Will Wright

A year later, in 2000, came something much quieter.

A game designer named Will Wright released The Sims.

The player looks down on a suburban house full of tiny people, each with a set of needs shown as bars on a screen.

Hunger, sleep, a bathroom, company, fun.

So they could get off and do their work and, and, and, and then maybe have as few meetings as possible.

And so the reason I have Will Wright here, famous sort of game designer, is he describes this employee-centered method he uses during meetings, which is he used to have one, one guy, Ocean Quigley, the actual person's name, who when Ocean Quigley started looking bored and, um, raised his hand and asked to be excused, that was a sign the meeting should be over.

So you had sort of like the canary in the coal mine guy.

[laughs]

And, um, the other thing that Will Wright did was he charged people, um, a dollar whenever they would call a meeting just to get them to think about it a little bit.

[laughs]

Um, by the way, having been at Stanford for a long time, the, the guy who was most amating-- amazing on meetings was John Hennessy when he was dean of s- the School of Engineering.

Oh, you're saying Wil Wheaton.

Oh, Wil Wright.

Do you mean Wil Wright?

Oh, yeah, Wil Wright.

Goddammit, not Wil Wheaton.

Fuck.

I'm saying...

It's funny that we used to...

What 2014 space game had a 1-to-1 scale Milky Way galaxy with over 400 billion procedurally generated systems? Elite Dangerous Number 5.

Created by Will Wright with numerous sequels and spin-offs, what 1989 game let you run your own city? SimCity 6.

What life simulator game, if you bought all the DLCs and add-ons, would cost nearly $1,500? The Sims 4.

Actual life might be cheaper.

He was hired in Drexel's game design program as the program manager of the Entrepreneurial Game Studio, wrote research-based game studies grants there, and helped students launch their games to market.

He also worked at Masterclass on Will Wright, the famous designer's course on game design and theory.

And he started at Blue Bottle shortly after the entrepreneurial game studio was paused during the pandemic.

Throughout all of this, he's been making games and writing short stories.