For Will Wright, story time is all the time

"Story, really, is following one causal chain and presenting that to the viewer," said Wright, designer of games like The Sims, SimCity and Electronic Arts' forthcoming Spore, in his keynote speech at South by Southwest Interactive here on Tuesday. In his hour onstage, Wright spelled out--in a coffee-fueled frenzy--his personal view of interactive storytelling.

The talk ended with a new demonstration of Spore, which, while similar to the version EA has shown for about two years, appeared to be much more streamlined, with more developed graphics and slightly more developed gameplay.

Wright led the crowd through his usual demonstration of the Spore creature editor, which allows players to quickly build fantastical little animals in mere moments. He is particularly fond of how fast players can color their new creations.

"We've taken something that would take a texture artist a couple days," Wright said as he automatically filled in the colors on a new Spore creature, "and reduced it to a couple hundred milliseconds."

Wright also explained that to him and his Spore colleagues, the game--which is expected sometime in the second half of 2007--is akin to a very elaborate Montessori toy. He said that because of the scientific theories it is based on--such as Powers of 10 and SETI@home--and because the game is designed, to some extent, to predict what would make the game world more interesting, it is in fact an elaborate philosophy tool.

"You walk away thinking about the meaning of life," he said. "How did we get here?"

Will Wright

He also showed how artificial societies in Spore can be quickly turned into representations of human behavior.

For example, he showed how, by dropping a monolith into a populated area, he created a religious icon. The next thing that happened was that the local creatures quickly began worshipping the monolith.

Wright used the rest of the demo to showcase additional features of Spore, some of which had not been seen before. Those included the ability to change climates, quickly raising the temperature of an area on a planet so seas recede or even disappear altogether.

He then joked that Spore could be a sequel to the Al Gore documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, as he melted a planet with his cloud ray.

Essentially, he argued, Spore can give players a toy version of evolution.

Earlier, Wright had started his keynote by showing pictures from the Hubble space telescope, "one of my favorite robots of all time."

For about half an hour, Wright led the audience on a whirlwind tour of his philosophy of interactive (read: video game) storytelling, and how it differs from that of movies.

He said that the most important property of storytelling to him is empathy, and that that is something movies do a good job of establishing.

But he also said video games can instill a sense of pride and guilt in ways movies cannot.

"I've played (the video game) Black and White and beat up my characters to see what would happen," Wright said. "I've never felt guilty watching a movie."

The point, he said, is that games provide more proactive agency: "I am causing what is going on on the screen."

Still, he also said that any kind of story can open up the "possibility space" for those watching or reading.

For example, he pointed to the famous scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones is running away from the giant rolling stone.

"What if he trips there, or falls down the hole?" he asked. We're "imagining all these little possibilities that don't happen in the film."

And what some interactive storytellers struggle with, Wright suggested, is offering a causal chain of events, presumably one that leads viewers to experience the richest possible palette of emotions.

Wright then turned to what he said was one of his favorite types of stories, the kind where the story line is "going along and going along and then all of a sudden it takes a (major, unexpected) turn."

He used several films as examples, including Memento, which he said had an interactive method of playing with the causal chain.

"At some point," Wright explained, "each future point in the (film's) chain caused you to re-evaluate what you'd seen before. It was kind of an interactive puzzle game."

Another of his favorite stories, he said, is Groundhog Day.

"It's an interactive sequence (the Bill Murray character is) going through," Wright said. "All of a sudden, it's 6 a.m. again. Basically, it was a game (and) he had to restart."

Every succeeding day in the film, Wright said, the audience sees the Murray character skipping over more and more of what he spent his time on, because they already know most of what he does.

"And that's something that we really should be doing, over and over again," he said. "So if we know the player has failed at the same miserable level three times, why not just let him skip the level?"

After the Spore demo, Wright talked about how computers can expand our imaginations and become powerful tools for self- expression.

He also talked about how every once in awhile, the world goes through major paradigm shifts. That's happening more frequently than in the past, in part due to political issues, in part environmental issues.

Games, he said, are sometimes perceived as meaningless toys, but they can be much more meaningful, and can allow storytellers to build much more elaborate models of the world.

"These things will allow us to change the world," Wright said, "and (people's) awareness of these models, for the rest of their lives, hopefully."