Most of my readers are probably familiar with the creator of The Sims and Spore, but for anyone else, Will Wright is an innovative thinker who made manipulating a human in daily life fun and addictive, and who created a visionary single-cell to space exploration game which was not as seamless as promised, but still quite enjoyable.
Like Peter Molyneux with single-player RPGs (Black and White, Fable), Will Wright helped create the semi-casual real-time time-management game so that it would be the popular genre that it is today.
Recently, Wright spoke on the intersection between learning and gaming, as he understands it. Learning happens through self-exploration and realization, he said, and the best type of games encourage learning by making it okay to fail. Players learn from their failure and usually don’t repeat the same mistakes, meaning they have actually gained something from the experience.
