think or thwim

In this talk at the Long Now Foundation, Wright and Eno discuss their uses of generative systems, and Wright gives a great demo of his next game, Spore.

Stewart Brand:

Back in the 1970s both speakers got hooked by cellular automata such as Conway’s “Game of Life,” where just a few simple rules could unleash profoundly unpredictable and infinitely varied dynamic patterns. Cellular automata were the secret ingredient of Wright’s genre-busting computer game “SimCity” in 1989. Eno was additionally inspired by Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain,” in which two identical 1.8 second tape loops beat against each other out of phase for a riveting 20 minutes. That idea led to Eno’s “Music for Airports” (1978), and the genre he named “ambient music” was born….

It’s interesting that just one verb is used both for music and for games: “play.”