Wright tells reporter Dean Takahashi that his post-EA venture, the expanded Stupid Fun Club, is staffing up but staying small, adding some ex-Maxis employees but keeping headcount under 30. At least three projects are underway, all of which will have a web component and all of which seem that they will be playable in some way.

Two choice excerpts:

VB: Do you feel you are looking back on the game industry, as something in your past, and do you have a take on it now?

WW: I feel we are still in it because a couple of projects are games. We are taking the games industry into other areas. We are expanding what we call the “play industry”. Games are limited in some ways. Play can be applied to so many different kinds of experiences.

And

VB: Do you think the future is more about Facebook games, or is more about console games?

WW: I think it is going to be a lot broader than either one of those two. Those are both experiences where you sit in front of the screen. They’re very structured activities. I’m thinking much broader than that.

Plenty more in the full post, though you’ll have to guess as to what Wright is actually making. I see clues. No specifics yet.

Will Wright on his entertainment startup, the Stupid Fun Club [VentureBeat]

For game enthusiasts who may find themselves in the greater Los Angeles area, you’ll be lucky enough to have access to indie game exhibitions for a nominal entrance fee. That means more than two dozen selected independent games, all of which will be on hand at the Wonderful World of Art Gallery, Culver Hotel Mezzanine and Gregg Fleishman Gallery daily from 10 AM to 7 PM.

Also attending this year’s Indiecade will be game development luminaries such as Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, Will Wright, and much, much more. I’ll be there. Will you?

IndieCade 2009 [Official Site]

The Chronicle of Higher Education sat down recently with Will Wright to talk to him about the value of educational games. Not only did they get some great money quotes, they got some great money business cards!

The interview starts off with Wright showing off his new business cards, which he’s had printed on replicas of foreign money. It then quickly drops into the topic, pulling this gem of a quote from the famed developer:

“If you look at what people are doing with this technology it is, or has been, mostly directed at 12-year-old boys. But it has the potential to do a whole lot more.”

Wright, when asked about educational and serious games, says that he thinks sometimes these games are a bit too focused on the idea, hinting that maybe they’re not so fun.

What they need to do, he says, is be a bit more abstract in how they deal with the idea.

Why should serious and educational game developers listen to Wright? He’s made a career out of making educational games, people just don’t realise it.

Wright says, as he told me, that the real power in gaming isn’t in its ability to educate, but its ability to motivate. Motivate people to educate themselves.

UPDATE: Sorry for the downtime with the video. All fixed now.

Creator of ‘The Sims’ Talks Educational Gaming

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Wright explains that the true key to motivating your employees is to know what motivates them, and not just from a development standpoint. Everyone has something they are passionate about, and once you discover that you can use it to help relate on a much more personal level.

…this to me is one of the important points of working collaboratively with other people – trying to get a sense of what is the one thing that makes their eyes light up, they get excited about and they won’t stop talking about. And if you can get a sense of what that is from somebody, and you can harness that, that’s going to have more impact on how they perform their job, how they relate to you, how you can convey a vision to them in a way that they get excited about it.

Talking about Wright as a manager and not as a game designer provides us with an interesting look into how the man operates. I think we tend to think of big-name creators like Wright and Sid Mead as if they simply give birth to video games, rather than managing a talented team of developers focused on delivering a unified vision. Wright began programming games at a time when a huge team wasn’t necessary, so it is intriguing – to me at least – to see how he has developed as a manager over the years.

I particularly like how he filters prospective employees by how they react to seemingly impossible ideas… those who get excited make the cut, while those who get stressed or depressed generally don’t. In the interview Wright also speaks extensively about balancing the team, and how an extremely skilled programmer who can’t work well with others might be worth less than a merely competent programmer that is truly a team player.

The key idea I took from the interview is the importance of knowing who you are working with on a level deeper than many traditional managers are willing to explore. It isn’t merely about putting people with the correct skills in the correct positions… it’s about knowing how said placement will affect the other people around them, and what they will bring to the table in the long run. In a way, it’s much like a complicated puzzle game, in which some pieces explode and others strengthen the other pieces around them. It’s the getting to know the pieces before dropping them that makes all the difference.

On Will Wright’s Team, Would You Be a Solvent, or the Glue? [The New York Times]

Capcom isn’t completely sure and that’s why they’re asking their blog readers to go support their iconic blue-clad hero by voting for him on the Robot Hall of Fame’s official site. The French robot, Maillardet’s Automaton is currently ahead of Mega Man by 8% — but I’d say Dr. Wily’s foe has much stiffer competition from Futurama’s Bender and Invader Zim’s Gir.

It may be that Mega Man still has a chance, even if the Automaton tops him in the voting pool; the Robot Hall of Fame has two categories to honour robots. One is for real-life robots like Honda’s ASIMO and the other honors robots from science fiction where robots “have achieved worldwide fame as fictional characters and have helped form our opinions about the functions and values of real robots.”

