13 ms·

Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996)

370 points by DonHopkins 4y ago

DonHopkins 4y ago
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 Recordings https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_text/ https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_tex... Will Wright, Maxis, "Interfacing to Microworlds", April 26, 1996: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999 Will Wright, Maxis, "Games and Simulation", May 2, 2003 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pw467bz3079 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pw467bz3079 Will Wright, Maxis / Electronic Arts, "Laughing Creative Communities: Lessons for the Spore community experience", May 22, 2009 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pd936vc7267 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pd936vc7267 I 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=nsxoZXaYJSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk And 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-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
- Donckele 4y ago
  Thank you for the links and the youtube upload!
- ido 4y ago
  Thanks a lot! And it’s amazing students had such an opportunity - students here get to hear people like me instead (I think pretty highly of myself but I’m no Will Wright!) It would be like having Carmack come over to talk about 3d rendering (in the 90s no less)…
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  Thank you, this is amazing! The various "sim" games were discussed quite a bit during my master studies in Interaction Design - as were your pie menus, by the way :) PS: the update on the medium blog post accidentally says 2013-1-27 instead of 2023-1-27. Small but confusing typo
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    Thank you! The year in the title was totally different too -- I am REALLY not into knowing what year it is!
- recuter 4y ago
  I always love reading your comments, thank you very much.
- _448 4y ago
  This is what passion for a domain looks like, and also your respect for others is really admirable! And your efforts to not only share all the information but to go further than that and proofread and cleaned it so that it is accessible to others is highly respectable. Thank you for sharing this information with us!
- amitp 4y ago
  Wow, thank you for this! I got to see Dollhouse in late 1996(). Having loved SimCity, SimEarth, etc., I admit I didn't "get it" when I saw Dollhouse. I had plans this morning but I'm going to watch these videos instead :-) () in part because of my gamedev web site, and in part because I was working on a sim game and Maxis lawyers didn't want me calling it SimAnything
tigerlily 4y ago
> "So, when I got a computer in my early twenties..." Did Will have exposure to computing before this time? If not, it kinda blows the whole digital natives thing away.
- cookie_monsta 4y ago
  There's a digital natives thing?
  - tigerlily 4y ago
    Yeah the thing where schools force kids to have a Google account to be able to take part, and parents just blithely accept. Idk, maybe it's just a thing where I live.
    - cookie_monsta 4y ago
      Oh, that's not what I understand by digital natives at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
      - tigerlily 4y ago
        I guess some educational policy wonks must've got in bed with big tech and appropriated the digital natives term as defined in the Wiki article, as a means of creating a fomo, allowing big tech to reach into elementary schools and steal childhood.
- npteljes 4y ago
  I'm also among those who contest the whole digital native thing. I think that growing up in the information age is not really correlated with being good with tech and computers, those skills, if you can call it that even, can be picked up any time. It's just that people don't bother - young people don't bother with icky old people things, old people don't bother with the strange new things, everyone has got their excuse to not expend energy on change.
jakear 4y ago
Love the "Antique Soviet Space Junk" collection, it'd awesome to see the full collection digitized - great resource for intuitive UI development. Relatedly, I've recently been working on UI's inspired by the F-15 cockpit [1,2]. It's neat how on one hand the controls are amazingly complicated (Enough knobs and dials to fly a fighter jet! With 0 losses to boot!), but on the other hand you can get a pretty good sense of how everything operates just by reading the labels and diagrams painted atop them. The acronyms are a different story, but then that's what manuals and all those hours of training are for. [1]: https://waltham.pages.dev https://waltham.pages.dev, F-15's clock/timer element [2]: https://solunar.pages.dev https://solunar.pages.dev, tide charts based on F-15 UI elements. WIP, still gotta figure out how to render the location selection -- the soviet globe UI in the OP is quite interesting. For now set the url's hash to your favorite NOAA station's id if you're really interested :)
- criddell 4y ago
  Could you could take design ideas from the F-15 cockpit and use them without being skeuomorphic? Would you end up with a UI of checkboxes and radio buttons? Or was the whole goal to make something that looks like physical cockpit control? I think some aspects, like toggle controls, are not very common today. Some people might have no idea what they are.
