Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996)
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 Recordingshttps://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_tex...Will Wright, Maxis, "Interfacing to Microworlds", April 26, 1996:https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999Will Wright, Maxis, "Games and Simulation", May 2, 2003https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pw467bz3079Will Wright, Maxis / Electronic Arts, "Laughing Creative Communities: Lessons for the Spore community experience", May 22, 2009https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pd936vc7267I 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.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSkAnd 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.https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...