Will Wright

A city without a final victory

A neighbour suggested he read Urban Dynamics (1969), in which the MIT engineer Jay Forrester argued that urban planning could be done more rationally by computer simulation than by human intuition. “I started reading the early work of people like Jay Forrester,” Wright told Pearce. He combined Forrester’s feedback loops with the local rules of John Conway’s Game of Life, cells that change according to their neighbours, and began the city game in 1985. Broderbund could see no market for a game nobody could win and returned the rights. In 1986, at a pizza party in Alameda, he met Jeff Braun, a young businessman looking for a way into games. As Braun recounted the exchange to the designer and historian Chaim Gingold, Wright warned him, “You’re not going to like mine. It’s really awful,” because, he explained, “it’s not a game.” Braun liked it anyway; he foresaw, he told Seabrook, “an audience of megalomaniacs who want to control the world.” They founded Maxis in 1987, and SimCity came out for the Amiga and Macintosh in February 1989, with Broderbund back on board as distributor and a menu of disasters added for players who wanted to wreck what they had built. In the code even disaster is a model: the random monster only appears once average pollution passes a threshold, and it makes for the most polluted spot on the map.

What the city actually does is on public record. In January 2008 Electronic Arts released, under the GPL, the code of the Unix version that Don Hopkins ported around 1990, renamed Micropolis for the One Laptop per Child project; its README credits the simulation as “designed and implemented by Will Wright”. (Hopkins’s optimisations and later fixes are marked in the code, so not every line is Wright’s 1989 original.) Demand lives in three numbers, the residential, commercial and industrial “valves”. Every other cycle the function SetValves compares a projected population with the actual one: jobs per resident drive migration, a flat 2 per cent birth rate is added, commerce follows the size of the city’s internal market and industry an external market set by the difficulty level, and a tax table takes more demand away the higher the rate. The result is added to each valve rather than replacing it, so demand gathers speed and coasts. It reads like Forrester’s rates and levels rendered in a few dozen lines of C.

Each zone then tests itself. A residential zone first tries to send its people somewhere: MakeTraf looks for a road on the zone’s edge, and TryDrive takes a random walk of up to 30 road tiles in search of a destination; as a comment in DriveDone sums it up, homes look for commerce, commerce for industry, industry for homes. With no road the zone loses population. A trip that arrives adds traffic along the route it took, so traffic piles up on the roads that join homes to work. Growth then depends on the valve plus EvalRes, which is local land value minus pollution; an unpowered zone scores −500 and cannot grow. Land value, computed in PTLScan, is mostly closeness to the city centre, plus water and trees nearby, minus pollution, minus a penalty where crime runs high. Pollution is a lookup table (heavy traffic 75, industry 50, ports, airports and power plants 100, radioactive ground 255), then blurred across neighbouring cells as smoke would drift.

The rule most worth arguing with is CrimeScan. Crime in each block is 128 minus land value, plus population density, minus police coverage, and nothing else: cheap, crowded land breeds crime and only policing removes it. Fire spreads more like Conway’s cells. Each pass, a burning tile has a one-in-eight chance of igniting each flammable neighbour, and burns out to rubble faster inside a fire station’s range. These are the model’s assumptions, not laws of cities, and the game invites you to find them by trial. Wright compared playing it to gardening: you till and fertilise, things come up and surprise you, you weed. Anyone’s city, he told Pearce, is “a snapshot of their current understanding of the model.”

Gaia on a floppy disk, ants under glass

“Most of the games I’ve done were inspired by books,” Wright told Seabrook, and the next two came straight off his shelf. SimEarth (1990) put James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, the idea that life itself keeps a planet habitable, into a planetary model where the player adjusts atmospheric gases, continental drift and mutation rates over billions of years. Its title screen reads “by Fred Haslam & Will Wright with James Lovelock”: Haslam was co-designer, and Lovelock, introduced through Stewart Brand, advised on the geophysics and wrote the manual’s introduction. It includes his Daisyworld, a toy planet of black and white daisies that regulate their own temperature. It was also, players found, hard to read: species flourished or died for reasons the screen did not show.

SimAnt (1991) went the other way, light and legible. Wright built it with his high-school friend Justin McCormick, the two splitting the code and design, from E. O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler’s The Ants: a colony that finds food by laying and following pheromone trails, no ant knowing the plan. Wilson later said the game captured the subtleties of colony life. It sold modestly, and Wright later called it a disappointment for failing to show “how cool ants are”. He and Haslam then rebuilt the city for SimCity 2000 (1993), with terrain, underground water pipes and a newspaper that reported on the player’s choices; its success carried Maxis to a stock-market flotation in 1995. Losses followed almost at once. SimCopter (1996), Wright’s helicopter game set inside SimCity 2000 cities, became notorious when the designer Jacques Servin was fired for slipping in an Easter egg of men in swimming trunks kissing, his protest, he said, against sixty-hour weeks and the games’ default heterosexuality.

The extraordinary life of an ordinary house

On the morning of 20 October 1991 Wright smelled smoke at his house on Norfolk Road, high in the Oakland Hills, close to where a grass fire from the day before had not been fully put out. He rang 911 and was told everything was under control, he told Berkeleyside in 2011; he went to shave and shower, and rang again as the smoke thickened. He and Joell Jones took their neighbours, who had no car, grabbed some photographs and drove down Charing Cross Road through a corridor of flames. “We drove down Charing Cross Road which is where all the people died. We were about five minutes ahead when we got there.” His house was among the first to burn. A week later he found chimneys, barbecue grills and one car reduced to “a big puddle of melted aluminum.” He keeps its charred remains in his house today, like a sculpture. Two weeks earlier he had happened to take the SimAnt source code to the office. On the burned ground, the only survivors he could see were ants, carrying off their dead.