  - jakear 4y ago
    The fun part in developing for myself is I don't have to care what "some people" don't know. :) That said, I believe my toggles have a couple benefits: they're labeled on both sides, so it's more clear what the options are. And the change is immediately visible, again making the functionality more obvious. The "modern" toggle where a circle can be on either end of an elongated cylinder and a string of text is somewhere across the screen in a step down from that, IMO.
- somat 4y ago
  On the subject of controls that don't translate well, Rotary knobs are great as a physical device, But they feel terrible as a mouse controlled item. The biggest offenders are audio plugins, they tend to be very skeuomorphic, almost to a fault. I don't mind a little skeuomorphism, in fact I think it can help readability of the interface. But the way audio plugins take it to an extreme and cram as many rotary knobs in there as possible is maddening.
noduerme 4y ago
As the presenter in the first video says, Will Wright lead to a "real shift" in the "younger generation" about how "people think about computers and about computing in general". As a member of the Will Wright generation of 12 year old Mac programmers who tried to take his games apart with ResEdit and tried to make our own, with Perl and HyperCard, this was really resonant, really true. When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer. He turned incredibly complex systems into games and games into systems, so that reading his game manuals made you think about the whole world. One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual systems or logical rules they're playing with, and just learning to trick something that's already inscrutable and smarter than them. Mastering AI prompts or even running your own neural net doesn't teach anything like logic or the kind of deep, recursive cause and effect structure you could get from Will Wright's toys, or even from CK3... even if you get all your prompts perfect to make what you want, it teaches something much more like dependence on a magical oracle than, say, a toy/game/sim that really encourages you to deconstruct and take pleasure in all its interconnections that you can understand.
- szundi 4y ago
  My funny hypothesis is that the ones who can actually make something out of the AI/machine learning trend are those who are good in this logical thinking you are talking about, not the ones who try to skip it on the way.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    I'm tempted to think you're right, but we're probably going to have to live through a 5 years long boom / bust of illogical, unthinking children getting in and building very stupid things with very powerful weapons before another cryptocurrency-style crash. On the whole it is not going to serve as a technology to even teach young coders to think for themselves, let alone the devastating effects it will have on society and human relationships in all countries. Really, I mean, force kids to learn BASIC or Pascal or whatever... but these AI systems cannot ever be understood by people who grow up taking computation for granted (and only learning how to tinker with them on the surface). If they aren't understood, they will be treated like a magic box for answers, and worshipped as a deity or an oracle. I don't think it is too much to say that ChatGPT is the Golden Calf that represented the type of lazy thinking or psychological projection into imagined, embodied "gods" which the monotheistic religions starting with Judaism found to be morally atrocious. And why? Because giving up one's rational beliefs or even one's irrational monotheistic belief in a God to the fantasms and stories created of idols and their stewards was a form of slavery from which you could not rescue yourself or your children. Guarding the Word presages guarding its corruption by machine, several thousand years in advance. And Islam, Christianity and Judaism are all a warning against allowing the machinery - even seemingly perfect technologies - to become a god. [edit] and FWIW I am an atheist, but that only makes me more concerned, as I see a new and more terrifying irrationality taking the place of the old. The new religion of CHATGPT will be much more terrifying because the entity it worships will be PRESENT AND ALIVE...
gardenmud 4y ago
Very cool! A lot of this tech still is fascinating today. Well... visually not so stunning, of course, but in concept and execution.
musesum 4y ago
Will Wright taught me about "turtleducks" Met him at the Computer History Museum, maybe around 2007. He had a branching storyboard-style presentation with 100's of slides. In the middle of the talk, he asked the audience about which direction they wanted to explore. Based on a show of hands, he proceeded to branch off into a few dozen more slides. Pretty epic. Anyway, Turtleducks: we met later and I demoed a visual music synth. Was wondering if it would fit somehow into Sim-City. He said: "Well, what I have is a turtle and what you have is a duck. You can't just put a duck on a turtle and get a turtleduck." [Am paraphrasing.] Ironically, a year later, he introduce Spore -- thus, solving the turtleduck problem. At least, in the turtle/duck domain.
- a13o 4y ago
  My go-to name for this is 'Nuts & Gum' from the Simpsons. In the show, Homer pulls down a can from the cupboard and the camera zooms in so we can read the product label: Nuts & Gum! Together at last! These two products would obviously be horrible together; a crumbly thing, and a thing you can't swallow. But on their own they're just fine.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    You've never done the trick, apparently. When you're chewing gum, try adding a "real food", like a peanut. The gum changes texture dramatically. It has to do with saliva enzymes, i'm told.
    - vanderZwan 4y ago
      This just triggered a memory synapse that probably has been unused for literal decades about how when I was a kid we only could buy really bad chewing gum in our village, the type that quickly lost flavor and ended up really tough to chew, and how we would experiment with eating something else like licorice or a cookie to re-introduce flavor or soften it up. Even thinking about the texture of chewing gum mixed with brittle cookies now grosses me out, but childhood me had different tastes I guess.
corysama 4y ago
Will Wright’s talks at the Game Developers Conference were not to be missed. They were wild, fascinating and funny. He would often go off-topic with mini-presentations like the “Russian Space Minute” where he marveled at the analog computers used in space by the cosmonauts. It’s really hard to find recordings. I don’t even know if they are all available anywhere on the Internet.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Here are the videos of the three talks by Will Wright (including this one) presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class over the years. Stanford Library has just recently made these available! I uploaded this one to youtube and closed captioned it, and I'll get around to the others when I have the chance. There are a LOT of really excellent historic videos in the collection by many other amazing people. Guide to the Stanford University, Computer Science Department, HCI Group, CS547 Seminar Videorecordings https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_text/ https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_tex... Stanford University, Computer Science Department, HCI Group, CS547 seminar videorecordings, 1990-2012 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10637698 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10637698 From: Henry E Lowood at Stanford All, This video has been reformatted and is streamed from the Stanford website. As far as I can tell, there should be no restriction on access from off-campus: Interfacing to Microworlds, Will Wright, Maxis in SearchWorks catalog (stanford.edu) (April 26, 1996) https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999 Two more of Will’s lectures streamed from Stanford: Will Wright, Maxis, "Games and Simulation" in SearchWorks catalog (stanford.edu) (May 2, 2003) https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pw467bz3079 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pw467bz3079 Laughing Creative Communities: Lessons for the Spore community experience, Will Wright, Maxis / Electronic Arts in SearchWorks catalog (stanford.edu) (May 22, 2009) https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pd936vc7267 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pd936vc7267 If you have issues viewing the videos, please let me know and I will pass the information along to our media lab. Having had the pleasure of Will lecturing in my Stanford course on one or two occasions, I am glad to see that these examples of his thinking (and lecturing style!) are available. Please consider sending important documents to Stanford for preservation. We offer one of the leading collections of game-related archival material for research and instruction and our streaming services are robust. All my best, Henry Henry Lowood, PhD Harold C. Hohbach Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, Curator for Film & Media Collections. HSSG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall Stanford University Libraries, Stanford CA 93405-6004 Web: https://people.stanford.edu/lowood/ https://people.stanford.edu/lowood/ Email: lowood@stanford.edu
samsquire 4y ago
One game I would like to see is the cloud scalability game. You simulate a cloud environment and buy servers and staff and rack servers and install software and try handle extreme levels of traffic.
the_af 4y ago
Very interesting article, with lots of food for thought. I find it fascinating that you can think of an interesting simulation with fun gameplay, but without a good UI, and that therefore won't work as a game. I also liked the idea that the user's mental model of the game is not necessarily represented by the actual code running the simulation. But if one "closes the gap", Scott McCloud style, then it's good enough! Also, I must say that I really liked SimCity (classic, the only one I really played) but also loved SimAnt, which the article (or Wright, actually) calls "too simple". I dunno, I really liked it. You could even play as the spider and hunt ants! You just had to be careful, because a single ant is prey for the spider, but a bunch of ants become the predators. Finally, for all of its technical achievements, I never really liked The Sims or any of its variants. It seemed impressive but what is the gameplay? Seemed like a variation on tamagotchis, and so I never got the urge to really play it even back when it was all the rage.
amelius 4y ago
I wonder how these games and their UI would evolve if you added Gpt3 to it.

