Commencement 2007 Remarks

Will Wright, Chief Designer and Co-founder, Maxis

"Hello and congratulations.

I want to thank USC for inviting me here to speak to you today. This is actually the first commencement ceremony I've ever been to. I went to college for many years but just took the classes that interested me so I never earned a degree. In high school I was quite anxious to get out as soon as possible so after my junior year I took summer school classes so I could graduate despite skipping my senior year.

So having never been to a commencement before I 'm not entirely sure what I'm expected to be saying to you here today. I roughly gather that I'm either supposed to give you a motivational "go out and give'm hell" sort of talk or maybe the "timeless words of wisdom" that I've learned through my first hand experience. The other challenge for me here today is, as you know, I'm from the world of games and you are all film school graduates.

I think there are some fundamental differences between what you do as professional storytellers and what I do creating game worlds for players to explore. But I do think there is a deep common thread to both of these things. At the end of the day we are both trying to help people come to understand and appreciate the complexity, beauty and meaning of the world around us.

In games I focus on building little "toy worlds" for players to explore, manipulate and construct. In doing so each player eventually charts their own path through the space of possibilities that exists in the game world and in essence writes their own story of what they've experienced.

As storytellers, you are using empathy to connect viewers to your characters and drama to invest them in your plots. At that point you have a very powerful vehicle for illuminating the world in new ways and hopefully, as a result, you can change these viewers, you can give them new ways to see the world, to understand and appreciate it. I think you all understand the power that stories have to change how we see the world, I imagine it's what brought most of you to be here today.

When I was 8 years old my parents took me to see 200l: A Space Odyssey when it was first released. At that time the Apollo moon program was in full-swing, and of course as an 8 year-old nerd to be, I was enthralled in the whole thing. I had spaceship models all over my room, I watched every NASA launch, read everything I could get my hands on, I had memorized all the technical specs of the Saturn5 booster, and so on... but all of this obsession was really on a sort of cerebral, analytical level.

So anyway I saw the movie200l and as an impressionable8 year old...I was totally blown away by it. It was like some sort of drug induced religious epiphany for me, something I wouldn't experience for another l0 years...well I won't go there.

For the first time I found that I had a deep emotional connection to what it would feel like to be in space and for what it meant for us, for humanity to be leaving the planet. This was also the first time I had ever even considered the impact that intelligent machines might have on our future. While the spaceflight represented stretching our humanity further out into the universe, to me HAL represented just the opposite, our quest inwards, to understand the nature of intelligence, self-awareness and consciousness. In many ways the journey inwards that HAL symbolized to me was by far the more interesting one.

I learned another important lesson from this movie, one that I wouldn't realize until many years later. When 2001was first released in 1967 it seemed like a perfectly reasonable prediction of where we would be 35 years later into the future. Howard Johnson's restaurants in orbit, giant moon colonies, sentient homicidal computers. These were all things that I was really looking forward to experiencing before my 40th birthday.

The lesson I learned much later, over time was simply "don't trust the future". That is, don't trust that we can see into the future with any amount of accuracy beyond perhaps about a 10 year time frame. In 2001 (the movie) they had a fully sentient supercomputer on their ship and apparently the most state-of-the-art computer game they could find to play on it was chess. It would be about10 years after this movie that the medium I work in was even invented.

Interestingly, when most people first saw HAL in this movie what impressed them wasn't HAL's ability to have fluid, natural conversations with the crew or even his ability to read lips as the astronauts were planning to disconnect him, but rather everyone walked out of the theatre in disbelief of the possibility that a computer could beat a human at chess. We would seem to be notoriously bad at understanding which technologies will explode into new directions and which ones will hit brick walls and stall out.

This is getting to be truer every year. Think about it. The Internet, as we know it now, is really just a little over 10 years old. 20 years ago no one saw it coming. 10 years ago everyone bought and listened to their music on CDs, 10 years from now I suspect they'll be almost as hard to find as vinyl is now.

The field of games and interactive entertainment has been changing at an incredible pace ever since it's beginning about 30 years ago. A lot of the same technological and social forces that games are based on are starting to have a major impact on linear storytelling as well.

For one thing, it seems to me like the basic rhythm of storytelling has undergone a huge shift over my generation. As a young kid I must admit, I watched my fair share of what you might now call "nostalgic TV". Wonderfully crafted shows like: Gilligan's Island, Charlie's Angels and The Brady Bunch. Now a major factor in this for me was the fact that we only received 3 channels on our TV, not the 500 or whatever it is that I get now. So when I came home from school and plopped down in front of the TV with a snack, it was either Gilligan's Island, some boring news show or The Price is Right.

