serial consign

Sim-guru Will Wright gave the keynote talk at South by Southwest Interactive this year and he used the forum to address the theme of storytelling. I came across the transcript of the speech via 3pointd and it is definitely worth taking a look at.

In the talk, Wright dances through the narrative structure of several contemporary films with nods to The Truman Show, Magnolia, Timecode, Memento and an extended exploration of the poetics of Groundhog Day (eat your heart out Run Lola Run). He then addresses social networking, and starts weaving this perspective into a more involved presentation of Spore then has been seen thus far. It seems that one of the nuances of Spore will be Sporepedia, a live database custom created for each player that records every encounter with biology, culture, and technology over the course of the game. The way he describes it, I can't help but think of Borges. What other then a database (or perhaps Marcel Proust) could index an experiential history so perfectly? The most beautiful thing about this idea of gaming as the creation of taxonomy is that it renders "play" as a process of exploration and collection rather than as a goal driven activity.

He closes his talk with a very inspiring thought that is worth repeating here:

When you look at games specifically and entertainment in general heading into the future, games have a perception as being simple and meaningless, but really they can be much much more than that. They can allow us to develop systemic thinking, build much more elaborate, more accurate models of the world around us.