- 1 giorno fa
Un videodiario con Will Wright e Ocean Quigley su SimCity.
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00:02Beggy 7
00:06Hi, we're back.
00:08I'm all right, and now we have Ocean Quigley,
00:11somebody who I've worked with for many, many years on many projects,
00:14as the creative director on the new SimCity.
00:17So, welcome Ocean.
00:18Thank you, Will.
00:18I have to say I've had more fun playing this SimCity
00:21than I've had playing SimCity in over a decade.
00:24Excellent. That's true.
00:25You know, there was a point at which I had played SimCity so much
00:28that I was so sick, and you know this,
00:30of the whole thing.
00:31I just didn't want to touch it for like 10 years.
00:34But now, having played the new version,
00:37I really have had a surprising amount of fun.
00:40Excellent.
00:40So, I want to thank you for that.
00:41Thank you.
00:41Yeah, we tried to take the thing that was magic about the original SimCities
00:46and contain it, and then bring it forward into something new.
00:50So, hopefully, you felt it.
00:52Yeah, I mean, there was a sense of familiarity, you know,
00:55with kind of what was going on in building a city
00:56and people moving in and all that stuff.
00:58But yet, the presentation of it, you know,
01:00as I immersed myself down at the street level,
01:02I could hear the people, watch them moving around,
01:04I really got the sense of what it would be like to live in the neighborhoods.
01:07While at the same time, I could pull out
01:08and get this amazing kind of visual, intuitive sense
01:11of the complex system that was underneath the hood.
01:13Cool.
01:13But I thought the balance between the two was very well struck.
01:16The way I've been thinking about it is the previous SimCities being sort of isometric maps
01:21were kind of abstracted representations of places.
01:24And with the new SimCity, I wanted to make it so that you could experience it as a place.
01:29You know, so it was no longer a map.
01:31It became a territory.
01:33You know, it became something that you could go into
01:36and see what it would be like to be actually in that place.
01:39Yeah, and I felt like that was one of the first things that really grabbed me.
01:41I mean, I could kind of zoom back and see the schematic map.
01:44Right.
01:44But when I came down to the neighborhood level,
01:45I felt this kind of visceral, emotional connection.
01:49What would it feel like to be in that neighborhood?
01:50Cool.
01:50You know, how would it feel like to be on that street?
01:52And that was something that I don't think I ever had
01:54with any previous version of SimCity at all.
01:56One of the things I wanted to do with it was to make you feel more responsibility
02:00for the little people that live there, too.
02:02Because you do all these horrible things to them, right?
02:04It's your fault, right?
02:05You poison them.
02:07Their houses burn down.
02:08You know, because of your crappy economic decisions, they go homeless.
02:13You cut back on their services.
02:14Exactly.
02:15And I wanted to make it so that when that happened to them,
02:18you'd have this guilt.
02:19You'd feel this twinge of emotion about your responsibility for the life opportunities
02:24for these people that live in this world that you've created.
02:27Yeah, so you've made SimCity a guilt-driven experience, you know?
02:30I think guilt is an underexploited emotion in video games.
02:34Yeah, in fact, I think that's actually one of the interesting emotions
02:36that you cannot get from something like a book or a film.
02:38Yeah, no question.
02:39You know, I've never felt guilty watching a movie or reading a book,
02:42but I have felt guilty playing games based upon my decisions.
02:44Yeah, yeah.
02:45And I found that when I was playing, actually, I was kind of immersing myself
02:49not just in kind of the areas and the neighborhoods,
02:51but I was imagining myself living the lives of these people.
02:53Right.
02:54What would it be like to live in that trailer park and work in that grocery store?
02:57I went to the U.S. Census data and got all the thousand most common last names
03:01and the most common first names and made a system that Mad Libs them all together.
03:06So the odds are there actually is a Will Wright living somewhere.
03:09Well, hopefully he's not living in one of my cities.
03:11You know, as a new player, you know, it was actually very challenging for me economically.
03:16You know, I kind of got the hang of it.
03:17At first it felt kind of constrained with the small plot,
03:19but then I started realizing it was much more about quality than quantity,
03:23which to me actually felt like a really good design decision
03:26because then it focuses you on the depth of the simulation.
03:29Exactly.
03:29And I can't just kind of like trash an area and then go do something else over here.
03:32Yeah.
03:32Yeah, the intent there was to make it so that there was so much more resolution
03:38to what was going on in any given area that you could, you know, dive down to it
03:42and then get essentially lost in what's going on in the simulation
03:44and the detail, the movement, the emotion,
03:48and then pull back and get kind of the bird's eye view,
03:51but that there'd be things for you to go down into and see.
03:54Yeah, opting for depth of simulation as opposed to having something inert and large
03:59was a real conscious design decision.
04:00I'm curious, when you play, because I find that when I'm playing,
04:03I'm kind of at the map level about half the time,
04:04but I really spend about half my time down at the street level
04:07just getting a sense, like an emotional sense of what it feels like to live there.
04:11Do you still find yourself, I mean, having done all these kind of elaborate graphics
04:15and spent so much time, you know, achieving that immersive experience,
04:19do you still find yourself kind of going down to that level
04:21and just kind of living in the city?
04:22I probably spend the bulk of my time down at that pretty close to ground level
04:27just seeing what it's like in a given spot.
04:30I think there's really two different large categories of people who play the game, I think.
04:34There's people who are playing it to understand and beat the simulation in one way or another.
04:39And I'd say that the majority of the developers on the team are that kind of player.
04:42Right.
04:42And then there's people who are playing it because they want to build some environment
04:45and sort of feel what it's like to be in there
04:47and express some vision or fantasy about what the sort of world they'd like to build is.
04:51And I am very much in that camp.
04:53So I build stuff for 20 minutes and then I spend 45 minutes
04:57just kind of like wandering around at street level looking at things
05:00and kind of tracking people and seeing what they're doing
05:03and then taking screen captures of things.
05:05And then I'll zoom back out and I'll do another 20 minutes worth of work
05:08and then I'll spend another 45 minutes zooming in, playing around with things.
05:11So it's kind of strategic up here and then experiential down there.
05:14I think so, yeah.
05:14When you zoom down, that's when you start experiencing the people as people
05:19and the activity of the city is something that's affecting them, you know, is something that's...
05:24Yeah, I find I spend a lot of time following like a police car
05:27and just kind of imagining what their daily beat is like, you know.
05:29And as they drive through different neighborhoods, I'm giving you a sense of,
05:32oh, that's kind of a scary neighborhood.
05:33That's a nice neighborhood.
05:34Yeah.
05:35And I really like that it's almost a narrative that you're building, you know,
05:39through a thousand different eyes of what your city feels like to live in.
05:42But yeah, and each one of the little sims, you know, they're trying to live their lives.
05:46You see a little sim walking down the street, you know, it's trying to go shopping,
05:50it's trying to get to the hospital, it's looking for work.
05:53And the city emerges out of the sort of the tapestry of all those threads of sims walking around and
05:59trying to do things.
06:00Right.
06:01It's not kind of an abstracted top-down thing.
06:03It's very much a bottom-up thing that's built out of all those stories.
06:07And I think that's part of where the guilt comes from is that I kind of feel that they're very
06:09earnest
06:10and they're really trying their best to get a job, to do this, to do well.
06:13But, you know, they get thwarted by decisions you've made up here at the strategic level.
06:17Yeah, absolutely.
06:18You didn't build a good street or there's no school for them to get an education.
06:20And that's when, you know, you start feeling like you're the one holding back their lives.
06:24And I think that fundamental decision to redo the simulation as a bunch of agents and objects
06:29enables sort of that close reading of the simulation
06:32and the larger emergence of the whole sort of state of the city
06:37out of, you know, those thousands or millions of individual stories.
06:41Yeah, Stony and I discussed that a bit.
06:43I mean, it does feel like a very fundamental shift away from kind of a spreadsheet experience
06:47to now kind of a terrarium with, you know, thousands of little creatures living their lives inside of this box.
06:52And it did feel like that in playing the game.
06:53I did feel like there were thousands of little agents living their lives, driving cars, waiting at bus stops,
06:58going to school, you know, all those things.
07:00And that authenticity, I think, gave me a totally different emotional connection to the experience, you know,
07:07that I was having as a mayor.
07:09Yeah, I think it's pretty satisfying to see the consequences of your actions
07:14on the actual lives of these little folks that live down there.
