Breakfast with WillI spotted part of the following interview in a discussion over at MetaFilter today. (I made my first Metafilter FPP today, very exciting, anyway...).

Will Wright is the inventor of the SimCity and the Sims games. And, if this interview from GameSpy is anything to go by, either someone with a good imagination, or someone with enough money to try and make the things he wants to make happen (and most probably both).

Having just told the interviewer about his uncollecting hobby (whereby he buys up other people's collections on ebay, and then disseminates the collections back out into the community, thereby 'uncollecting' them), he then reveals he spends his 'real money' on soviet-era space hardware.

Wright: It started in the last 10 months or so. I got really interested in the Russian space program and the way they design things, so I started collecting this stuff like big control panels.

GameSpy: What is the biggest thing that you've bought?

Wright: The biggest thing I have right now is the external hatch off a Russian space shuttle. It's about four feet in diameter and about 100 pounds.


GameSpy: And you have it leaning against a wall?

Wright: Yeah, in our stairwell.

And I have a seat from the Soyuz. That's also pretty big. Some of the Mir control panels get pretty large. And I have a Soyuz hatch, which is a little smaller. It's about that big. (Wright holds his hand about three feet off the ground.)

GameSpy: Are you still roboting?

Wright: Not robot fighting stuff, but we are still building robots and attacking people with them.

GameSpy: Attacking people?

Wright: Yes, at Berkeley. We build these robots and we take them down to Berkeley and study the interactions that people have with the robots.

We built this newer one that has a rapid-fire ping pong cannon. And they really hurt. They come out really fast. It will fire about 10 per second. It has this big bin on it that is full of ping pong balls.

So we give people this plastic bag and we say, "It's set up to play baseball. Do you want to play baseball?" So we stand them up in front of the robot and we give them a face shield. We tell them, "It's going to shoot a little ball and you try to hit it." And all of a sudden it's like da-da-da-da, and it's belting them with balls.

We take it out to laundry mats, restaurants, drive-ins. People turn around and there is this robot and it's trying to interact with them.

Interact. By shooting ping pong balls at them. Ahhh, geeks. The rest of the interview is both random and interesting (for someone who enjoys games, maybe).
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