As the presenter in the first video says, Will Wright lead to a "real shift" in the "younger generation" about how "people think about computers and about computing in general". As a member of the Will Wright generation of 12 year old Mac programmers who tried to take his games apart with ResEdit and tried to make our own, with Perl and HyperCard, this was really resonant, really true.
When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer.
He turned incredibly complex systems into games and games into systems, so that reading his game manuals made you think about the whole world.
One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual systems or logical rules they're playing with, and just learning to trick something that's already inscrutable and smarter than them. Mastering AI prompts or even running your own neural net doesn't teach anything like logic or the kind of deep, recursive cause and effect structure you could get from Will Wright's toys, or even from CK3... even if you get all your prompts perfect to make what you want, it teaches something much more like dependence on a magical oracle than, say, a toy/game/sim that really encourages you to deconstruct and take pleasure in all its interconnections that you can understand.
> When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer.
Page 149 (yes - it had a lot of pages) starts off with "An Introduction to Earth Science" and continues to the appendix on page 201. It has enough content to make a good starter for a grade school science class's syllabus.
Games were different then. While the price of a game has remained fairly fixed over the years, the amount of resources that represents has gone down. A $40 game back in 1990 had a lot more value to it compared to a $40 game in 2020. Based on inflation, that would be an $80 in 2020 dollars - you can do a lot more with a $80 game.
Next, the internet wasn't there. Anything you wanted someone playing the game to have you put in the box on paper. Sometimes that was also the DRM (enter the 5th word on page 44). There wasn't a "look it up online" or "watch this video to understand the game."
And then there was also the this was supposed to be a simulator - not a game. Read the intro part of the manual.
> SimEarth is a planet simulator - a model of a planet. It is a game, an educational toy, and an enjoyable tool. With SimEarth you can take over many included planets, or design and create your own.
> ...
> SimEarth isn't exactly a game. it's what we cal a "Software Toy." Toys, by definition, are more flexible and open-ended than games.
> ...
> So when you play with SimEarth, or any of our Software Toys, don't limit yourself to trying to "win." Play with it, Experiment. Try new things. Just have fun.
In order to use it to the fullest amount that the creators wanted you to be able to, it required a short course on earth science that not everyone may have been exposed to.
i do remember from back then. many games came with fun packaging/etc. DRM, I remember. Infocom games - early iterations had great packaging.
This SimEarth manual is just on a different level, imo. Perhaps SimCity had something similar - I would see copies of it around school, but never saw a manual for it.
I do remember some 'larger' games. Populous was one... that was rather complex, and had a 'tutorial' IIRC, but no manual anywhere near the size of that SimEarth one.
> When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer.
This is me, but with the SimCity 2000 Deluxe Edition and it’s novel-like manual.
Civ II is the one that sticks in my head… always bought games at an egghead software 4 hours from home (and usually a couple days before my family would drive back anyway)
> One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual systems or logical rules they're playing with, and just learning to trick something that's already inscrutable and smarter than them
This is something I don't understand. Sure, not every kid is going to think about that but that's ok. We need some kids to think about it, probably a small subset..
Back when computers were new, not every kid tried to make games or understand how they worked either. Only a small subset and that's how it is..
The way I read OP's comment was more about quality rather than quantity.
Put another way, I'd say that the right amount of people who should be learning that skill is probably zero. "Learning to write AI prompts" is a skill that only exists because AI hasn't evolved enough yet; in another 10-25 years, "learning to write AI prompts" will just be equivalent to "communicating clearly."
And, yes, thinking and communicating clearly are valuable skills that everyone should learn, but that's just the point — people investing time in the "writing AI prompts" skill now aren't learning that. They're just learning to string random adjectives together, along with (at best) a slight bit of the iterative never-give-up spirit that comes with poking an inscrutable pile of matrices until it does what you want. [1]
I think the lament is that if people do not learn the logical side of things, they are unable to figure out how to reason about issues and errors. They are unable to easily go deep into topics like computer science.
I feel as if it stands to reason that someone without practice in common topics should do worse at a subject when encountered professionally or academically; the base mathematical principles behind programming like lambda calculus and the principles of recursion and boolean logic haven't changed, they've been masked.
