Will Wright and Brian Eno on generative creation
I stumbled upon this talk from the middle of last year, which features Brian Eno (legendary music producer, originally part of Roxy Music) and Will Wright (one of the worlds most successful game designers - responsible for the Sims, Sim City and the upcoming Spore) organised by the Long Now foundation. The two have recently been working together (Brian Eno is working on the soundtrack to Spore).
The Long Now foundation is a curious institution. Formed in 1996 (or “01996″ as they state) its aim is to promote consideration of human existence and culture over a much longer term. Their own description states:
The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
Among other things, they are currently designing an enormous clock to be displayed in a section of the Nevada desert, to mark the passing of the next 10,000 years. A prototype of the first draft of this clock is on display at the Science Museum.
The talk is centred on generative content, the emergence of interesting forms and phenomena from well-constructed simple rules, and touches on a wide variety of disciplines in which this is of use or interest. Naturally Brian’s focus is on his employment of generative content for much of the ambient music he has released as well as visual work such as 77 million paintings. Will talks extensively on the applications to games and simulations, and naturally his particular speciality - simulation games. He presents a series of examples of generative content, from cellular automata, such as Conway’s game of life and the Sand Pile model used for predicting avalanche size, to generative character illustration, to pattern language within architecture such as the work of Christopher Alexander. He talks of tradition games, such as Go in which player action is the driving force, but through the small aperture of the game’s two rules, enormously complex strategies come into play.
Will’s presentation ultimately culminates in a presentation of his magnum opus, Spore (which has progressed significantly since the last time I saw it… the latest version of the creature creator is mind-blowing). Spore as a game is possibly the single largest demonstration of generative creation to date - everything within the game is created using intelligent, adaptive procedural systems (obviously directed by the player). This includes wonderfully detailed creatures (that animate in a physically believable, consistant way), cities, civilisations, planets and eventually an entire galaxy.
Its a fascinating talk (about an hour and a half), and well worth watching one sunday afternoon. Shame the streaming seems a bit screwed (why can’t I just download the damn video huh?).
links for 2007-03-03 (Leapfroglog) on March 3rd, 2007
[...] handcircus » Blog Archive » Will Wright and Brian Eno on generative creation Simon Oliver discusses a presentation by Brian Eno and Will Wright on generative content. Really should take a look at this (it’s not clear what the long now angle is on this talk, though.) (tags: generativecontent WillWright BrianEno longnow presentations) [...]