Will Wright: The Need to Learn Long Term Planning

(note: safari (beta) users may not find the video... for some insane reason it disappeared. if you do encounter that error, may i recommend visiting Ted.com for the streaming video: here. For firefox/mozilla browser users you should be fine and you can view it from this page. Internet Explorer users, sorry, i haven't tested if the video works or not for your platform, but if it doesn't please follow this link, to view the video. thank you and sorry for the trouble.)

Who is Will Wright? Have you ever played a game of Sim City, a city simulator, where you are the mayor and you build your little town? Maybe you've played a game of the Sims that simulate real life from being born to raising a family, to finding a job or starting a business, even taking care of your real life pet? Will Wright is a game designer. Sim City and Sims family of games are his creations. He is the game designer. But what has it got to do with the need for humans to gain long term planning?

The thing about his games is that they are addicting, engaging and you can literally spend countless hours immersed in that world. The vision for his next game is the most ambitious of his creations. Spore is for a lack of a better way to describe it: Maya for kids plus the Sims plus Civilization. What Will Wright hopes (well one of many, I suppose) is for Kids to learn the value of Long Term Planning.

In Spore, his next game, the player starts out building a character from a single celled organism. It is the player who takes that organism and turns it into a sentient being. He guides it through the process of civilization--- even to the point of being able to fashion an entire planet in the process and push that civilization to the stars. The simulator is sophisticated that you can for example manipulate the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere--- raise or lower planetary temperature and watch your creations deal with the consequences of doing that.

It is a subtle way of teaching long term planning and consequences of our actions, which quite frankly, I must agree with Will Wright, is one of our biggest fundamental flaws as a species.

Most Addicting

The world is filled with so many things that can be addicting like games and viral videos. Games that are simply so good. And no, you are never too old to be addicted.

I am a Solarwolf addict. There are no offensive weapons in the game. You've got asteroids flying every which way. Space mines sprinkled all over. Time is running out, adrenaline rush.

original image is from here.

What's not to love?

Solarwolf is an action-arcade game written in pygame. It is absolutely addicting. Solarwolf is also open source--- not to mention it runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OSX, IRIX, Solaris and BeOS. This game was made by a guy named Eero Tamminen. According to Planet Solarwolf, this game was based on SolarFox on the Atari 2600.

Speaking of addicting games, since we're all waiting for Spore... something came out from everyone's friend, Blizzard. What the heck am I talking about?

Starcraft 2 is real!

original video is here.

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It's been nearly a decade since the first Starcraft came out. And if one could base game greatness on trailers--- this one is umping our expectations.

Finally, youtube can be addicting. or should i say viral videos? Here's another one of those: I'm a Marvel, I'm a DC but this one's the "Villains' Edition". Enjoy.

original youtube link here.