Funny Failure

Will Wright mentions funny failure in the last third of the PopSci Podcast.

They built the creature lab knowing that there are certain constraints that are required to allow the creature to “live” and knowing how flexible the system is, they also have a system that is very flexible and that will be pushed to it’s limits by the player. To this end, they want to let players fail gracefully, or in a funny way. Will comments that there is no better feeling than the one that comes from something good arising out of something you “knew” was going to fail or break the program.

Towards the end of the podcast, Will mentions that they want to ensure that “only good stuff” comes out of the creature editor. Having said what I said in the last post, I am dearly hoping that the “failure” element has not been removed from this system, but rather that “good stuff” has more to do with the “high probability” types of creatures that he talks about (the kinds that would be created more often). As long as you can create a creature that gets “stuck” in evolution, I think I’ll be happy. Because the game is procedurally governed, there are likely some paths that will move faster than others to the end part of the game that has you flying around in space. I’m hoping that there are other paths that might be stuck in one phase or another or not always be the “biggest” out there. Luckily it seems that after playing the other Sim games, this will be the case. Just think of all those Sim Cities that you must have built (without the cheats) that never really made it beyond suburb size, but were so fun to continue to tinker around with and improve your plans and ideas for your next city.

Failure is not a dead end, it should be seen as a chance to understand the bounds of a process. If you can never test the bounds of a process, how much can you really know about it?