I feel like the use of many AI sub-systems really just trains someone in the use of that sub-system rather than any of the underlying principles. This feels obvious to me, am I missing something?
Also : I don't think that specific 'AI sub-system' training is useless, that's the way our world is heading.. I just also happen to believe that it hides trees.
It feels like the app-ification programming. It's more accessible but leaves the users less able to deal with things it can't solve and completely incompetent to debug them.
Hopefully I'm wrong.
Also hopefully it doesn't put me out of a job in 5-10 years.
This is normal. The industry has many times more front-end web developers than full stack. It has many more full-stack developers than systems programmers. It has many more systems programmers than chip engineers. Each layer of abstraction makes things easier to learn (or at least more visible and therefore approachable) and therefore makes the number of people trained in any given discipline higher.
but the same could be said for indie games developed with tools like Unity or Godot—people who make games with these tools don't really know 100% about what's going on with the actual underlying systems they're stitching together to make a game with, but they stitch things together and create a game nonetheless. on its face that's fine, but as time goes on, "making video games" has gone from being something that required intimate knowledge and understanding of the software and hardware at the foundation of the executable you're running, to domain-specific knowledge relative only to one specific tool/framework. if you've only ever made Unity games and now you want to work on a more complex simulation, you either find yourself increasingly having to fight "the Unity way of doing things", or take the plunge and unlearn your current way of thinking in domain-specific primitives such that you can learn to do things at a lower level.
Learning the minutiae of a particular piece of hardware isn't important. Learning to understand and debug a program's is very important. Unity or Godot still work on logic - if A causes B and C causes D but A and C doesn't cause B and D, there'll be a reason for that (even if that reason is just "a bug in the Unity implementation") and a programmer has a hope of learning what it is. Probabilistic tools don't have that, and I worry about the implications for learning. (For the same reason I've always been very skeptical about including tools like ElasticSearch or Splunk in a dataflow - even if they seem to work reliably, how can you be confident they will continue to do so in the future?)
I'd agree, with the caveat that I think it's okay to start at the top of the stack and work downwards, as long as the limitations of the tools keep you learning. I'm sure not every artist at Maxis could write Assembly code. There are more chances for visual artists now to step into the world of code than there were then. I started off as a graphic designer in an ad agency, learned the 1990s Dreamweaver way of writing web pages, and learned HTML/CSS and AS2/3 and JS and then PHP and Node and SQL as I hit various limitations with what I wanted to do. Now I write full stack business software. But I know people who went the other way, who learned the visual art and UI skills they wanted long after learning C++. So, unlearning your framework is a way of learning, too. The difference I see between interacting with a black-box AI versus any of those other things is that the AI isn't a constructor kit, it's a finished product that doesn't lead to furthering any skill set. It isn't like using Unity to build a city simulator; it's like playing the city simulator.
GPT and transformers are not the end game for logical analysis.
Pretrained LLMs cannot capture factual knowledge from text, that is true. MIT is proposing a unified model for Knowledge Embedding and Pretrained LanguagERepresentation (KEPLER) [0], which can better integrate factual knowledge into LLMs.
Knowledge Embeddings could be created by anyone who wants to better simulate a particular system, including kids, given the right exploratory environment.
My funny hypothesis is that the ones who can actually make something out of the AI/machine learning trend are those who are good in this logical thinking you are talking about, not the ones who try to skip it on the way.
I'm tempted to think you're right, but we're probably going to have to live through a 5 years long boom / bust of illogical, unthinking children getting in and building very stupid things with very powerful weapons before another cryptocurrency-style crash. On the whole it is not going to serve as a technology to even teach young coders to think for themselves, let alone the devastating effects it will have on society and human relationships in all countries.
Really, I mean, force kids to learn BASIC or Pascal or whatever... but these AI systems cannot ever be understood by people who grow up taking computation for granted (and only learning how to tinker with them on the surface). If they aren't understood, they will be treated like a magic box for answers, and worshipped as a deity or an oracle.
I don't think it is too much to say that ChatGPT is the Golden Calf that represented the type of lazy thinking or psychological projection into imagined, embodied "gods" which the monotheistic religions starting with Judaism found to be morally atrocious. And why? Because giving up one's rational beliefs or even one's irrational monotheistic belief in a God to the fantasms and stories created of idols and their stewards was a form of slavery from which you could not rescue yourself or your children.
