Looking like a professor and dressing like a character from Grand Theft Auto, Will Wright is in an understandably buoyant mood. He's the name behind not one, but two, massive PC franchises: SimCity and The Sims, both created with his California-based games development studio Maxis. And now he's on the verge of launching The Sims 2 - which could eclipse all before it.
With seven expansion packs, a console franchise and upcoming spin-off series The Urbz, Maxis has had a lot of practice in gearing up for The Sims 2. Nevertheless, when you're talking about creating a follow-up to The Sims, you're effectively talking about trying to write a new chapter in gaming history. This is a title that has become the best-selling PC game of all time.
"The level of technology that The Sims 2 exhibits from the original Sims is amazing to me, especially as a gamer," enthuses Wright, who views the game as much through the eyes of a player as a designer.
"With the original Sims, we didn't really know what we were doing, we were just throwing darts and happened to hit a bullseye. This time it feels like we have a much clearer understanding of what the players like, what kind of stories they were projecting into the game and how much of themselves they were putting in. I think we've nailed the really important parts."
But chasing virtual dreams isn't all that interests him.
Several years ago, Wright's love of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) caused him to start the Stupid Fun Club with Marc Thorpe, the creator of the US Robot Wars series, and fellow robot builder Mike Winter.
"We bonded because we were the only two contestants who had brought their kids to the show. Our daughters were the same age and we used to make robots with them. My first robot was Juliebot, a wedge-shape robot with a doll's head on top that talked and would say things like 'Oh this is fun, let's have a party!' in the middle of the arena. It was quite goofy, but it was the only robot that could be interviewed!"
Now Wright's Stupid Fun Club is dedicated to exploring the boundaries of the way humans interact with robots and respond to AI. His eyes light up when he talks about how the club has created many life-sized robots and taken them into the local town of Berkeley. In one experiment, they built a robot that looked like it had been knocked over by a car and then put it on the footpath, where it would plead for help from passersby.
"Almost all the women got really creeped out by it and would walk away really fast. The men would ignore the talking and start stripping it for parts!" he explains.
"The only people to help it were the mixed gender couples. They would come over, pick it up, converse with it and try to reset it. I found it amazing that the women seemed to invest too much soul into it and it scared them, whereas the men invested no soul in it and tried to take it apart. I'm really interested in seeing how people relate to intelligent machines, it helps with the way I design games."
It has certainly paid off, because AI is something that The Sims 2 has in spades. It is also undeniable that sales of the title will likely be huge, since it is one of the few games over the past five years to have successfully captured a mainstream audience. Despite this, the franchise is regarded as an annoyance by many hardcore gaming enthusiasts. With its continuous domination of the PC charts, the series rankles them like the relentlessly enthusiastic, popular kid with the DayGlo smile, bringing homemade Soya flapjacks to a Dungeons and Dragons meeting.
A hardcore gamer himself, Wright can understand some of the backlash. At the same time, however, he welcomes the idea of creating more of a mainstream appeal for games.
"I think it's almost a class thing. They know that the people that are into The Sims aren't hardcore gamers, yet they've invaded their world and filled up the message boards," he explains.
"I like the idea that our industry is becoming more of a mass market and bringing in a lot of players who don't normally play games and don't have the traditional gaming history. I think hardcore players almost see it as 'Oh look, there goes the neighbourhood'. But gaming is going from being a very hobbyist activity into a really casual thing that my mother or sister might play. It's a cultural revolution."