Now I don't know if any of you have actually sat down and watched an entire episode of Gilligan's Island from start to finish, but from today's narrative sensibilities it's a fairly excruciating experience. This is not exactly fast-paced or multithreaded, nor is it particularly surprising or inspiring. You can pretty much sum up each episode with "something unexpected arrives on the island bringing the castaways hope for rescue then Gilligan somehow blows it". That was every single episode. And it would half an hour for this simple plot to play itself out with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy.

Just recently Sony announced plans to re-release several of these old TV shows, things like TJ Hooker, Starsky and Hutch, and Charlie's Angels. But the twist is they plan to condense each episode, through editing, to match the attention span of the modern viewer. It turns out these shows condense quite nicely, down to about 3 and a half minutes for what used to be a hour episode. That's well over a 10 to I compression ratio. Now there are a few ways to look at this, either everyone has developed severe ADD overt he last 30 years...or …perhaps the narrative literacy, the ability to absorb complex, multithreaded information (including stories) has risen dramatically over the last generation. I suspect a combination of the two.

We still yearn for stories that can captivate our imaginations, with archetypal characters a nd situations we can relate to. We just want them faster, denser, more engaging. As simple as Gilligan's Island was as a TV show it still, perhaps unintentionally, contained nuggets of classic storytelling. The characters can be seen to represent the faults and failings of humanity, in fact they map perfectly to the 7 deadly sins. Gilligan as sloth, Skipper as anger, Mrs. Howell as gluttony, Mr. Howell as greed, The Professor..pride,
Mary Ann jelousy (she was always jealous of Ginger you see) and of course Ginger as lust.

I think the modern version of Gillian's Island is perhaps ABC's hit show Lost. Archetypal characters stuck on an uncharted island, strange new things appearing every week bringing a false hope for rescue... etc. etc. But story-wise it 's a far denser experience more plot threads, longer narrative arcs and much more interesting character  development.  At the same time, I'm sure that just one episode of Lost has a larger budget than every single episode of Gilligan' s Island combined.

One of the fundamental shifts affecting both games and storytelling right now is diversification. In some ways we're going through a Cambrian explosion of sorts as new outlets for both games and stories appear. These new distribution technologies are not just the formats that we work with and but the social dynamics around our entertainment as well.

There used to be this big wall between entertainment producers and consumers. The film studios, book publishers, newspapers, game companies, TV networks and record companies were on one side of that wall, our customers on the other side. We would build our entertainment experiences and then throw them over the wall for the hungry masses to consume.

Now that wall is starting to come down fast. Cheap hardware -power software- online distribution…the synergy of these tools are fundamentally restructuring the media world before our eyes. In some sense I think we are witnessing the democratization of entertainment. Anybody can now make something and share it with the world using commonly available tools. As a result you will have many more opportunities to use your craft but at the same time the competition for mindshare will become ever more intense.

You are not just going to be competing with each other, or others in the film industry, but with the entire world now. You are going to be competing with some high school kid in Kansas posting her short films on YouTube. That may not sound like much in the way of competition...but believe me, I 've seen what bright, creative people ... stuck in boring places ...with lots of time on their hands are capable of. And it's not to be underestimated. As a matter of fact I think the best way for you to compete with this hypothetical kid to become her. Imagine how obsessed she is with either the craft of filmmaking or the story she wants to tell. Imagine how she spends every free moment trying to improve her abilities, her projects and her stories. Imagine her thirst for knowledge and experience. How determined she is to have a real,lasting impact her audience.

Maybe this all sounds familiar to you. I would guess that might describe most of you here today and what brought you into this school, and into this program. In my experience talent is nice to have; education can be quite valuable as well. But what really matters more than any of that is the ability to cultivate an intense obsession with what you love to do. Call it deep motivation or perhaps extreme persistence. It is a rare and valuable thing.

About the only pertinent advice I can think of to give you today is simply this: If your love for filmmaking is what brought you here, to this school, to this program. Don't forget your passion. It will be easy to lose your connection to it later in all the complexities of your career, and your life, and the world. But if you can always keep a deep connection to your passion, your obsession for what you do, then you'll at least be on a level playing field with that kid in Kansas."