My post recently about the scale of our own self-perception was on my mind as I read this awesome and exhaustive Will Wright piece from the NY Times. Some favorite quotes:
“I wanted to make a game that would recreate a drug induced epiphany,” Wright told me. “I want people to be able to step back five steps, five really big steps. To think about life itself and its potential galactic-scale impact. I want the gamers to have this awesome perspective handed to them in a game. And then let them decide how to interpret it.”
And also:
Hecker pulled up a new lineup to demonstrate a clapping animation that included a creature whose cranium is so inconveniently located that clapping forces him to slap both his hands against the side of his head. It looked like slapstick comedy of the highest order — vaudeville meets “Monsters, Inc. ”
“Our philosophy is,” Bradshaw said, “if it’s going to break, it should break funny.”
What a coincidence, that’s sort of my philosophy, too! =) What’s super humorous about this whole article to me is that it’s all about galaxies and huge sweeping vistas of time and space and all that, and yet the interview takes place at “an anonymous-looking complex in Emeryville, Calif.”
Anonymous-looking, perhaps. But I will say this. They make damn good sandwiches there.
Also, upon reaching the final page of the article, you’ll find this delicious paragraph:
It occurred to me as I wandered through the halls of the Spore offices that a troubled school system could probably do far worse than to devote an entire, say, fourth-grade year to playing Spore. The kids would get a valuable perspective on their universe; they would learn technical skills and exercise their imaginations at the same time; they would learn about the responsibility that comes from creating independent life. And no doubt you would have to drag them out of the classrooms at the end of the day. When I mentioned this to Eno, he immediately chimed in agreement. “I thought the same thing,” he said. “If you really want to reinvent education, look at games. They fold everything in: history, sociology, anthropology, chemistry — you can piggyback everything on it.
Which recalls something I read in some book about an Island or something, I think it was by a guy called Huxley:
“How early do you start your science teaching?”
“We start it at the same time we start multiplication and division. First lessons in ecology.”
“Ecology? Isn’t that a bit complicated?”
“That’s precisely the reason why we begin with it. Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and the country around it. Rub it in.”
there are more things in heaven and earth, horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy