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Comment by chaimgingold | Hacker News Reader

Hi! I wrote this book. Ask me anything. I also was a designer on Spore. I'm also trying to feed my 8 month old lunch and he is very excited to asn``wer anything too.

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I want to bump a few things that folks linked to below:

[1] Will Wright (designer of SimCity) will be interviewing me about the book on July 19th at 2PM ET. We thought it would be fun to turn the tables and have him interview someone else for a change. On Twitch, free, online, and live. Hosted by ROMchip. RSVP here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/romchipajournalofgamehis...

[2] Stewart Brand wrote a brief review on X I'm still in disbelief over ("It is one of the best origin stories ever told and the best account I've seen of how innovation actually occurs in computerdom."). Read more here: https://twitter.com/stewartbrand/status/1800941614287946003

Have you ever read 'Sim Cities and Sim Crises'?

https://molleindustria.org/GamesForCities/

Very interesting, but please try to read it on a mobile device to understand how hard this is, would strongly recommend to let someone look over it and apply a more mobile friendly design.

For what it's worth, this page works great in the mobile Chrome reader view.

Yes, it's great!

Will the interview be available on any other platforms, after the fact? I'd love to watch the interview, but I am not sure I'll be able to catch it live, and Twitch is not my favourite platform for watching livestream recordings.

Should be! ROMchip posts recordings on their YouTube channel afterwards: https://www.youtube.com/@ROMchipJournal

Congrats about Stewart Brand, that’s a ringing endorsement. Can’t wait to read the book.

Stewart Brand's twitter review was reason I went out and bought the book right away. So far it's an excellent read!

Hi Chaim! I really enjoyed working with you on Spore. What have you been up to in the intervening years besides writing this book?

Hi Ryan!! I got a PhD, did some indie game stuff, made some babies (with some help, mainly from my wife), design consulting. You can see more of my projects here: https://chaim.io, like some tangible/mixed reality computing (done while I was working at a research lab with Bret Victor), and Earth: A Primer, a science book made of simulation toys.

> ... working at a research lab with Bret Victor), and Earth: A Primer, a science book made of simulation toys.

For the folks reading this, I just wanted to point out that Earth: A Primer is one of the coolest sets of explorable explanations ever made:

https://www.earthprimer.com/

Thanks for making all this cool stuff! :-)

I do love the Earth Primer.

The Earth is our Mother, so we shouldn't treat her like Dirt! ;)

Ryan!! Now you’re getting tagged. Long time. I saw Ted and Rebecca a couple weeks ago. If you’re that Ryan I.

Cool!

Possibly off topic, but: what did you work on for Spore? Was it around the time of the now (in?)famous E3 demo in ~2006, or closer to the final release? The final game seemed to differ significantly from what many of us were hoping for, and I never really heard much of a story of what happened in between.

The main thing I did was design the Editors (like the Creature Creator), but I initially joined as an intern in 2001 and did some really fun divergent prototypes for Will Wright while the project was in a nascent state, and a bunch of other stuff during development.

There's a whole book to be written about Spore (but I'm done writing books for now), but the simple answer is that the difference between "hoping for" and "final" product encompasses a lot of what makes software and game development (or really any creative project for that matter) interesting. Especially when multiple people are involved. And that is part of what sparked this project, which took over a decade to research and write.

(Also, many years ago I wrote a chapter for another MIT Press book about some early Spore history. It's reproduced on this deprecated blog: http://www.levitylab.com/blog/2011/02/brief-history-of-spore...)

Thanks. I should add that I did enjoy the final game very much; it was just quite different to what was demoed.

I’ll probably be buying your book!

Thank you!

Not to be defensive, but I want to say more about this because I think it's a fascinating subject with Spore in particular and games, software, and technology generally. My take is that Will Wright had a very exciting vision but visions are just that: not real. They are inherently nebulous and everyone on the team (and many many people beyond it) had their own idea on what Spore would be or turn into. We converged on something and negotiated with one another and many constraints, social and technical, and arrived at something. It didn't help that part of the game's marketing appeal was a bit Rorschach-y in the first place and capitalized on the exciting but vague promise of Will Wright (Sim-) + Universe (-Everything).

Thank you for the mental picture you trying to tap out a message offending off a very interested child :-)

Man I loved Spore! There's so much potential in those mechanics. A modern remake with mod ability would be amazing! Perhaps that ship is sailed but one can imagine.

You're welcome, and thank you!

I agree! There's a lot of talented people out there. Hopefully someone will make something like that one day.

The Spore team invented the term "TTP" (and Chaim made the tools to optimize Spore's TTP so much it was negative), which was referenced several times in the hilarious series that parodies a game development company, "Mythic Quest":

Mythic Quest - TTP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_xqyIMwbew

NSFW YouTube Search:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spore+penis+mon...

