But that isn't what this post is about, not entirely at least.



Last night I had the distinct pleasure to sit in on an hour and a half long lecture that Will Wright made at the Emily Carr school of design in Vancouver, BC. I almost couldn't attend due to the show having sold out before I first discovered this monumental opportunity. Luckily I had left a message conveying my interest and I was contacted the day before the lecture and given access to some tickets. There's a lesson in there somewhere, but I could care less as I got see Will Wright in person!!

So why was Wright gracing us with his presence? The Vancouver Art Gallery is currently playing host to a special event that is going on through to September called Krazytalk! Industry Giants which is part of their latest exhibition, Krazy: The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art. If you're in the area, I would definitely recommend checking out the events they will be holding to see if you might be interested in attending one of them. Now obviously, after seeing Will Wright, I could care less about any other event as they can only go downhill from here.

Still, what is important is that Will Wright's lecture was amazing! I knew I had to share it with everyone here in some fashion, so I brought a camera, notebook and mechanical pencil with me, though they wouldn't let me film or take pictures during his lecture so I had to rely on hastily scrawled notes. I will tell you this much: my hand experienced grievous levels of pain as I struggled to keep up with Wright's constant outpour of information. It was quite the experience.

Alas, being unable to take pictures of any kind (outside of the one I managed to snag before he left the room) means I don't really have anything to spice up this post with. So I have opted to simply repost my picture with Will Wright every once in a while, only with my friend having been replaced by someone I would rather spend time with. Case in point:



As I eagerly awaited Will Wright to ascend the stage, I could not help but think of the many vile and perverse acts I wanted to perform on his podium, much as I'm sure the rest of the sold out crowd did as well. As I began to question my sexuality, the lights began to dim and the room went anything but silent. Perhaps it was the fact that we were all about to be within meters of a god among men, or perhaps it was the incessant Sim City-like jazz that was being played in the background, but the energy in the room was palpable and reeked of god-complexes.

Starting eight minutes late, we were greeted by disappointment. Two ladies whose names I don't remember and speeches I forget wasted precious minutes that could have been spent basking in Wright's radiance. If that weren't enough, they couldn't stop talking about their precious school programs, vapid cunts that they were. I know that sounds unreasonably impatient, but I am an unreasonably impatient man. Also, to all of the students who got a personal session with Will Wright: Fuck you!

And so, after spending so much time listing Will Wright's many accomplishments that I wanted to slap her just to get her to shut up, the man of the hour took the stage to much applause. Behind him, many odd images began flitting by in what was obviously a powerpoint presentation of some sort until they came to rest on one slide that said simply "Video Games (In Context)".

Wright began by going over what brought him to the Krazytalk festivities, which mainly boiled down to another attendant speaker on behalf of comics having derided video games as an art form and responsible form of expression. Ironic, I know, and Wright felt much the same way. So it came to be that Will wished to address gaming's disreputable position in the entertainment world, which brings us finally to Will Wright's lecture proper.



We were told the all too common tale of encountering a "normal" person and being asked what you do for a living, with the reaction to game developer being one of horror and shock. Wright naturally brings us back in history to illustrate how this situation is not unique in the slightest; he uses a 15th century monk and another man's unfavorable reaction to how absorbed he is in a book to parallel the same grounds gaming finds itself on today.

He then went on to talk about how art forms often evolve into forms of expression quite unlike that of their original purpose, such as how writing was originally meant for what was essentially accountancy and not the beautiful works of prose it became. To illustrate this progression in art Wright brings up a slide depicting a cheesy romance novel, which is fitting to say the least. Getting back to the speaker on behalf of comics, Wright comments on comics originally being politically charged social tools as opposed to now being perceived of as base entertainment. At one time, Mary Pickford even said that sound would add nothing to film, one of the earlier bonehead statements regarding new technology.

This of course brings Wright to talk about inventors underestimating and miscalculating the worth of their inventions. He jokes about television having once been expected to improve education, following that up with a slide containing the Dukes of Hazzard. This naturally leads to talk of the internet and its origins as a military tool and the sleazy platform it has now become (DToid excepted of course. Though Wright may not have said this, I know he knows it to be true). All of this shows that art forms are originally created to solve certain problems, eventually becoming mediums for entertainment and ultimately, art.



It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Will Wright's work that he considers gaming to be a medium ripe for learning opportunities. We, as a species, build models of our world using our senses, and with the help of our greatest asset, imagination, construct our reality. Essentially we are running simulations in our mind, only there's a good chance we're not translating it all into Simlish. Wright goes on to break this down into four processes:

Classification
Causality
Empathy
Agency

Now, you'll have to bear with me here as I was having a difficult time keeping up, but from what I can recall essentially in all of our interactions we first classify the variables of the situation, analyze the causal paths stemming from this event, draw on our own experiences to personalize the occurrence, and finally decide on a course of action or agency to take. Wright uses an encounter with a tiger in the jungle to illustrate how our reactions to this encounter follow this progression model and how it all happens in an instant. He then continues to show that encountering a painting of a tiger in the jungle, despite it sharing many of the same qualities of the real tiger in its depiction, results in completely different agency.

Wright believes that our brains have evolved (all you bible thumpers might want to leave the room for a bit now) from Fish -> Reptile -> Bird -> Mammal -> Ape -> Man, with each evolutionary step providing varying perspectives in our needs such as food and fight or flight reactions. It was with our evolution into man that we received our greatest asset, imagination. We build a model of a person when interacting with them, completely apart from their own model of their self. Not only that, we construct models of what we feel their model of us is as well, and I'm certain that I'm not alone in that I can take that even further without even being in a drug-induced paranoia.



This brings Wright to his next topic: Learning.

Human beings are phenomenal when it comes to recognizing patterns better than any supercomputer, which he illustrates by showing an image of what seems to be random dots until you notice that it is in fact a dog. What we do is generate Schema from situations we encounter that define new rules that we then apply to similar situations. Unfortunately, being mortal beings, experience is a major limiter in our development of schema, which is why learning is so important.

With learning we are able to expand our horizons, and whether it be through toy experiences or the experiences of others it ultimately comes down to learning through play and story. While many animals learn through play, including humans, it is only the homo-sapien species that learns through story. Wright breaks story down into another four aspects:

Archetypes - Making use of a picture of Vader, starting off gratuitous Star Wars references
Environment (Setting)
Cool Abilities - Essentially fantasy fulfillment
Plot

Beginning with archetypes, Wright talks about how Horatio Hornblower was inspiration for Captain James Tiberius Kirk, how the Kurosawa films were inspiration for Lucas when he made Darth Vader, and even went so far as to compare the cast of Gilligan's Isle to the seven deadly sins and how ultimately that formed the basis for Sandman.

While archetypes are important to help us connect with the story, it is the environment or setting that is crucial to our learning. With new settings we are able to build new models which are all essentially toy worlds, even those based in reality. One of the most important elements of these models are the inherent abstractions we make which filter out irrelevant information, thus improving our ability to learn. Toys are an excellent example of this process of abstraction.



Alright, I think I'm going to take a break here as this is a lot to read and there's still a lot left. I managed to take twelve pages of notes during his lecture and this has only gone through around four of them. I've tried to capture the progression of the lecture as best I could without the aid of video or pictures, and without quickly summarizing what I found to be an amazing experience. Unfortunately, I cannot possibly hope to convey how unbelievable this lecture was but I will continue to go through his presentation sometime tomorrow.

Feel free to let me know what you think of all this so far and whether or not you would want to read more in detail or a more summarized version. I reserve the right not to summarize. :P