Guarding the Word presages guarding its corruption by machine, several thousand years in advance. And Islam, Christianity and Judaism are all a warning against allowing the machinery - even seemingly perfect technologies - to become a god.
[edit] and FWIW I am an atheist, but that only makes me more concerned, as I see a new and more terrifying irrationality taking the place of the old. The new religion of CHATGPT will be much more terrifying because the entity it worships will be PRESENT AND ALIVE...
Reading this above made me think of song lyrics from the 60's
"And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And sign flashed out it's warning
In the words it was forming
Then the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and in tenement halls"
And whispered in the sound of silence"
Honestly I think a lot of these tools are hit and miss right now. Some are pretty cool, super easy to steal stuff (art for example), and have it look mostly good to an untrained eye, or in the case of chat return reasonable good answers but often they still can't compare to a professional with the insight and history of understanding principals that are just not there yet in these tools. Will they ever be? I'm not sure. Some of these tools may survive but a lot will be hit with copyright, plagiarism, restricted use, and probably mainstream use with the understanding quality will go down but stuff will get cheaper... Like auto generated captions, most of the time it kinda sucks and I always have to go back and fix a bunch of stuff. It's sort of like CGI, if know what you are looking for it's pretty clear, but sometimes it can fool people. Considering people were being fooled in the 60's with chat bots (Eliza is well known), it will be interesting to see where this goes. Considering all this was stuff even before my parents time, I expect the younger generation to catch on to it too and to have some small counter movements too.
> When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer.
When I rented SimEarth as a kid, it didn't come with a manual and absolutely nothing in the game made any sense to me. :(
I tried renting it a few times, in hope that I'd eventually figure it out. I never did, though.
Met him at the Computer History Museum, maybe around 2007. He had a branching storyboard-style presentation with 100's of slides. In the middle of the talk, he asked the audience about which direction they wanted to explore. Based on a show of hands, he proceeded to branch off into a few dozen more slides. Pretty epic.
Anyway, Turtleducks: we met later and I demoed a visual music synth. Was wondering if it would fit somehow into Sim-City. He said: "Well, what I have is a turtle and what you have is a duck. You can't just put a duck on a turtle and get a turtleduck." [Am paraphrasing.]
Ironically, a year later, he introduce Spore -- thus, solving the turtleduck problem. At least, in the turtle/duck domain.
This just triggered a memory synapse that probably has been unused for literal decades about how when I was a kid we only could buy really bad chewing gum in our village, the type that quickly lost flavor and ended up really tough to chew, and how we would experiment with eating something else like licorice or a cookie to re-introduce flavor or soften it up. Even thinking about the texture of chewing gum mixed with brittle cookies now grosses me out, but childhood me had different tastes I guess.
Love the "Antique Soviet Space Junk" collection, it'd awesome to see the full collection digitized - great resource for intuitive UI development.
Relatedly, I've recently been working on UI's inspired by the F-15 cockpit [1,2]. It's neat how on one hand the controls are amazingly complicated (Enough knobs and dials to fly a fighter jet! With 0 losses to boot!), but on the other hand you can get a pretty good sense of how everything operates just by reading the labels and diagrams painted atop them. The acronyms are a different story, but then that's what manuals and all those hours of training are for.
[2]: https://solunar.pages.dev, tide charts based on F-15 UI elements. WIP, still gotta figure out how to render the location selection -- the soviet globe UI in the OP is quite interesting. For now set the url's hash to your favorite NOAA station's id if you're really interested :)
On the subject of controls that don't translate well, Rotary knobs are great as a physical device, But they feel terrible as a mouse controlled item.
The biggest offenders are audio plugins, they tend to be very skeuomorphic, almost to a fault. I don't mind a little skeuomorphism, in fact I think it can help readability of the interface. But the way audio plugins take it to an extreme and cram as many rotary knobs in there as possible is maddening.
A well-designed digital rotary knob isn't too hard to use - but it must be set by simply dragging up and down, not in a rotary motion, which is very unnatural with a mouse. They remain popular in audio software not just because of skeuomorphism (though that doubtless plays a role) but because they are a space-efficient way of putting lots of controls on a page. Audio software is usually highly parametric, so that's important.