Hm. Maybe Bender and Gir’s chances aren’t so good, then. Also Will Wright is on the jury, so that may be Mega Man’s ace in the hole.

Get Mega Man into Robot Hall of Fame [Capcom]

ZootFly’s first game will pit the mohawked one against Nazis, obviously, bustin’ up the gigantic machines of the Third Reich in “South American rain forests, lost ancient cities, industrial complexes and contemporary military installations.” Mr. T will joined by SimCity and Spore designer Will Wright, who’s trading in his game design skills for genetic engineering skills. Unfortunately, Wright’s been kidnapped by them no good Nazis and T’s gotta help. Expect to pity those Nazi fools.

According to ZootFly’s announcement, each and every game will feature “knuckle-whitening action-adventure, furious brawler combat, gravity-defying platforming, and environmental puzzles.” That’s right, Jack! Environmental puzzles, sucka!

Whatever these Mr. T games will be called and whether Wright’s actually signed off on having his likeness in the T-rated games, they’ll be coming to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii and PC. Stay in school!

In an interview with GameDaily, Wright says it was a matter of balancing output with creativity:

You know, we either [port the game to console] or we continue creating new applications on the PC or we kind of go into the handheld arena. I can’t specifically say what the plans are right now, but really all these things are measured against each other. We can’t do everything at once, so we have to say, ‘What platforms would it kind of evolve the fastest on?’ So you can sort of look at a straight port to the PS3 and Xbox 360 and basically have the same game we have on the PC… or we could say, ‘What can we do on this platform that will help us explore different parts of the design?’ I think the Wii is really unique in that sense, with the things you can do on Wii that you can’t do on other platforms right now. It’s represented a lot of learning for us in terms of the directions we might take it. So I’d say that’s one of the under-appreciated aspects of how we choose to deploy this on different platforms.

A mouthful, yes, but we appreciate it. If only more developers could be so honest when explaining why games don’t launch on certain platforms, or may (as he seems to be suggesting) come to one platform later than another one.

Will Wright Confirms Future Involvement in Spore Franchise [GameDaily]

Will Wright, the man who launched a million sims, is broadening his horizons.

Will Wright may be leaving Maxis and Electronic Arts, but that doesn’t mean he’s leaving gaming. In fact some of his biggest ideas are for future games, he told us today.

When asked if he felt like he was leaving his gaming fanbase behind, he said no.

“That’s definitely not the case, some of the coolest things I’m thinking of working on are new games,” he said.

And those games won’t be a total departure from Wright’s history of making open-ended simulators. There will be “an almost unbroken lineage” between what he has done in the past and where he hopes to take gaming with Stupid Fun Club, he says.

Earlier today, Wright announced that he would be departing Maxis and Electronic Arts to spend all of his time working at an entertainment think tank developing new intellectual properties for all forms of entertainment from toys to television.

Stupid Fun Club, which was initially started in 2001 as an offshoot of his work building robots for Robot Wars, was dramatically restructured recently in time for the deal he signed with EA on Monday, he said.

“It started out in Berkeley, ” he said. “We were all doing Robot Wars together. We started building strange robots and then started doing these fun social experiments where we would have them encounter people and film it to study peoples’ reactions.”

That led to a lot of ideas, Wright said and people started stopping by to see if they could invest in the company. But Wright said he was reluctant to go down the path of an IPO or start up again, like he did with Maxis.

They started showing some of the ideas to Electronic Arts and the publisher got interested. “They were the perfect VC for us,” Wright said.

The relationship Stupid Fun Club will have with EA will, in some ways, be a broad version of the one Steven Spielberg has with the company, Wright said.

Wright says he was fascinated with the concept of the film maker working as an entertainment designer in a field he was unaccustomed to. And Boom Blox, he says, was a interesting product of that effort.

“Boom Blox was remarkable because it was not the game I was expecting from Steven Spielberg, but it was a blast to play,” he said. “There were no cinematic, no story, no anything. You could just pick it up and play it.

“He clearly understood games at a level I didn’t expect him to.”

Wright has been working for some time now trying to grow his understanding of other elements of entertainment as well.

“I’ve been kind of talking to people about TV shows and movies for awhile now,” he said, declining to say which games they would be based on.

When will we hear from Wright and his company again? Perhaps at this year’s E3? The designer said he wasn’t sure quite yet.

“Give me a few months and I’m sure you’ll hear something.”

Maybe the website for Will Wright’s entertainment think tank is just a website. But given that it has three games of sorts hidden on it, I’d like to think there’s more to it than that.

I’ve been messing around with all three for a bit now and am most intrigued by the one you can access by clicking on the black hole where a rectangle should be on the front page. Maybe Wright is just messing with us, but I’d like to think that if we get the order “right” it might reveal something.

Of course the website was created back in 2002, so maybe it’s just a bunch of silliness. Afterall, he did have a hand in making this M.Y. Robot video.

Stupid Fun Club