools to make up our own stories.

Wright cited The Sims as a great example of this: by having the Sims populating the world speak 'Simlish', the burden is on the player to speculate why this Sim got mad at that Sim and ran out of the room. And we do, often ascribing far more complex motivations to these characters than their programmers could ever hope to simulate.

Wright talked briefly about talking to users who were dead certain they'd figured out some trick of the math behind SimCity that involved power surges and odd coincidences, just based on their observations and what they could infer from that. Of course, there is no such detail in the simulator; they're seeing patterns where none exist. Perhaps that's why emergent storytelling is so fascinating to us when we're in the driver's seat.

In his earlier chat, Wright took more of a Q&A approach, answering questions from MDM students and staff and showing off a series of fascinating quick-and-dirty simulations written to prototype features in Spore: how does life spread throughout a galaxy via panspermia and colonization by intelligent lifeforms? How do stars coalesce from interstellar dust, and what does sprinkling more dust across the galactic plane do?

I though those parts were great, and I would've loved to play with the tools myself.

Wright also spent time addressing a particularly tough challenge he's faced: making a simulation fun. As an example, he mentioned the followup to SimCity, 1990's SimEarth. He said that players frequently had no idea what was going on and had little way to really understand what events were happening and whether their actions had precipitated them.

Now, I genuinely liked SimEarth, [1] but I definitely know what he was getting at. I mean, if you add a single prokaryote lifeform and suddenly, your whole planet undergoes rapid runaway climate change, you're likely to assume you did something wrong -- or blame the game. However, the real question is, what caused the disaster, planting some tiny lifeform, or something you did much earlier -- or that you didn't do? Was there ever any indication that something was wrong?

Back in the 90s, I was eagerly awaiting a game for the Panasonic 3DO: WorldBuilders, Inc. As captain of a giant terraforming starship, you would take jobs turning icy rocks and scorched planetoids into habitable worlds, made to order. Needless to say, it never even came close to shipping.

I certainly don't claim to be an expert, but I like to think I have some understanding of how doomed game projects generally die. I can speculate with some confidence on how it went down: a new development team tried to kick off a franchise with a groundbreaking game for a new platform that used gameplay elements that had never been seen before. According to EA's Glenn Entis, those are his five criteria that determine whether or not a game is going to make it or fail, and Worldbuilders, Inc. hit all five -- that's automatically a recipe for disaster.

So was WorldBuilders Inc. ever likely to succeed at all? Probably not, if you ask Glenn. Either way, the inherent problems of making an accurate simulation fun can't have helped. It's a tough job -- everything we know about our universe indicates that stable systems only last for a while before entropy and catastrophe theory make everything suck. Even the short simulations Will Wright showed off during his talk demonstrate that.

So how do you meet that challenge? Rumour has it that Spore has been more or less done for some time now, it's just been delayed while they tackle the "fun" factor -- and that's really what it's all about. Case in point: I love Sim City 2000. It's still one of my favorite games, 15 years after its release. I wasn't really a fan of sequels Sim City 3000 or Sim City 4, though. Why? They just got too complicated, and the immediate learning curve wasn't worth it for me to stick with them long enough to really want to play.

It's easier to make a simulation that's accurate than a simulator game that's fun, even if you're Will Wright. I'm sure that being Will Wright helps though.

[1] My true "fangirl moment" actually came when Wright mentioned Bill Budge's groundbreaking Pinball Construction Set for the Apple II as inspiration. It was definitely my favorite game for years -- imagine, being able to make your own pinball table!