07:18You know, like you bulldoze a factory and the little people that used to work there are now unemployed.
07:24And you see them get kind of desperate as they go around looking for additional jobs,
07:28looking for some way to get money to pay their rent.
07:30And then eventually, you know, their cries for help get feebler and feebler and feebler.
07:35And then, poof, the house goes abandoned.
07:37You see the little family leave and be homeless in the park.
07:40You know, and you're like, I did that.
07:41You know, like I, as a player, made those decisions that carried out.
07:45I kind of, I decided early on in the game that if the little sims couldn't be made to suffer,
07:51you wouldn't care about them.
07:53You know, if they were invulnerable, if they didn't need anything from you.
07:56If they just poofed and disappeared.
07:57Yeah, exactly.
07:57Then you wouldn't have any reason to care about them or care about their well-being.
08:01But by making them fragile, by making them people that need your help to live their lives,
08:08you feel a sense of responsibility and compassion for them, I think.
08:12And that's one of the things that gives the game emotional heft.
08:16Yeah, and I think that's kind of remarkable.
08:17You think of strategy games as being things that are very abstract.
08:20You know, I don't really care if I lose a pawn in chess.
08:22Right.
08:23But to take that kind of strategic depth and gameplay and turn it into kind of a deeper
08:28emotional experience, I think that, you know, so much of the technology that you put into
08:33this, you know, the visuals, the sound, et cetera, are toward that end.
08:37Right.
08:38And it's not just a matter of adding lots of bells and whistles or, you know, just making
08:41the graphics look prettier.
08:42But it really is toward the end of getting the player emotionally connected to this complex
08:46thing that they're building.
08:47And I think that was actually part of your genius with taking real world objects like cities
08:53and people as your subjects.
08:55They come loaded with all this emotional meaning.
08:59And so all you need to do is tap into it.
09:01You know, we all have experiences of what it's like to be in trouble or what it's like to
09:05look for something and not find it or what it's like to get a job when you need a job.
09:09And so...
09:10Or to be in a scary neighborhood.
09:11Exactly.
09:11Or to be in a nice park.
09:12Yeah.
09:12And so you're not trying to convince somebody what it's like to be a space marine, for example.
09:16You're trying to take these common, mundane human experiences that everybody has and build
09:22a system that taps into those emotional states.
09:24Right.
09:24It's reflecting your own experiences back to you.
09:26Yeah.
09:27But now you have a totally different level of kind of responsibility and control over it.
09:30So all in all, I mean, I spent a lot of time, you know, kind of playing with the basic
09:34stuff, the core city, building the roads, building it up.
09:36And then I just started getting into the specialties, you know, kind of exploring, you know,
09:39an ore town or a tourist town.
09:41And, you know, I was just trying to really get a glimpse of the diversity of cities.
09:45You know, not every city is going to be this monolithic, you know, one-size-fits-all
09:48thing.
09:49Right.
09:49But in fact, you get these totally different flavors of cities.
09:52And that's something I'm just kind of getting into.
09:54And also the idea of the region gameplay and trading with neighbors.
09:57And the kind of multiplayer thing.
09:58But, you know, I've been just remarkably impressed, not just with this as a game, but with my history
10:04of this and how much time I'd spent thinking about it, to be kind of surprised and delighted
10:08as much as I had by such a new interpretation of it.
10:11Right.
10:12It must be like seeing your kid go off to college and then come back years later.
10:16You know, like, oh, that's what became of you.
10:18Yeah.
10:19But also, you know, very proud in some sense, but also extremely happy and surprised that,
10:23oh, my God, I never even thought you would turn into that.
10:25Right.
10:25You know, your success exceeds my expectations.
10:28Cool.
10:29Yeah, I mean, I just, I can't thank you enough for doing such a great job with this.
10:32You know, I'm really looking forward to your next project.
10:36So when are we going to hear more about that?
10:39I think for now, SimCity for a little while.
10:42Okay.
10:43But at any rate, thank you very much, Ocean, for being here today.
10:46My pleasure, Will.
10:47Thanks.
10:47And I'm really one of your biggest fans now.
10:50Thank you.
10:51All right.
10:51So that was Ocean Quigley, the creative director on the new SimCity, which will be out the first
10:55week in March.
10:58Thank you.
10:58Thank you.
10:59Thank you.