Analyzing What Robots Tell Us About Human Nature: A Q&A with Will Wright

Scientific America has interviewed Will Wright on what robots tell us about Human Nature. There is some great facts from this article about Will Wright and robots. One of these is that Will and the filmmaker Mike Winter created a club based on robots called the Stupid Fun Club and on more then one occasion, they have been known to let their creations loose on the street and to film bystanders’ incredulous reactions.

When did you first become interested in robotics? Was this before you became a software designer?
Yes, that’s actually kind of what got me into software. As a kid, I spent a lot of time building models and, when I became a teenager, I started adding little motors to my models to help them move around. I bought my first computer in 1980 actually to connect to some of these robots and control them. That’s basically when I taught myself to program and got very interested in simulation and artificial intelligence [AI].

What about robots interests you the most?
I think it’s the same thing that interests me about modeling and simulation. Robots really are in some sense an attempt to model human abilities, whether they be physical or mental abilities. We think about robots as surrogates for what we can do. Robots are also interesting for what they tell us about ourselves. You don’t really understand how complicated a human hand is until you try to build one. A lot of things we take for granted—for example, natural human abilities— when you go out and try to re-create them you realize how extraordinary they are. Robots represent our attempts to understand what it means to be human.

A few years ago your group, the Stupid Fun Club, a Berkeley, Calif.–based robotics workshop, seemed most interested in analyzing reactions to robots by taking your creations out on the street for people to see. What are you focusing on now? What’s most relevant at this time?
There are a couple projects we’re working on, but I can’t really talk about them now. Hopefully, that won’t be the case in a few months. We’re still very interested in basically the way people choose to interact with intelligent machines.

What have you learned from your observations about people and technology?
We’ve found that it’s hard to separate humans from their technology, which is developing so rapidly. Intelligence is embedded in the tools we surround ourselves with. Whether it’s GPS (global positioning systems), cars or even automatic light dimmers in our homes, we’re building a technological exoskeleton around us as a species and starting to off-load more and more autonomy into it. We’re basically delegating more and more decisions to the technology around us.

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GDC Mobile: EA’s Mike Pagano

Mike Pagano has produced many of the mobile games for EA, including Spore Origins, and earlier today he gave a talk on the challenges of porting games to the mobile genre. Gamasutra were there, and they created this article.

 

On the first day of GDC Mobile 2009, EA Mobile game producer Mike Pagano gave a candid but useful lecture on the challenges of porting games to the iPhone, sharing the lessons he and his team learned during the production three recent titles – Yahtzee! Adventures, SimCity and Spore Origins. 

The first point that Pagano wanted to hit home was that EA does not see these games as ports, quoting Zach Waibel of development partner Tricky Software: “It’s an adaptation, not a port.” 

“We want something that translates from whatever platform we had previously to a new platform,” said Pagano, “but with content that only works on that device.” For Spore Origins, Pagano “took the original BREW version, tossed it away, and tried to build it from the ground up” to utilize the iPhone’s unique aesthetics and input schemes. 

“We prototyped a lot,” said Pagano, “and after iteration after iteration, they came with the tilt-based control scheme.” 

Adapting to the iPhone extends beyond UI and control, and affects game design and length. “When we’re looking at mobile games, we see them as shorter experiences,” Pagno continued. “We like to take that and expand on it. Spore Origins [for other mobile devices] was originally a two-hour game, and we took it to a five-hour game for the iPhone.” 

 

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Maria Montessori: The 138-Year-Old Inspiration Behind Spore

Kotaku has a lengthy article in which Will Wright discusses his childhood and his time spent in the Montessori school he attended and how it influenced his learning, and reflected on his career as a game producer.

In Montessori schools, the emphasis is on instilling a desire to learn in children, not in lecturing them.

“In western education we take theories, we deconstruct them, we categorize them and then we teach them in classrooms,” Wright says. “You are going to a school, going to a master, learning theory before you could go practice it.”

“Before that system, it was about practice, it was more of a failure based learning. I think that’s almost a more natural approach. It seems that Montessori is going with the grain in that naturalistic sense. It was later we moved to this narrative method, sitting back, listening-to-a-lecture model .”

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“To be creative you have to have the freedom to explore and to master the specific techniques and that leads to unleashing the human spirit so that the process of creating can come from within.”

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“The structure of Montessori toy is that the kid will discover things while playing with a toy,” Wright said. “Having the kid discover these principals is so much more powerful than a teacher coming up and saying we’re going to learn about this.

“The way we approached Spore was a lot like that. What are the components I want a gamer to discover when playing with this?”

And that’s not an unusual approach for Wright. None of his games are really games, he says.

“I build more interesting toys than interesting games,” he said. “I always thought of Spore as a toy universe. I think there is an interesting distinction between toy and game. I think a toy is more open ended.

“The game is a subset of the experiences you can have with the toy.”

 

Read the full article here