The Philosophy of Wil Wright #
September 13th, 2008 | In Worth Reading
Luke O’Brien has an interesting piece about the philosophies advanced (or not) by the video games of Wil Wright. I admit I’d never much thought about it, but SimCity, The Sims, and Spore can all be read to have very serious real-world philosophical messages. Of The Sims, for example:
“The constraints of consumer capitalism are built into the game’s logic,” wrote Ann McGuire, an Australian academic, echoing earlier complaints about the hypercapitalist SimCity. “The Sims distils and intensifies, through its underlying code, key ideological aspects of late capitalism: self, other, and time are all quantified and commodified. What the player is doing is shopping effectively in order to manage a life in the world.”