Will Wright is one of the luminaries of the gaming industry, but right now many of his projects for Stupid Fun Club are more like toys than games. That said, many of these toys have online interactive components, and Wright thinks this is just a natural evolution.

“Well, I think that a lot of the video game industry came in and took a big chunk of what used to be known as the toy market and kids are getting very comfortable with play experiences and virtual online environments, or even offline,” said Wright. “But for kids, when it comes to play, they don t make a big distinction between playing with a physical toy and playing with a virtual environment; and so I think the fact that these things want to blend and mix in the same way that people are investing more and more time in their Facebook stuff and friends and profiles, but it intersects the real world and so they see a very smooth blending between the virtual and the real and they’re in some sense self supportive; they re not exclusive of each other. I think a lot of parents only see their kids playing with video games, like ‘Oh, why don t you play with your toys instead of playing with video games ‘ For them, they re very different experiences. They put a wall up between them.”

“But you look at younger people, at adults having kids, and I think they grew up in an environment where the virtual it was in bits instead of atoms but it was still very meaningful, and they had friends online and online communities and they had real communities and real friends and real experiences. So I think we have a generation growing up that doesn’t make a huge distinction between those two and I think it’s pretty natural that the play experiences that they consider, whether they’re toys or games, consist of a blending of the two. And I see games going the other way in a sense; I see games involving more and more of the real world.”

When asked about the impact of social games on the industry, Wright responded, “I think it s going to be an established area of games; I don’t think it’ going to take over the world. People were saying that about online games before that and they were saying that about portable games before that. There s always, when a new platform or a new niche emerges, there s explosive growth in that niche; it s like this void that s being filled very rapidly, where there was a vacuum. So right now we re at the steep of that curve. If you extrapolate that out, it looks like ‘Oh, that s gonna be the whole market in five years,’ but of course the curve never stays that steep. It s kind of like the ecosystems are in this gigantic disruptive phase. Whole new niches are opening and other ones are shrinking and so we re seeing some very steep deltas in different directions right now. I get the sense that in a year from now we’ll start seeing these things plateau towards what their natural equilibrium is.”

Wright was also questioned about Project Natal and PlayStation Move and the significance of those platforms. He responded, “I doubt they ll have the same impact the Wii had. In some sense, they feel like evolutions, or evolutionary technologies. I think Natal feels like a better EyeToy, which is going to have some interesting applications. I don t think it s going to change the face of gaming or anything. I think that having motion control, like in a Wii controller, is something that both Microsoft and Sony are catching up to, but again it almost suggests certain toy-like applications. I m not sure I d want to use a Wii controller for a first-person shooter. Even as obvious as this might sound to you, you want to point something at the screen when you re shooting, but just the precision of the technology is below the precision I would get with a mouse on a PC, for instance. That’s something that Nintendo has always been very, very good at… in some sense when they design something, they work from the controller outwards and they may show the kinesthetic second to second experience with the control scheme is first and foremost when they work on a new game. The feel of Mario jumping has to be just right, and then they base the rest of the game around that.”

Source: IndustryGamers {link no longer active}