Spores, o novo game de Will Wright

A New Yorker publica uma reportagem muito bacana sobre o Spores, o novo jogo assinado por Will Wright que deve ser lançado em 2007 depois de 6 anos de desenvolvimento.

A autor exagera um pouco e compara a expectativa relacionada ao Spores com o lançamento de Ulisses de James Joyce...

It is anticipated with something like the interest with which writers in Paris in the early twenties awaited Joyce’s “Ulysses.” At first, Wright called the project Sim Everything, but a few years ago he settled on the name Spore. The game draws on the theory of natural selection.

O texto conta um pouco da história dos videogames e traz detalhes sobre as inspirações para os sucessos anteriores de Wright.

"SimCity", por exemplo, foi baseado no livro “Urban Dynamics” do professor do MIT, Jay Wright...

A neighbor suggested that Wright take a look at a 1969 book called “Urban Dynamics,” by Jay Wright Forrester, an M.I.T. professor, which argued that urban planning could be carried out more rationally by a computer simulation than by humans, because the computer wouldn’t be blinded by intuitive biases. In a later book, “World Dynamics,” Forrester laid out his proposal for a simulation that could manage the entire planet.

.... e da influência montessoriana na educação primária de Wright...

Wright flourished in the local Montessori school, with its emphasis on creativity, problem solving, and self-motivation. “Montessori taught me the joy of discovery,” Wright told me. “It showed you can become interested in pretty complex theories, like Pythagorean theory, say, by playing with blocks. It’s all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori—if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design.”

"The Sims", foi criado em cima dos estudos contidos em “A Pattern Language” do professor de arquitetura de Berkeley Christopher Alexander, das teorias sobre motivação psicologo Abraham Maslow e da coleção de idéias sobre o funcionamento da mente humana condensada em “Maps of the Mind" por Charles Hampden-Turner.

Three works helped Wright understand how he could turn these life experiences into a game. One was the book “A Pattern Language,” by Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure, in Berkeley. The book identifies two hundred and fifty-three timeless ways of building, which are classified as patterns—“Stair Seats,” “Children’s Realm,” etc.—and it shows how these patterns can create satisfying living spaces. The idea is that the value of architecture can be measured by the happiness of the people who live in it. The second was the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” in which Maslow described a pyramid-shaped hierarchy of human needs, with “Physiological” at the bottom, and above it “Safety,” “Love,” “Esteem,” and, at the top, “Self-actualization.” The third inspiration was Charles Hampden-Turner’s “Maps of the Mind,” which compares more than fifty theories about how the mind works. Putting these works together, Wright formulated a model with which to “score” the happiness of the people in his doll house by their status, popularity, and success, and by the quality of the environment the player designs for them—the more comfortable the house, the happier the people. Wright told me, “I don’t believe any one theory of human psychology is correct. The Sims just ended up being a mishmash of stuff that worked in the game.”

Spores tem influência da Equação de Drake, do astrônomo Frank Drake, e do muitas vezes parodiado curta metragem “The Powers of Ten”, do casal Charles e Ray Eames (veja a versão dos Simpsons no You Tube)...

“I love ‘The Powers of Ten,’ ” Wright said, “and I’ve always been a big fan of the Eameses. At the same time, I am really interested in the terms of Drake’s equation, and when I began working on Spore I was using it to map some of the game play. At some point I realized that the terms of Drake’s equation mapped neatly to the scale of ‘The Powers of Ten.’ So I rolled the two up into Spore.”

A reportagem é longa, rola tb uma visita à Electronic Arts....

The E.A. campus is in Redwood Shores, California, at the northern edge of Silicon Valley. Employees dress in shorts; there’s a gym; the games in the company store are less than half price; and several meeting rooms are designed to look like sports bars. But, according to two class-action suits for “unpaid overtime,” one filed by E.A. game artists and another by programmers, working for E.A. hasn’t always been as much fun as it appears to be. Although both suits have been settled and E.A. has revised its overtime policy, during crunch times eighty-hour weeks continue to be the norm.

... uma passada pela E3 deste ano

On the trade floor, screens showed guns, cars, football players, and lycra-clad virtual babes, featuring “better breast shadowing, better breast physics, and deeper breast customization,” as one gaming blog put it. It felt as if we were all inside some gigantic video-game machine—the place Nolan Bushnell had imagined thirty-five years earlier.

....e muitas outras coisas interessantes sobre o mundo dos videogames. Vale ler inteira...