Name: 【TED】Will Wright: Spore, birth of a game (Will Wright: Spore, birth of a game)
Uploaded: 2017-11-05T21:37:34.000Z
Duration: 18 min 34 s
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One of my favorite shows as a kid was "The Six Million Dollar Man,"

and this is a little bit closer to the 240-dollar man or so, but --

At any rate, I would normally feel very self-conscious and geeky

but a few days ago I saw one world-renowned statistician

But that's not what I want to talk about today.

I want to talk about toys, and the power that I see inherent in them.

When I was a kid, I attended Montessori school

And at the time I didn't think much about it,

but then later, I realized that that was the high point of my education.

From that point on, everything else was pretty much downhill.

And it wasn't until later, as I started making games, that --

I really actually think of them more as toys.

but I really think of these things more as toys.

I started getting very interested in Maria Montessori and her methods,

and the way she thought it very valuable for kids

rather than being taught these things overtly.

And she would design these toys, where kids in playing with the toys

would come to understand these deep principles

And since they discovered this, it stuck with them so much more,

and also they would experience their own failures.

There was a failure-based aspect to learning there. It was very important.

I think of really more as modern Montessori toys.

And I really kind of want them to be presented in a way

to where kids can kind of explore and discover their own principles.

I started getting very interested in the SETI program.

I get interested in different subjects, I dive in, research them,

and then try to figure out how to craft a toy around that,

so that other people can experience the same sense of discovery

that I did as I was learning that subject.

the study of possible life in the universe.

looking at the probability of life arising on planets,

how long it might last, how many planets are out there.

And I started looking at how interesting Drake's equation was,

because it spanned all these different subjects --

physics, chemistry, sociology, economics, astronomy.

And another thing that really impressed me a long time ago

was "Powers of Ten," Charles and Ray Eames' film.

And I started putting those two together and wondering, could I build a toy

where kids would trip across all these interesting principles of life,

as it exists and as it might go in the future.

Things where you might trip across things

like the Copernican principle, the Fermi paradox,

the anthropic principle, the origin of life.

And so I'm going to show you a toy today that I've been working on,

that I think of more as kind of a philosophy toy.

Playing this toy will bring up philosophical questions in you.

The game is "Spore." I've been working on it for several years.

It's getting pretty close to finished now.

It occurs at all these different scales, from very small to very large.

I'm going to pop in at the start of the game.

And you actually start this game in a drop of water,

as a very, very small single-cell creature,

and right off the bat you basically just have to live, survive, reproduce.

So here we are, at a very microscopic scale,

And I actually realize that cells don't have eyes,

The players are going to play through every generation of this species,

the creature is actually growing bit by bit.

the camera will actually start zooming out,

and things that you see in the background there

will start slowly pulling into the foreground,

showing you a little bit of what you'll be interacting with as you grow.

So as we eat, the camera starts pulling out,

and then we start interacting with larger and larger organisms.

We actually play through many generations here,

and we actually get to a macroevolution scale.

Now, at this point we're leaving the water,

and one thing that's kind of important about this game is that, at every level,

Now, in the evolution game here, the creature scale,

basically you have to eat, survive, and then reproduce.

One thing we noticed with "The Sims," a game I did earlier,

When they were able to make stuff in the game,

they had a lot of empathy in connection to it.

as a professional artist would make for games,

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【TED】Will Wright: Spore, birth of a game (Will Wright: Spore, birth of a game)

stuff

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