370 points by DonHopkins 4y ago

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 Recordings https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_text/ https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_tex... Will Wright, Maxis, "Interfacing to Microworlds", April 26, 1996: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999 Will Wright, Maxis, "Games and Simulation", May 2, 2003 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pw467bz3079 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pw467bz3079 Will Wright, Maxis / Electronic Arts, "Laughing Creative Communities: Lessons for the Spore community experience", May 22, 2009 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pd936vc7267 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pd936vc7267 I 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=nsxoZXaYJSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk And 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-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

Donckele 4y ago
Thank you for the links and the youtube upload!
ido 4y ago
Thanks a lot! And it’s amazing students had such an opportunity - students here get to hear people like me instead (I think pretty highly of myself but I’m no Will Wright!) It would be like having Carmack come over to talk about 3d rendering (in the 90s no less)…
vanderZwan 4y ago
Thank you, this is amazing! The various "sim" games were discussed quite a bit during my master studies in Interaction Design - as were your pie menus, by the way :) PS: the update on the medium blog post accidentally says 2013-1-27 instead of 2023-1-27. Small but confusing typo
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Thank you! The year in the title was totally different too -- I am REALLY not into knowing what year it is!
recuter 4y ago
I always love reading your comments, thank you very much.
_448 4y ago
This is what passion for a domain looks like, and also your respect for others is really admirable! And your efforts to not only share all the information but to go further than that and proofread and cleaned it so that it is accessible to others is highly respectable. Thank you for sharing this information with us!
amitp 4y ago
Wow, thank you for this! I got to see Dollhouse in late 1996(). Having loved SimCity, SimEarth, etc., I admit I didn't "get it" when I saw Dollhouse. I had plans this morning but I'm going to watch these videos instead :-) () in part because of my gamedev web site, and in part because I was working on a sim game and Maxis lawyers didn't want me calling it SimAnything

tigerlily 4y ago

> "So, when I got a computer in my early twenties..." Did Will have exposure to computing before this time? If not, it kinda blows the whole digital natives thing away.

cookie_monsta 4y ago
There's a digital natives thing?
- tigerlily 4y ago
  Yeah the thing where schools force kids to have a Google account to be able to take part, and parents just blithely accept. Idk, maybe it's just a thing where I live.
  - cookie_monsta 4y ago
    Oh, that's not what I understand by digital natives at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native
    - tigerlily 4y ago
      I guess some educational policy wonks must've got in bed with big tech and appropriated the digital natives term as defined in the Wiki article, as a means of creating a fomo, allowing big tech to reach into elementary schools and steal childhood.
npteljes 4y ago
I'm also among those who contest the whole digital native thing. I think that growing up in the information age is not really correlated with being good with tech and computers, those skills, if you can call it that even, can be picked up any time. It's just that people don't bother - young people don't bother with icky old people things, old people don't bother with the strange new things, everyone has got their excuse to not expend energy on change.

jakear 4y ago

Love the "Antique Soviet Space Junk" collection, it'd awesome to see the full collection digitized - great resource for intuitive UI development. Relatedly, I've recently been working on UI's inspired by the F-15 cockpit [1,2]. It's neat how on one hand the controls are amazingly complicated (Enough knobs and dials to fly a fighter jet! With 0 losses to boot!), but on the other hand you can get a pretty good sense of how everything operates just by reading the labels and diagrams painted atop them. The acronyms are a different story, but then that's what manuals and all those hours of training are for. [1]: https://waltham.pages.dev https://waltham.pages.dev, F-15's clock/timer element [2]: https://solunar.pages.dev https://solunar.pages.dev, tide charts based on F-15 UI elements. WIP, still gotta figure out how to render the location selection -- the soviet globe UI in the OP is quite interesting. For now set the url's hash to your favorite NOAA station's id if you're really interested :)

criddell 4y ago
Could you could take design ideas from the F-15 cockpit and use them without being skeuomorphic? Would you end up with a UI of checkboxes and radio buttons? Or was the whole goal to make something that looks like physical cockpit control? I think some aspects, like toggle controls, are not very common today. Some people might have no idea what they are.
- jakear 4y ago
  The fun part in developing for myself is I don't have to care what "some people" don't know. :) That said, I believe my toggles have a couple benefits: they're labeled on both sides, so it's more clear what the options are. And the change is immediately visible, again making the functionality more obvious. The "modern" toggle where a circle can be on either end of an elongated cylinder and a string of text is somewhere across the screen in a step down from that, IMO.
somat 4y ago
On the subject of controls that don't translate well, Rotary knobs are great as a physical device, But they feel terrible as a mouse controlled item. The biggest offenders are audio plugins, they tend to be very skeuomorphic, almost to a fault. I don't mind a little skeuomorphism, in fact I think it can help readability of the interface. But the way audio plugins take it to an extreme and cram as many rotary knobs in there as possible is maddening.