Even though I understand this need, I'm still very keen on audio software that tries to break out of the 'everything is a knob' paradigm when it makes sense.
A digital knob shouldn't need any dragging nowadays with modern mice. Instead you should be able to just point to it and spin the scrollwheel. It's a rotary motion that feels somewhat analogous to spinning a physical knob with an easy physical transition from coarse-grained spin to fine-tuning adjustment.
Good point about converting linear motion to rotary for mouse users. I hadn't considered that as I only ever use touch screens and touch pads so to me the rotary is just fine (aka, touch the option you want).
That said, it's just a radio button, would you expect radio buttons to activate on scroll too? For continuous numeric inputs I modeled the slider, and enabled scroll control.
One issue there is intercepting horizontal scroll on touchpads is flakey and about two thirds of the time you go back instead of moving the thing right.
a lot of audio stuff is designed with the expectation that you'll be binding the control to a MIDI controller if it's important, so in that sense the skeumorphism makes a lot of sense. if the VST knob is just a visual representation of something that's bound to another MIDI-bound knob in a DAW, it doesn't really matter if the mouse UX is bad, since it'll probably only be used briefly while dialing in settings, and then serve as a visual UX thing after
Could you could take design ideas from the F-15 cockpit and use them without being skeuomorphic? Would you end up with a UI of checkboxes and radio buttons? Or was the whole goal to make something that looks like physical cockpit control?
I think some aspects, like toggle controls, are not very common today. Some people might have no idea what they are.
The fun part in developing for myself is I don't have to care what "some people" don't know. :)
That said, I believe my toggles have a couple benefits: they're labeled on both sides, so it's more clear what the options are. And the change is immediately visible, again making the functionality more obvious. The "modern" toggle where a circle can be on either end of an elongated cylinder and a string of text is somewhere across the screen in a step down from that, IMO.
On April 4, 1996, Terry Winograd (who I worked with at Interval Research) invited me to sit in on his HCI Group CS547 Seminar where Will Wright was giving a presentation called "Interfacing to Microworlds", in which he gave demos and retrospective critiques of his three previous games, SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000.
He opened it up to a question and answer session, during which Terry Winograd’s students asked excellent questions that Will answered in thoughtful detail, then one of them asked the $5 billion question: "What projects are you working on now?"
Will was taken aback and amused by the directness, and answered "Oh, God..." then said he would back up and give "more of an answer than you were looking for."
The he demonstrated and explained Dollhouse for the first time in public, talking in depth about its architecture, design, and his long term plans and visions.
I took notes of the lecture, augmented them with more recent information and links from later talking and working with Will, and published the notes on my blog. But all I had to go on were my notes, and I haven't seen a video of that early version of Dollhouse ever since.
But only last week I discovered the Holy Grail I'd been searching for 27 years, nestled and sparkling among a huge dragon's hoard of historic treasures that are now free for the taking: Stanford University has published a huge collection of hundreds of Terry Winograd’s HCI Group CS547 Seminar Video Recordings, including that talk and two more by Will Wright!
I really appreciate Terry Winograd for inviting me to Will's talk that blew my mind and changed my life (it overwhelmingly and irresistibly convinced me to go to Maxis to work with Will on The Sims), and to the Stanford University librarians and archivists for putting this enormous treasure trove of historic videos online.
Guide to the Stanford University, Computer Science Department, HCI Group, CS547 Seminar Video Recordings
I uploaded the video to YouTube to automatically create closed captions, which I proofread and cleaned up, so it's more accessible and easier for people to find, and you can translate the closed captions to other languages.
And I updated my previous article "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)" to include the embedded video, as well as the transcript and screen snapshots of the demo, links to more information, and slides from Will's subsequent talk that illustrated what he was talking about in 1996.
This is what passion for a domain looks like, and also your respect for others is really admirable!
And your efforts to not only share all the information but to go further than that and proofread and cleaned it so that it is accessible to others is highly respectable.
