The Will Wright Stuff

Not really, except keeping up with the development team, which is just down the street from me. I'd have lunch with them and they'd say, 'Oh, we're going to do this.' I played just a little bit of it.

It's very different. In fact, it is an example of how you take a lot of creative assets and take them in different directions. It's not the way I would have done it, or where I would have gone with it. It definitely is aiming for that Pokemon audience in a darker sense. I know what they're trying to do with it.

It's hard for me, having not really played it or interacted with it, to give you a real meaningful critique of it.

I am. But the game stuff is earlier than some of our other projects. There's some TV stuff we're doing we started a couple of years ago, and some toy stuff that's a little bit more recent.

Oh, Bruce Sterling. Yes.

It's a bit early, but I can tell you about the story it was inspired by. It's called Maneki Neko, a short story he wrote. He describes a karmic computer that's keeping a balance of payments between different people, and causing them to interact with each other in interesting ways, to improve their lives even though they're strangers. They earn karmic points that are redeemed by having somebody else help them.

As far as that goes, we're looking at a lot of platforms. Facebook, tablets and mobile smart phones, feel to me like the big platforms going forward. We're still going to have PC and console games.

Console is the odd man out here, because PC games are always going to be the place where a lot of people have their primary web connectivity and do their email. I see the PC having value, especially in a much broader market.

Average people who aren't hardcore gamers have a PC connected to the internet. My mother has a PC connected to the internet and she's not a gamer. We're seeing early adoption of tablets and smart phones as well.

The consoles are the ones I worry about. How much life span really is there in the plugged-into-your-TV console experience?

One or two of our games, yes, that we're doing other work on. But most of our work is going to be everything else: PC, tablet, Facebook and mobile.

One of the things we're working on, which is going to be a big project for us – I can't talk about it in much detail – it's not really a game, but it's going to have a lot of gaming-ness to it. It's a way of experiencing your digital content, browsing it and interacting with it.

This is another big thing that's happening over the next few years: people's digital content is quickly moving to the cloud. The idea of thumb drives, CDs, DVDs, all that stuff, is evaporating rapidly. Apple's going to the cloud. Google Music. You'll see more and more movies delivered via the cloud streaming services. You're seeing a lot of VOD right now.

But within five years we're going to have almost all the digital content we own, consume and browse, be cloud based. It's not going to be device specific. I should be able to interact with that content in some way on my iPhone, my iPad, my PC – whatever.

It's almost the idea that the entertainment we're consuming, we now have all these windows into it. It used to be, OK, I want to play GTA, and I sit in front of my Xbox, and I always play on this computer, always look at this screen, I'm always using this controller – the idea that GTA lives on a little disc that I stick into my Xbox.

The new world will be the entertainment - whatever it is – it might be a movie, it might even be sold to you as you get the movie rights, the game rights and the music rights as a package and I can consume different aspects of that on different platforms.

The rate of change is increasing almost exponentially right now, which means I don't think it makes sense to go through even a three or four year development cycle any more.

Unless you can get something to market within a year, at least an initial version within a year, you're hosed.

So that's the new model for development, which has totally changed my thinking. Almost any project I want to work on is going to be something I can at least get some version out there in about a year and then iterate from there.

Roughly a year, a year-and-a-half. There will be some version of it. I don't mean the fully-realised concept will be out there, but the initial step in that direction, where people are now interacting with it and we're learning from that.