noduerme 4y ago

As the presenter in the first video says, Will Wright lead to a "real shift" in the "younger generation" about how "people think about computers and about computing in general". As a member of the Will Wright generation of 12 year old Mac programmers who tried to take his games apart with ResEdit and tried to make our own, with Perl and HyperCard, this was really resonant, really true. When SimEarth came out, I spent hours and hours just rereading the thick paper manual of how it all worked, because the only places I could play it on the disks were in the computer lab after school, or for an hour a day on the home computer. He turned incredibly complex systems into games and games into systems, so that reading his game manuals made you think about the whole world. One thing sad to me now, with the focus on GPT or Diffusion prompts, is how much kids are no longer thinking about the actual systems or logical rules they're playing with, and just learning to trick something that's already inscrutable and smarter than them. Mastering AI prompts or even running your own neural net doesn't teach anything like logic or the kind of deep, recursive cause and effect structure you could get from Will Wright's toys, or even from CK3... even if you get all your prompts perfect to make what you want, it teaches something much more like dependence on a magical oracle than, say, a toy/game/sim that really encourages you to deconstruct and take pleasure in all its interconnections that you can understand.

szundi 4y ago
My funny hypothesis is that the ones who can actually make something out of the AI/machine learning trend are those who are good in this logical thinking you are talking about, not the ones who try to skip it on the way.
- noduerme 4y ago
  I'm tempted to think you're right, but we're probably going to have to live through a 5 years long boom / bust of illogical, unthinking children getting in and building very stupid things with very powerful weapons before another cryptocurrency-style crash. On the whole it is not going to serve as a technology to even teach young coders to think for themselves, let alone the devastating effects it will have on society and human relationships in all countries. Really, I mean, force kids to learn BASIC or Pascal or whatever... but these AI systems cannot ever be understood by people who grow up taking computation for granted (and only learning how to tinker with them on the surface). If they aren't understood, they will be treated like a magic box for answers, and worshipped as a deity or an oracle. I don't think it is too much to say that ChatGPT is the Golden Calf that represented the type of lazy thinking or psychological projection into imagined, embodied "gods" which the monotheistic religions starting with Judaism found to be morally atrocious. And why? Because giving up one's rational beliefs or even one's irrational monotheistic belief in a God to the fantasms and stories created of idols and their stewards was a form of slavery from which you could not rescue yourself or your children. Guarding the Word presages guarding its corruption by machine, several thousand years in advance. And Islam, Christianity and Judaism are all a warning against allowing the machinery - even seemingly perfect technologies - to become a god. [edit] and FWIW I am an atheist, but that only makes me more concerned, as I see a new and more terrifying irrationality taking the place of the old. The new religion of CHATGPT will be much more terrifying because the entity it worships will be PRESENT AND ALIVE...

gardenmud 4y ago

Very cool! A lot of this tech still is fascinating today. Well... visually not so stunning, of course, but in concept and execution.

musesum 4y ago

Will Wright taught me about "turtleducks" Met him at the Computer History Museum, maybe around 2007. He had a branching storyboard-style presentation with 100's of slides. In the middle of the talk, he asked the audience about which direction they wanted to explore. Based on a show of hands, he proceeded to branch off into a few dozen more slides. Pretty epic. Anyway, Turtleducks: we met later and I demoed a visual music synth. Was wondering if it would fit somehow into Sim-City. He said: "Well, what I have is a turtle and what you have is a duck. You can't just put a duck on a turtle and get a turtleduck." [Am paraphrasing.] Ironically, a year later, he introduce Spore -- thus, solving the turtleduck problem. At least, in the turtle/duck domain.