Thank you, this is amazing! The various "sim" games were discussed quite a bit during my master studies in Interaction Design - as were your pie menus, by the way :)
PS: the update on the medium blog post accidentally says 2013-1-27 instead of 2023-1-27. Small but confusing typo
Thanks a lot! And it’s amazing students had such an opportunity - students here get to hear people like me instead (I think pretty highly of myself but I’m no Will Wright!)
It would be like having Carmack come over to talk about 3d rendering (in the 90s no less)…
At the time I was actually pretty skeptical about how hard it would be to get the AI to work plausibly (and so was Will, but somehow he managed to do it), and I though an online game like The Sims Online would be easier. But leveraging the player's imagination and supporting storytelling was key.
>A Braitenberg vehicle is a concept conceived in a thought experiment by the Italian-Austrian cyberneticist Valentino Braitenberg. The book models the animal world in a minimalistic and constructive way, from simple reactive behaviours (like phototaxis) through the simplest vehicles, to the formation of concepts, spatial behaviour, and generation of ideas.
>For the simplest vehicles, the motion of the vehicle is directly controlled by some sensors (for example photo cells). Yet the resulting behaviour may appear complex or even intelligent.
What I didn't realize until I saw this video 27 years later, was that Will already had the idea of the "Peanuts Adult Voices", and the importance of storytelling.
It wasn't until later that those nebulous ideas actually crystalized into the design of the unique expressive but unintelligible "mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa" Simlish language, or the storytelling design of “The Sims Family Album” and “The Sims Exchange”, where you could take screen snapshots, write text in picture albums to make stories, upload and share your stories as well as your entire house and family, being an actual part of the game design.
The design of The Sims Family Album and story publishing features were also inspired by the success of live online chats with the fans, while playing the pre-release game with a virtual webcam that took screen snapshots and uploaded them to the web server and into the chat (like an early crude version of Twitch), so the fans could make suggestions and comments in chat and see what happens in the game seconds later.
From the transcript:
Student:
What about from person to person, you talking about the information that's contained within the objects, so there can be information in another person, that you want to interact with in the environment.
Have you looked at any reasons why you would want to do that?
Will Wright:
Oh yeah, I mean, that's that's the hard problem.
I mean, simulating ants is hard enough, when you get to people there's really no hope.
There are two issues here.
You can look at this as a technology.
It's not a product right now.
And their are a few directions this could go.
I could see this becoming, let's say, a multiplayer network MUD kind of a thing.
You might have a thousand people playing SimCity from the bottom up, each person building their own house in a big multi-user space.
In which case that issue is a little less important, because most of the people are real people, and you're dealing with puppets.
As a standalone game, which is probably our our closer target, we have to deal with the problem you're bringing up, which is how do we deal with people to people?
And it's hard, I mean there's just -- I'm sure Terry can elaborate on that more than I can.
But the best thing we can do is prop up a convincing illusion.
We don't have to be doing a valid simulation of human personality.
What we have to do is we have to put up something that's ambiguous enough to where somebody can read in what they want.
Actually in this thing what I have right now are people come up and they converse, but you don't hear what they're saying, they just gesture, and sometimes they look mad, sometimes they kind of look contemplative.
It's kind of interesting how much people will read into that.
This is kind of dynamic that we've seen again and again where something happens in SimCity and they said "oh I was running my nuclear reactor near the red line, and then there was so much smoke coming out of it, this plane crashed, and because of that, this and that happened", and they'll describe this long causal chain of events that I know does not exist.
I designed the simulation, I know that there's no linkage between the power output of the power plant, the planes crashing, but they're convinced it exists.
Don Hopkins:
They're using it as a medium to tell stories about.
Will Wright:
Yeah!
Don Hopkins:
Where they're using it as a piece of paper, to write.
Will Wright:
Yeah, that's exactly right.
There's a parallel simulation going on here in the game.
Everybody's taking a linear path through this, and they're basically, most people will attempt to understand things like this with a story.
They'll think about "I did this, then that happened, because of that", and so the story becomes kind of their logical connection, their logical reverse engineering, of the simulation that they're playing inside of.
Now on the people's side, I think we can do a lot in this as a product, by propping up that illusion of people.
Again, if this is a doll house, we don't want the dolls to be sentient things.
We want the dolls to be interesting enough to where I can play games with them.
There was actually a really interesting doll that this company came out with.
