Word: wrights
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...game designers are ambitious enough to even contemplate a game in which you get to control the entire evolution of a species, from the bacterial level all the way up to the galactic. Then again, few game designers are as quietly ambitious as Will Wright, creator of Sim City and The Sims, the best-selling PC game of all time. Wright's evolution game, Spore, has been in the works for three years already (and has two more to go). It was inspired in part by his favorite movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey--which he saw growing up in Atlanta...
...this makes Wright sound like a geek's geek, well, that's because he is. He loves making fictional territorial maps of the galaxy. He can tell you how many extraterrestrial races have been featured on Star Trek. His latest hobby is collecting outdated Soviet space equipment. But his inner nerd is hardly humorless. Wright's cartoon-like sense of the ridiculous--familiar to all Sims players--is still much in evidence in Spore. The opening stages of the game, in which a player must eat or be eaten by other microbes, is a deliberate homage to Pac-Man. Later...
Ambitious as all this is, Wright and his brain trust have taken pains to make the game as fast and easy to run as possible. It will also be interactive: all players' species will coexist in the same galaxy, via the Internet. The game itself will decide, say, which planet to place them on, going by what will make the most interesting combinations. "Until now, we've used the computer as an automated opponent," says Wright. "Now we're trying to give it the intelligence to run the show." The result, Wright believes, will hook in an even wider circle...
...Best Escape RoutesWhen women find a key to solving their own midlife mysteries, they often want nothing more than to help other women do the same. That typically involves some kind of journey, often a literal one. For Jennifer Wright, a divorced assistant professor of occupational therapy in Indianapolis, Ind., the epiphany came seven years ago, when she was 46 and on an intense four-day backpacking adventure in Nevada with her 21-year-old son. Up to that point, she says, women like her "may have been spending a good deal of our life taking care of everyone else...
...hoping he would win,” said Wright, who is a native of Ireland. “I’m slightly disappointed that the majority wasn’t larger, but I think he’s a strong leader...