ChasNote

The New Yorker ran a profile of Will Wright in the November 6 issue, in which he shares some interesting insights on the popularity of The Sims, and — by extension — online environments such as Second Life. First, the social-interaction elements have brought girls to gaming, not mention more than $1 billion in revenues to EA:

When he was a kid, Wright told me, “I never played with dolls, which is more of a social thing than playing with trains—it’s about the people in the house. [My daughter] Cassidy helped me see that. She and her friends got into the purely creative side of the game, rather than the goal-oriented side, which really influenced me a lot.”

And the powerful idea that these build-your-own-virtual-world applications are more like software platforms than games:

Second Life seems like a logical outcome of Wright’s simulation games—and it isn’t technically a game at all. When I asked Wright about Second Life, he said, “I think what you’re going to see now on Second Life is people who will start to develop games—someone will invite other people to kick a soccer ball around, and it will go from there.”