Overheard@GDC09: TTP = Time To Penis:

https://www.engadget.com/2009-03-24-overheard-gdc09-ttp-time...

(305) Margaret Robertson: SPORE's Wake: What Seriously Happened? TTP @ 38:00:

https://gdcvault.com/play/1317/(305)-SPORE-s-Wake-What

Know Your Meme: TTP:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/time-to-penis-ttp

About

Time to Penis, abbreviated to TTP, is a video game development metric and slang term for the time it takes players to generate a penis-shaped object via any available means. Coined by the Spore development team and popularized by a GDC 2009 panel, the term has been an inspiration for humorous posts online since.

Origin

During the development of the 2008 simulation real-time strategy video game Spore, developers working at Maxis came up with a metric to measure the amount of time in which a player was able to create a penis using in-game tools (excerpt seen below).[1]

>Mitch Zamara, 28 January 2011 at 00:01 | Permalink

>Fun little anecdote that came to mind when seeing the title image for this blog post:

>A friend of mine who worked at EA/Maxis told me of a coined term over there when working on spore:

>Time to Penis, or TTP for short. This basically is the amount of time it takes from release of your product before a player is able to create and distribute a representation of a penis inside your game/ editor:

>Clearly in games like Spore/LBP this time is nearly instant. I guess the rule is.. if you can give them something to build with, its only a matter of time until they li make a dick with it.

The first public mention of the metric occurred during the "Spore's Wake: What Seriously Happened?" at Game Developers Conference 2009. Participants of the panel defined the metric as the amount of time it will take children to make something rude out of a set of tools they've been given. On March 24th, 2009, the day when the panel took place, video game developer Evan Berman[2] and Engadget[3] contributor Kevin Kelly made the earliest public posts about the metric (shown below, left and right).

>Evan Berman @Scapes

>New acronym: TTP, "time to penis", a metric of the time it takes for a penis to be made as user-created content (from #GDC Spore talk).

>2:05 PM - Mar 24, 2009 • Twitter Web Client

>During the "Spore's Wake: What Seriously Happened?" panel at GDC, we learned a fantastic new meme that we have to share with you. "Time To Penis" (or just "TTP" in the streetz) is defined as the amount of time it will take children to make something rude out of a set of tools they've been given --typically, that object is a penis. Apparently, TTP can be measured down to the near-second. In Spore's case, TTP was actually a negative factor since "children" were making penis monsters before the Creature Creator was even officially released!

Don't you think the granularity of factorio is what brought its success? Don't you think it would be interesting the mix the sims and sim city for more granularity in the game?

That’s a fascinating idea! One of the surprising things I learned while researching this book was that Maxis was actually trying to do that at one point, and in fact more. They had an initiative called SimWorld that would allow all their sim games to link together and even be open to third party development. This very ambitious OS-like architecture meant that The Sims really was seen as zooming into SimCity, and in fact early prototypes of what became The Sims let you do just that. And SimCopter did let you open SC2k save files and fly through them. While SimWorld didn’t take off it seems that without it we wouldn’t have The Sims, which introduced an innovative object-oriented architecture that underwrote its cutting-edge AI, UI, and business model (modular expansion packs).

Some fun primary sources:

[1] Will Wright interview for SimCity 2000 CDROM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcgV4YolDkg

[2] Game Developer magazine piece on SimWorld and early The Sims: https://ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws.com/o1/vault/GD_Mag_Archi... (An old Game Developer magazine piece)

[3] Will Wright shows a very early The Sims demo at Terry Winograd’s Stanford seminar: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999

I would require faster computer, and also a simplified game design.

It's doable more than before.

I got many ideas how to do it, don't hesitate to hire me as a game designer :D

You do so much cool stuff in life. Much Kudos to you. And you have taken an unusual career path in your life for a smart person.

Are you content with the uncertainty, and not having a conventional, safe job?

Thank you. Hmm, a big existential question and I haven't had any coffee yet. There is certainly anxiety in the uncertainty. (Was spending over ten years researching and writing this book––intermixed with other things--a good use of time?) But I think I'd be unhappy with something safe. It's an ongoing surprise to me that my career continues to work, but I do occasionally wonder if this is a wise course. My parallel counterfactual selves are doing really different things, but I think I like the real one more. (Though they probably feel the same way.)

Thank you for answering honestly and directly.

I ask this question because I also found myself to be unfit for 40 hours a week regular tech job. And, in India, practically they are 60 to 70 hours a week.

And yet, I cannot seem to find any creative energy if I am not engaged in something safe. So, currently I am thinking about jobs outside tech, with better work-life balance, and continue programming as a hobby.

And the pastures are much greener in the US than in India. Qualitatively and quantitatively, more opportunities exist. And the culture is much better. So, someone in your position can find something safe if this life doesn't suit you anymore.

