rate and i would normally feel very self conscious and kind of geeky wearing this around right but like a few days ago i saw one world renowned statistician swallowing swords on stage here so
i figure it's ok amongst this group
when i was a kid i actually
it wasn't until later as i started making games that i really i actually think of them more as toys people call me a game designer but i really think of these things more as toys
but i started getting very interested in maria montessori and her methods and the kind of way she went about things and the way she thought it very valuable for kids to kind of discover things on their own rather than being taught these things just kind of overtly and she would design these toys where kids in playing with the toys
would actually come to understand these deep principles of life and nature through play and since they discovered those things it really stuck with them so much more and also they would experience their own failures there was a failure based aspect to learning there it was very important
and so the games that i do i think of really more as modern montessori toys and i really kind of want them to be presented in a way to where kids can kind of explore and discover their own principles
so a few years ago i actually started getting very interested in the seti program and that's kind of the way i work is i get interested in different kinds of subjects i dive in i research them and then i try to figure out how to craft a toy around that so that other people can kind of experience the same sense of discovery as i did as i was learning that subject
and i started looking at how interesting doctorake 's equation was because it spanned all these different subjects you know physics chemistry sociology economics
another thing that really impressed me a long time ago was powers of ten you know charles and ray eames film
and i started kind of putting those two together and wondering could i build a toy where kids would kind of trip across all these interesting principles of life you know
as it exists and as it might go in the future things where you might kind of trip across things like the copernican principle the fermi paradox the anthropic principle the origin of life
and right off the bat you basically just have to live survive reproduce
so here we are at a very kind of microscopic scale
and i actually realize that cells don't have eyes but
and as we start growing the camera will actually start zooming out and things that you see kind of in the background there will actually start slowly pulling into the foreground showing you a little bit of what you'll be interacting with as you grow so as we eat the camera starts pulling out
kind of a macro evolution scale
their creature and that's kind of a fundamentalaspect of this now in the evolution game here the creature scale basically you have to eat survive and then reproduce you know very darwinian
one thing we noticed with the sims which is a game i did earlier is that players love making stuff when they were able to make stuff in the game they had a tremendousamount of empathy in connection to it
and now we might try to
with humans and all that because it's kind of almost more interesting to look at alternate possibilities in evolution evolution is usually presented as like this one path that we took through
but really it represents this huge set of possibilities now once we mate we actually click on the egg and this is where the game starts getting interesting because one of the things we really focused on here
of intelligence kind of on the tool side but basically this is the editor where we're going to design the next generation of our creature so it has a little spine it can kind of move around here
and we'll basically bring it to life so for instance i might put some limbs on the character here i'll inflate them kind of large and in this case i might decide i'm going to put
very creative in the game here i'll give it like one eye in the middle maybe scale it up a bit point it down
so basically in some sense we want this to feel like kind of an amplifier for the player 's imagination so that with a very small number of clicks a player can create something
that they didn't really think was possible before you know this is almost like designing something like maya that a like eight year old can use but really the goal here was within about a minute i wanted somebody to replicate what typically takes a pictorial artist you know several weeks to create
tail here
so that's the complete model now we can actually go to the painting phase now at this phase the programactually has some understanding of kind of the topology of this creature it kind of knows where the backbone is
where the spine the limbs are it kind of knows how stripes should run how it should be shaded and so we're procedurally generating the texture map and this is something a texture artist would take many many days to work on and then we can test it out once we've done that
pose for a photo
and then redistributed to all the other players transparently so in fact as i'm kind of interacting in this world with other creatures these creatures are transparently coming from other players as they play so the process of playing the game
in the game that the player can create you know all the way up through civilization this is my baby when i eat i'll actually start growing this is the next generation but i'm going to skip way ahead here
go out into space and start colonizing and exploring the universe now really in some sense i want the players to be
know basically the player 's imagination an amplifier
and how do we make these tools these editors something that in fact are actually just as fun as the game itself
so this is the planet that we've been playing on up to this point in the game
so far the entire game has been played on the surface of this little world here now at this point we're actuallydealing with a very little toy planet
this world was actually extracted from the player 's imagination so this is the planet that the player evolved on so things like the buildings and the vehicles the architecture civilizations were all designed by the player up to this point
so here 's a little city with some of our guys kind of walking around in it and most games kind of put the player in the role of luke skywalker you know this protagonist playing to this story
really this is more about putting the player in the role of george lucas you know i want them after they've played this game to have extracted an entire world that they're now interacting with now as we pull down here we actually still have a whole set of creatures
living on the surface of the planet so all these different dynamics going on here in fact i can look over here and this is kind of a little simplified food web that's going on with the creatures i can open this up and then kind of actually scan what exists on the surface and get some sense of the diversity of creatures
that were brought in you know some of these were created by the player others by other players automatically sent over here but there's a very simple little kind of calculation of what's required how much
play with the dynamics of this world
of our planetary atmospherepressure and temperature
so basically i want the players to be able to experiment
space so there goes one
over time this is actually going to heat up the planet so at first what we're going to see is a global ocean rise here on this little toy planet but then over time i can speed it up just a little bit we'll actually see the heat impact of that
so basically what we're getting here is kind of maybe the sequel to an inconvenient truth you know in about two minutes and that actually kind of brings up an interesting point about games now here our entire oceans
and as it keeps getting hotter at some point the entire planet 's going to melt down here it goes
so we're not only simulating kind of biological dynamics food webs and all that but also geologic you know on a very simple kind of core scale
and what's interesting to me about games in some sense is that i think we can take a lot of long term dynamics and compress them into very short term kind of experiences because it's so hard for people to think fifty or one hundred years out
so here 's our little solar system as we pull away from our melted planet here we actually it turns out have a couple of other planets in this solar system let 's fly to another one
so in fact we're going to have this unlimited number of worlds you can kind of explore here now as we move into the future and we start going out in this space and doing stuff we're drawing a lot from things like science fiction
so this planetactually has some life on it here it is some indigenous life down here now one of the tools i can eventually earn from my ufo is a
i can drop down
you can see these guys are actually starting to kind of go up and
and over time once they touch it they will become intelligent so i can actually pick a species on a planet and then make them sentient you see now they've actually gone to tribal dynamics and now because i'm actually the one here i can actually if i want to get out of the ufo and walk up and they should be worshipping me at this point as a god
the star now one of the things that always kind of
now what i really wanted to do is to present this you know basically as wonderfully three d as it is actually is and not only that but also show the dynamics and a lot of the interesting objects that you might find
but we also have stars and things as well if we pull all the way back we start seeing the entire galaxy here
is another thing where like typically when people present galaxies it's always been these very beautiful photos but they're always static and when you actually bring it forward in time and start animating it it's actually kind of amazing
second because you have about roughly one supernova every
was kind of wondering what kind of gods that the players would become because if you think about it you know you're going to have fifteen year olds twenty year olds whatever flying around this universe and they might be a nurturing god
basically the reason why i make toys like this is because
think if there's one difference i could possibly make in the world that i would choose to make it's that i would like to somehow give people just a little bit better calibration on long term thinking because i think most of the problems that our world is facing right now
is the result of short term thinking and the fact that it is so hard for us to think fifty one hundred years or one thousand years out and i think by giving kids toys like this and letting them replay dynamics
you know very long term dynamics over the short term and getting some sense of what we're doing now what it's going to be like in one hundred years
probably is the most effective thing i can be doing probably to help the world and so that's why i think personally that toys can change the world
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