Will Wright

Will Wright puts a letter, handwritten in pencil, up on the screen in a Georgia Tech conference room. Letters of the alphabet are backward. There are no complete sentences. He says the letter is from a 7-year-old looking for a job as a game designer because he plays a lot of video games.

Wright, the famed designer of The Sims computer game, makes his point. "To be a good game designer, first you have to be a good designer. Period."

During his speech at the second Living Game Worlds symposium at Tech, Wright relates game design to such fields as architecture, industrial design and automotive design and quotes books on everything from Japanese gardening to a human behavior study of shopping habits.

"Trends I see are programmers with design skills, artists with programming skills, designers with programming skills, producers with design skills. Interdisciplinary teams — that's where I see teams going," he rattles off during the keynote address to kick off the daylong symposium.

It was Wright's second appearance on campus to deliver a keynote speech. At the inaugural event at Tech last year, he was awarded the Ivan Allen Prize for Progress and Service.

A Tech professor was applauded during this year's symposium. Michael Mateas, an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture and the College of Computing, won the Grand Jury Sparky Award at the Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competition.

The Slamdance awards honor independent game creators and filmmakers and the competition is staged at the same time as the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

An expert in expressive artificial intelligence, Mateas worked on Façade, a one-act interactive drama, for five years.

"With Façade we really wanted to open up a whole new genre of interactive entertainment experience. Traditionally games have focused on physical movement — running, jumping, shooting — in fantasy or science fiction environments. In contrast Facade focuses on social interaction with human characters," Mateas said.

The story revolves around a quarreling couple. How the argument ends depends on how the player interacts with them. Mateas now is working on using an augmented reality headset that would put the player into the couple's apartment to carry on a conversation with them.

"We're trying to get as close as we can to the 'Star Trek' Holodeck," he said.

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