GDC08: An evening with Will Wright minus friends (video)

by Akela Talamasca Feb 22nd 2008 at 1:15PM

Filed under: Video, Culture, Game mechanics, MMO industry, Opinion, Academic, Massively Event Coverage

I applied for, and received an invitation to 'An Evening with Will Wright and Friends', held in Mezzanine, a swanky club in San Francisco's SOMA district on Thursday evening. I didn't know what exactly to expect, but I knew two things: 1) It wasn't going to be about Spore, and 2) It was Will Freaking Wright. How did I know Spore wasn't on the offering? 'Cause we're all kind of Spore'd out, aren't we?

I was right about the lack of Spore, but was pleasantly surprised and gratified to hear Will speak on a variety of topics -- James Bond, cosmonauts, Gilligan's Island as the predecessor of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comics, Godzilla, Care Bears, Lost, Walt Disney, Battlestar Galactica, Spiderman, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- before finally wrapping it all up with the observation that the stories that resonate with us are deconstructible; we can reduce them to components, and using those components, build our own stories.

Finally, accepting questions from the audience, I asked him what advice he'd give NASA as they create their MMO. His friends never showed up, but man, Will Wright is always worth a listen. He knows his stuff so well and is such a wonderful speaker ... check out the video I shot after the break, and you'll see what I mean.

Here's the video, running length: 36:38

Tags: battlestar-galactica, care-bears, cosmonauts, event, featured, gdc, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, gilligans-island, godzilla, james-bond, lost, nasa, neil-gaiman, san-francisco, soma, spiderman, spore, the-sandman, walt-disney, will-wright, zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Dinah Sanders said on 9:02PM 2-25-2008

Excellent! Thank you so much for sharing this!

I really enjoy his thinking on these topics. This was a great companion piece to his keynote at SXSW Interactive 2007.
You can see that whole talk here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-NOHyWE2x8
(that's Justin Hall of PMOG doing the intro)

At the end of this talk you've just shared, Will includes a picture of himself playing in the Interactive Playpen at SXSW
http://flickr.com/photos/ardenstreet/420416014/
but I like this one of that same scene even better
http://flickr.com/photos/kathryn/428359962/
(and there's more fun from the interactive playpen available if you search for "interactive playpen" sxsw on Flickr. Select Most Interesting as your sort order :) )