Greg Costikyan isn’t the only person to notice that the ever increasing budgets for games harms games and the industry. In fact, Greg is quite bleak in his outlook.
Will Wright, the Will Wright, has noticed and is trying to do something about it with a game called spore. The idea is in line with a lot of his open ended sims-type games: The game provides the tools, the players provide the content. Spore promises to be another groundbreaking, huge selling game from Wright. Let’s hope that helps to avert the future Greg sees and laments. And while money seems to be the limiting factor on making games, time is the limiting factor in me playing games.
I used to talk about Wright like Woody Allen (I liked his earlier, fun games, but didn’t care for the later, too controlling games) but Spore promises to break that complaint. Thanks, Tanya, for letting me know how I’ll be spending my time in the future.
