Will Wright on Simulation

Posted by Scott on Thursday, November 15, 2007 at 8:58 pm.

“Implication is more efficient than simulation.”
– Don Hopkins, summarizing Will Wright, discussing why SimCity isn’t as realistic as it appears.

Update: Edited to properly attribute the quote to Don Hopkins, based on his comment below.

Don Hopkins says:

Actually, that’s not really a quote of Will Wright. I wrote it myself, to summarize the gist of his talk to Terry Winnograd’s user interface class, based on what I learned from working with the SimCity code itself, and discussing it with Will over the years.

Here’s the source:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/WillWright.html

“Here are some important points he’s made, at this and other talks. I’ve elaborated on some of his ideas with my own comments, based on my experiences playing lots of SimCity, talking with Will, studying the source code and porting it to Unix, reworking the user interface, and adding multi player support.”

There’s more information about SimCity on my blog:

http://www.DonHopkins.com

If you would like some authentic, interesting Will Wright quotes, here are his powerpoint slides from his talk at the 2003 game developer’s conference:

http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/GCD2003.ppt

Some of the slides are kind of hard to figure out without hearing the actual talk, which is here:

http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/GCD2003.wav

Sorry I haven’t had a chance to rip it into an mp3 — the wav is about 35.8 megs, and the ppt is about 17.5 megs.

-Don

November 18th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Scott says:

Thanks for the comment, Don! I’ve updated the quote to properly attribute it to you.

November 18th, 2007 at 3:46 pm