Replacing everything taught him something. “The interesting part was to find out that I wasn’t really that attached to much,” he said; he found himself listing needs, “a toothbrush, underwear, a car, a house,” and wondering why anyone believed an object would make them happier. He had already watched his daughter Cassidy, born in 1986, play with a dollhouse and had walked around his own home asking, as he told Seabrook, “What’s the least number of motives or needs that would justify all this crap in my house?” He read time-use studies and research on shopping, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (which judges a building by the life it supports), Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Charles Hampden-Turner’s Maps of the Mind. “I don’t believe any one theory of human psychology is correct,” he said. “The Sims just ended up being a mishmash of stuff that worked in the game.”

Almost nobody wanted it. Jeff Braun remembered the Maxis board’s verdict: “What is this? He wants to do an interactive doll house? The guy is out of his mind.” Marketing tested the idea on teenage boys, Gingold writes, “and found that they hated it.” Wright renamed it Project X, a “Tactical Domestic Simulator,” and worked on it with one borrowed programmer, Jamie Doornbos, who became its lead programmer, while Maxis floated on the stock market, lost money and, at the end of 1996, cancelled it. Jim Mackraz, head of Maxis’s Core Technology Group, kept it alive by quietly shifting money and people. When Electronic Arts bought the failing Maxis in 1997 (Wright took about $17 million in EA stock for his share), the new owners liked the project, by then called Jefferson. Women on the team changed its direction: the artists Jenny Martin and Suzie Greene pushed Wright to put people and their personalities ahead of architectural efficiency, as Cassidy did after playing prototypes, and the designers Claire Curtin and Roxy Wolosenko joined as co-designers. Seabrook reported that women made up 40 per cent of the development team.

The Sims came out in February 2000. Each Sim has eight motives (hunger, hygiene, bladder, comfort, energy, social, fun and room), and the objects in the house carry the code for what they offer those needs. As Chris Hecker, later a Spore programmer, explained the design, “The objects create ‘verbs’”: drop in a new espresso machine and Sims know how to use it without any change to the game. That is why a family can be undone by the distance from the bed to the bathroom, and why expansion packs could keep selling furniture. Wright called it a parody of consumerism: build a mansion full of stuff without cheating, he said, and “you realize that all these objects end up sucking up all your time.” Cassidy was upset to find that Sims could burn to death if they cooked carelessly; her father left the fire in. The Sims became, for a time, the best-selling PC game ever made, and players used it for soap opera, satire, cruelty (the swimming pool with its ladder removed) and self-portraiture. The Sims Online (2002), which Wright designed, failed to find the same crowd.

Creation travels between players

Spore began as “Sim Everything.” Wright announced it at the Game Developers Conference in March 2005 as a game whose scale ran from a single cell to a galaxy, built on two “landmarks”: Frank Drake’s equation for estimating the number of communicating civilisations, and Charles and Ray Eames’s film Powers of Ten. “At some point I realized that the terms of Drake’s equation mapped neatly to the scale of ‘The Powers of Ten,’” he told Seabrook. “So I rolled the two up into Spore.” Each stage borrowed a genre (a Pac-Man-like cell game, a creature game, a Molyneux-style tribal god game, a Civilization-style conquest, a space game), and the editors were the centre. In the creature editor, designed by Chaim Gingold, a player stretches a spine, adds legs, mouths and eyes, paints the skin and presses a button to see the thing walk.

Making an unknown body move was the technical problem. Chris Hecker and colleagues described the answer at SIGGRAPH in 2008. Animators posed and keyframed motions in an in-house tool called Spasm, which stored them in a “morphology-independent” form that keeps a motion’s structure and style rather than the movements of particular bones. At run time the game fits that description to whatever skeleton the player has built and hands the resulting goals to an inverse-kinematics solver. Creatures uploaded to the Sporepedia could then be downloaded into other players’ worlds, so a single-player game was populated by everyone else’s inventions.

The science was traded away in the open. “There was a fairly interesting dynamic between certain members of our team that we ended up calling the ‘cute’ team versus other members that we called the ‘science’ team,” Wright told Time’s Lev Grossman in September 2008. “We ended up splitting the difference.” His example was the cell stage: a translucent, microscope-like world, “but the cells have eyes. And they make cute little sounds when they bump into things.” Asked by MTV’s Stephen Totilo whether the stages had been simplified for a casual audience, he said, “I’d say that’s quite accurate,” and explained that the team had decided they would “rather have the Metacritic and sales of Sims 2 than the Metacritic and sales of Half-Life.” Reviewers praised the editors and found the stages thin. A panel of scientists assembled by Science graded the game’s biology and gave it Fs on natural selection, mutation and genetics, since a creature evolves by the player buying parts.

The team had grown from about 75 in 2006, housed in its own building in Emeryville, to more than 200 by release in September 2008, inside a corporation Wright chafed against; when managers objected to a salt lick he had put up among the cubicles, he added a sign reading EMPLOYEES ONLY. EA shipped Spore with SecuROM copy protection and a three-machine activation limit, and thousands of buyers left one-star reviews on Amazon in protest. EA said it sold two million copies in three weeks. Wright and Jones separated in 2008. In April 2009 he left EA to start the Stupid Fun Club, with EA as an investor.