Oh, it was Worlds of Wonder, this really cool doll, I've got a couple of them after they went out of business.
It's called the Julie doll.
But it was like this $250 doll with voice recognition, and it said all these things.
It had just a huge amount of ROM with digitized speech in it, and so it would sit there and try and have stupid conversations with you.
And really it was kind of Eliza, or had keywords it would recognize, and give you these kind of non-committal responses.
But in the testing of that, well first of all it was a $300 doll.
Who's going to buy the kid a $300 doll?
So it was really more, it was actually the only doll I've ever seen that appealed to grown men.
Grown men love this, I mean this is a hacker's doll.
But I talked to the guy who was working this project, and he said they put this in focus groups with girls.
And they played with it for a while, and then after about a half an hour they take the batteries out, and keep playing with it.
And what was happening is that the girls were propping up this elaborate fantasy in their play, and the dolls were supposed to be a structure for that fantasy, they weren't supposed to be the fantasy.
The doll was telling them what the fantasy was, and it was conflicting with what the girls were saying, and so it was interfering actively with their fantasy and their play.
So in that regard, I think we can actually kind of take that path with these people.
And all we have to do is deal with them at a very local kind of a state machine, Braitenberg Machine kind of level, and say that they're angry, and they're hungry, and they're sleepy.
And then we can actually do some things where maybe they have a little, what you might call, structural ambiguity about what they're actually saying.
One of the thoughts I had about this project in particular is that you'd see the people go up and they talk, and there would be some kind of a flavor to their conversation, but it would be more like Peanuts.
When they did the TV show of Peanuts, you'd hear the adults talking, and the adults would always be like "mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa", or soft, or loud.
You can tell if they're mad, or angry, or what, but you wouldn't hear what they were saying.
You'd have to read that into it.
I think this is the area where we sidestep the issue, just because as a commercial company we have to ship a game, we're not doing a research project.
So that's a long winded answer, sorry.
Yeah?
Student:
If you do do that, and people can read into what people are actually doing in the game, won't that sort of interfere with their expectations and simulation if the simulation doesn't actually meet those expectations?
If they're reading too much into it, and it's not really happening that way, won't they be sort of misled in there expectations?
Will Wright:
Yeah it really comes down what the simulation is.
That, I think, would be addressed on the game design side.
Again, I mean, just in terms of reality, I don't think there's any way I'm going to come anywhere close to simulating a person.
With a lot of tricks, I can have these people walking through the day, getting up, taking a bath or a shower, fixing breakfast, going to work, while at the same time deciding that I'm bored, I'm going to sit on the couch, I'm going to turn on the TV.
And how you make that into a game design might have a lot to do with how valid the simulation of the people has to be.
If it's a story kind of a game where you want drama to unfold at the right time, and the conversation between these two people is a crucial thing that happens before he gets really upset and does that, then yes the model would need to be a real simulation.
I really don't think we're anywhere near that though, I mean, really I think, unless you're in a very very tightly confined domain, you're going to have a hard time dealing with this open-ended simulation about people in that way.
So I think really unfortunately we're not there yet, and I think it'll be quite a long time before we are, so really we have to constrain what the user is doing.
Now maybe it's just a dollhouse, maybe all I do is I have to get two people to meet at a party, and everything else is kind of indeterminate about what they say and all that, and I'm moving furniture around.
So there are a lot of game design things we can do with this without doing a personality model.
Don Hopkins:
You're saying a multi-user game would be easier to design than an AI game, because you can use other people.
Will Wright:
Oh yeah, far easier, I think so.
Don Hopkins:
It's just the technology of communicating and time lags.
Will Wright:
This is how you're always building models of the system you're playing with.
It's easy to build a model of a stupid computer agent.
It's hard to build a model of your head, while I'm talking to you.
That's what's interesting, is trying to reverse engineer your thought process.
Don Hopkins:
Yeah, there's a lot of commercial services like Worlds Away and Habitat, things that have been done that only have other people, no robots or anything, and they're pretty successful just because of that.
The doll story reminded me that there's tech out there that is expensive and hard in a way that makes engineers happy, but there could be some other much simpler tech that makes the end users happier.