a13o 4y ago
My go-to name for this is 'Nuts & Gum' from the Simpsons. In the show, Homer pulls down a can from the cupboard and the camera zooms in so we can read the product label: Nuts & Gum! Together at last! These two products would obviously be horrible together; a crumbly thing, and a thing you can't swallow. But on their own they're just fine.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- h2odragon 4y ago
  You've never done the trick, apparently. When you're chewing gum, try adding a "real food", like a peanut. The gum changes texture dramatically. It has to do with saliva enzymes, i'm told.
  - vanderZwan 4y ago
    This just triggered a memory synapse that probably has been unused for literal decades about how when I was a kid we only could buy really bad chewing gum in our village, the type that quickly lost flavor and ended up really tough to chew, and how we would experiment with eating something else like licorice or a cookie to re-introduce flavor or soften it up. Even thinking about the texture of chewing gum mixed with brittle cookies now grosses me out, but childhood me had different tastes I guess.

corysama 4y ago

Will Wright’s talks at the Game Developers Conference were not to be missed. They were wild, fascinating and funny. He would often go off-topic with mini-presentations like the “Russian Space Minute” where he marveled at the analog computers used in space by the cosmonauts. It’s really hard to find recordings. I don’t even know if they are all available anywhere on the Internet.

DonHopkins 4y ago
Here are the videos of the three talks by Will Wright (including this one) presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class over the years. Stanford Library has just recently made these available! I uploaded this one to youtube and closed captioned it, and I'll get around to the others when I have the chance. There are a LOT of really excellent historic videos in the collection by many other amazing people. Guide to the Stanford University, Computer Science Department, HCI Group, CS547 Seminar Videorecordings https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_text/ https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_tex... Stanford University, Computer Science Department, HCI Group, CS547 seminar videorecordings, 1990-2012 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10637698 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10637698 From: Henry E Lowood at Stanford All, This video has been reformatted and is streamed from the Stanford website. As far as I can tell, there should be no restriction on access from off-campus: Interfacing to Microworlds, Will Wright, Maxis in SearchWorks catalog (stanford.edu) (April 26, 1996) https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999 Two more of Will’s lectures streamed from Stanford: Will Wright, Maxis, "Games and Simulation" in SearchWorks catalog (stanford.edu) (May 2, 2003) https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pw467bz3079 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pw467bz3079 Laughing Creative Communities: Lessons for the Spore community experience, Will Wright, Maxis / Electronic Arts in SearchWorks catalog (stanford.edu) (May 22, 2009) https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pd936vc7267 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pd936vc7267 If you have issues viewing the videos, please let me know and I will pass the information along to our media lab. Having had the pleasure of Will lecturing in my Stanford course on one or two occasions, I am glad to see that these examples of his thinking (and lecturing style!) are available. Please consider sending important documents to Stanford for preservation. We offer one of the leading collections of game-related archival material for research and instruction and our streaming services are robust. All my best, Henry Henry Lowood, PhD Harold C. Hohbach Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, Curator for Film & Media Collections. HSSG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall Stanford University Libraries, Stanford CA 93405-6004 Web: https://people.stanford.edu/lowood/ https://people.stanford.edu/lowood/ Email: lowood@stanford.edu

samsquire 4y ago

One game I would like to see is the cloud scalability game. You simulate a cloud environment and buy servers and staff and rack servers and install software and try handle extreme levels of traffic.

the_af 4y ago

Very interesting article, with lots of food for thought. I find it fascinating that you can think of an interesting simulation with fun gameplay, but without a good UI, and that therefore won't work as a game. I also liked the idea that the user's mental model of the game is not necessarily represented by the actual code running the simulation. But if one "closes the gap", Scott McCloud style, then it's good enough! Also, I must say that I really liked SimCity (classic, the only one I really played) but also loved SimAnt, which the article (or Wright, actually) calls "too simple". I dunno, I really liked it. You could even play as the spider and hunt ants! You just had to be careful, because a single ant is prey for the spider, but a bunch of ants become the predators. Finally, for all of its technical achievements, I never really liked The Sims or any of its variants. It seemed impressive but what is the gameplay? Seemed like a variation on tamagotchis, and so I never got the urge to really play it even back when it was all the rage.

amelius 4y ago

I wonder how these games and their UI would evolve if you added Gpt3 to it.