I can't take any more of 10-hour days, office politics, abuse, MBA bosses, etc. But I love programming.

I have a Master's in CS, I am also considering academia.

Anyway, thanks for your input.

Your lunch is 8 months old?

LOL. This must be the reason the Chicago Manual of Style indicates hyphens here. And it must also be the reason an MIT Press copyeditor reviewed the whole manuscript very carefully. (Which then triggered some legalistic arguments from me citing chapter and verse of said stye manual.)

For about five minutes I was trying to figure out why you were feeding your lunch. Some sort of creature perhaps? Then I realized you probably meant 8-month-old, as in baby...

> feed my 8 month old lunch and he is very excited to asn``wer anything too.

Looks like you're having a hard time keeping him away from the keyboard, too, I can relate :)

If you had access to the compute power that open ai has, what would you make?

Definitely not a videogame. I wouldn't want the responsibility of allocating that quantity of energy and resources. I think ChatGPT and its brethren are fascinating, amazing, and useful, but your question makes me think probably nobody should have that compute power. Maybe it's hubris to think one could responsibly use it. (Now I feel uncool for failing to have fun with your question.)

From "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)":

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

>There are several tightly coupled parts of a simulation game that must be designed closely together: the simulation model, the game play, the user interface, and the user’s model.

>In order for a game to be realizable, all of those different parts must be tractable. There are games that might have a great user interface, be fun to play, easy to understand, but involve processes that are currently impossible to simulate on a computer.

>There are also games that are possible to simulate, fun to play, easy to understand, but that don’t afford a useable interface: Will has designed a great game called “Sim Thunder Storm”, but he hasn’t been able to think of a user interface that would make any sense.

He also wanted to do SimTapeWorm, but just could not talk the marketing department into that. And I imagine the user interface would be quite slippery.

What about climate/weather models?

Aren't those simulations run on clusters of similar size (or atleast within an order of magnitude) and an agreeably responsible use of computational resources?

Would the climate model take its own climate impact into account?

Climate models probably take global energy use into about, so yes.

Feels like there should be an xkcd about this. I asked Claude to write one, but it wasn't very funny. Actually, Claude agrees with you that the energy used for training AIs is mere pocket change compared to climate simulations. (Can I trust Claude? Seems far from disinterested.)

What’s better, the puréed peas or carrots? That’s either to the infant eating it, or the parent who ultimately deals with it later on.

Is the ebook (on Penguin Random House) DRM-free? Are you planning an audiobook version?

I haven’t read the book, but in TFA it’s described as a “lavishly visual book” so I’m not sure it would translate well to audio.

Good luck with the baby and congrats for the book. <3

Thank you!!! (He really did make that typo and REALLY wanted to be inside my laptop screen and tap the keys just like me and was being super aggressive.)

I linked elsewhere Will talking about the procedural generation. But now we have The Power of Generative AI. Those editors you've built could sure be way different, just doodle your monster and watch it come alive. 'etc.

I would like to make Spore meets Second Life Powered by AI. Also Space Exploration games really took off in the years since Spore..

This is fertile ground there are so many directions to take it with modern hardware and the recent advancments. Time for another kick at the cat I say. Wanna apply to YC together? :)

I'm not even kidding, I gots ideas. Also randoms reading this if you're picking up what I'm laying down. But to get on the team first you have to buy and read his book.

P.S. - Somebody recently called me about how a Burger King Advertisement doxxed them. In the middle of the commercial it knew their name and IP address and zoomed unto their house with custom comical narration about which burger they like.

One day a Simulation of Everything Game with a little trickery could plausibly stun the player by suddenly showing them a little cartoonish version of themselves playing it in their own room.

I'm just sayin'.

LOL. Thanks!

I think a lot of videogaming ideas took off after Spore that were very likely influenced by it. Shades of Jodorowsky's Dune? (But I think Spore was actually more successful than many give it credit for, which has been pointed out to me many times. 191m+ creations and counting on Sporepedia.)

Generative AI certainly opens up new possibilities! It's analogous to GPUs (enabled real-time 3D) which opened new possibilities and audiences for videogames. I also think that the fundamental magic of creative tools doesn't actually need fancy tech at all.

Jodorowsky's Dune is perfectly apt actually.

I think you were the right people with the right vision but very early and we all simply fell into the darkest timeline because what should have been hasn't happened.

If you think about it this sort of your responsibility to save the universe by embarking on this quest with me and righting a cosmic wrong. Otherwise another Covid might happen.

Also VCs have moneybags for you we got all the buzzwords neatly lined up. Come Mr. Gingold, you cannot resist this potent of a reality distortion field from an internet stranger. Or dare I say... internet friend? ;)

I definitely feel like I've made a new internet friend. :D

Besties with testiees.

I'll drop you a line sometimes later this year. Enjoy the baby good buddy!

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