Example: AT&T kept advertising about how they're working on video phones (hard tech: latency, bandwidth, cameras, screens) but all I really wanted was SMS (easy tech by comparison)
Example: Twitter is using some fancy statistical or machine learning model (hard tech) to guess that I'm interested in peru, deadpool, university of alabama. And I have to guess that it thinks that I'm interested in peru because I was reading about the guano war (I'm not particularly interested in peru in general), and that I'm intersted in deadpool because a friend of mine wanted to watch a deadpool video on my tablet (I'm not interested in deadpool myself), and that I'm interested in the university of alabama because I was reading about alabama's role in the Apollo missions (but I'm not particularly interested in the university of alabama). They're doing something hard that frustrates me, when they could've done something easy like ask me, and I would've been happier with the results.
I like that in games, we can do something simple and let the player's imagination/apophenia invent the rest. I enjoyed a recent paper[1] about Caves of Qud generating a plausible history to fit the events the player has seen so far.
This was absolutely amazing to see. Thank you for sharing it (and your personal explanation of it) with us!! It is mindblowing to see how so many of the things we were accustomed to from The Sims are described here, like the objects defining the possible actions, the "ambiguous" blurbs ("Simlish"), multiplayer vs. local simulation, etc. .. I love his clarity of mind about all these subjects and how casually he answers all the questions -- proving how depthfully he thought about this stuff.
Now, definitely need to check more of this historical stuff... amazing :D
A few years ago I worked with an old colleague of yours Alex Z from those days. I of course poked him about random Maxis questions over and over, since I was such a megafan of Maxis back in those days. A great colleague regardless of our sparse work interactions. I've sent this video over to him in case he hadn't already seen it, of course!
Thanks again for sharing this, so stoked tonight haha :)
Will Wright’s talks at the Game Developers Conference were not to be missed. They were wild, fascinating and funny. He would often go off-topic with mini-presentations like the “Russian Space Minute” where he marveled at the analog computers used in space by the cosmonauts.
It’s really hard to find recordings. I don’t even know if they are all available anywhere on the Internet.
This video has been reformatted and is streamed from the Stanford website. As far as I can tell, there should be no restriction on access from off-campus:
Interfacing to Microworlds, Will Wright, Maxis in SearchWorks catalog (stanford.edu) (April 26, 1996)
Laughing Creative Communities: Lessons for the Spore community experience, Will Wright, Maxis / Electronic Arts in SearchWorks catalog (stanford.edu) (May 22, 2009)
If you have issues viewing the videos, please let me know and I will pass the information along to our media lab.
Having had the pleasure of Will lecturing in my Stanford course on one or two occasions, I am glad to see that these examples of his thinking (and lecturing style!) are available.
Please consider sending important documents to Stanford for preservation. We offer one of the leading collections of game-related archival material for research and instruction and our streaming services are robust.
All my best,
Henry
Henry Lowood, PhD
Harold C. Hohbach Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections,
Curator for Film & Media Collections.
HSSG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
Stanford University Libraries, Stanford CA 93405-6004
Very interesting article, with lots of food for thought.
I find it fascinating that you can think of an interesting simulation with fun gameplay, but without a good UI, and that therefore won't work as a game.
I also liked the idea that the user's mental model of the game is not necessarily represented by the actual code running the simulation. But if one "closes the gap", Scott McCloud style, then it's good enough!
Also, I must say that I really liked SimCity (classic, the only one I really played) but also loved SimAnt, which the article (or Wright, actually) calls "too simple". I dunno, I really liked it. You could even play as the spider and hunt ants! You just had to be careful, because a single ant is prey for the spider, but a bunch of ants become the predators.
Finally, for all of its technical achievements, I never really liked The Sims or any of its variants. It seemed impressive but what is the gameplay? Seemed like a variation on tamagotchis, and so I never got the urge to really play it even back when it was all the rage.
Digital natives have more and more been shown to be digital illiterates. And I say this with compassion as a STEM teacher who thinks kids are great and smart in many, many ways, just not digitally.
Besides the much-talked about problems with kids growing up in the age of iPads and Chromebooks, which prevent any actual interactions with computers, kids are even bad at the internet.
I remember this as far back as 2011, when Osama bin Laden was killed. One of the highest trending questions on both Twitter and on Yahoo Answers was "who was Osama bin Laden?" A shocking number of people's first instinct when trying to find out information was not Google searching, but lazy-web asking complete strangers on message boards, and needing to wait around to find out someone's answer.
Since then I've noticed this kind of thing with my students more and more. They can do actual research if told to, but it's never their first instinct.
> Digital natives have more and more been shown to be digital illiterates.
Very interesting.
Your observation might be a generality.
I keep thinking of Marshall McLuhan, Neal Postman, and other media critics. How were they so prescient and clear-eyed about the sociology of broadcast and cable television? While the following generation was so oblivious once that those mediums were established?
Ditto the early critics of social media, like Clay Shirky.
The best folk theory that I've come up with is that a fish doesn't know anything about water.
I'm also among those who contest the whole digital native thing. I think that growing up in the information age is not really correlated with being good with tech and computers, those skills, if you can call it that even, can be picked up any time. It's just that people don't bother - young people don't bother with icky old people things, old people don't bother with the strange new things, everyone has got their excuse to not expend energy on change.
I also don't agree with the digital native premise.
However I believe that those who grew up with or experienced the 8 bit home computer and it's evolution to what we have now, they have a much better understanding of how computers work.
Digital Native to me means you grew up when 'digital' was both everywhere and all encompassing. You don't have to understand it any more than you have to understand how hot water comes out of your shower or why a light turns on when you flip a switch.
Those of us grew up in the 'before times' had to understand how computers worked just to make them, well work. Much like someone who had to dig their own well, run their own pipes and heat their own water probably has a much better understanding as to how and why hot water comes out of their shower.
I wonder how much of that belief is true, and even more specifically, how much of that translates to real-life skills. In my experience, people picked up "digital" skills casually over some years, are indistinguishable from people who "grew up" with half of their lives being lived digitally. And neither of these understand how computers work, at most, what they are familiar with are the happy path of how they achieve some goals using the computer / smartphone, and maybe basic troubleshooting.
Part of why I don't think people understand the digital world is because it's changing fast. Both the systems themselves on a lower levels like hardware, and on top in regards to UX. Typing into a Commodore 64 is vastly different than a mouse-driven traditional desktop, which again is very different than a material design smartphone app. It's a lot of work to know these systems, and so, I think people don't know them that well, and that they overestimate their, and others' familiarity with them, in a similar way to how the Dunning-Kruger effect works.
Digital native doesn't mean good with tech, it just means that you default to expecting things to be on a website or app and are usually more comfortable interacting with it in that form. They have simply never experienced a world where constant global connectivity was not a thing. They've never had to go to the library to find out what Timor-Leste is, and never had to go on a long journey without a phone to entertain them.
It's not really a good or bad thing, just a difference. I think you'd usually find most younger people are quicker at acquiring information than average old people due to their familiarity with the tools, though not necessarily any better at turning that information into anything actionable. Most young people are just as useless outside their comfort zone as old people are.
Huh, what do you mean? Will Wright was born in 1960, so he amounts to a “boomer” as the term is used these days, as do most of the great game designers and programmers of the 90s, who obviously couldn’t have been “digital natives”. But one can become fluent, even an expert, in a non-native language… most people just never do!
FWIW, the idea of digital natives is problematic for other reasons, primarily the fact that it’s being applied to today’s kids who mostly are not any sort of native experts in general computing. If any generation is worthy of the term, it’s the millennials/Xennials who were there in the era when the use of personal computers involved more than just endlessly scrolling TikTok.
I guess some educational policy wonks must've got in bed with big tech and appropriated the digital natives term as defined in the Wiki article, as a means of creating a fomo, allowing big tech to reach into elementary schools and steal childhood.
When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer.
He turned incredibly complex systems into games and games into systems, so that reading his game manuals made you think about the whole world.
One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual systems or logical rules they're playing with, and just learning to trick something that's already inscrutable and smarter than them. Mastering AI prompts or even running your own neural net doesn't teach anything like logic or the kind of deep, recursive cause and effect structure you could get from Will Wright's toys, or even from CK3... even if you get all your prompts perfect to make what you want, it teaches something much more like dependence on a magical oracle than, say, a toy/game/sim that really encourages you to deconstruct and take pleasure in all its interconnections that you can understand.