Time's 2009 Person of the Year is Will Wright
March 21 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: Metaverse Year: 2009 Rating: 7
On December 26, 2009 Time Magazine announced superstar video-game designer Will Wright as its latest Person of the Year award recipient. Racking up multiple billions in sales for the recent releases of The Sims 3 (2009) and Spore (Sept. 2008) Wright conclusively asserted the dominance of massively multi-player online video games and, more importantly, ushered in the new era of Work/Play.
It’s almost impossible to walk into a school or a McDonald’s without immediately spotting some real-world manifestation of either Spore or The Sims. Custom trading cards, t-shirts, iPhone sleeves, iPhone flash games and hyper-viral 3D printouts featuring creatures generated in-game have become as pervasive as Pound Puppies at the peak of their craze eons ago. At the same time, this new marketing/merchandising phenomenon has also created a new class of millionaire creature, avatar and world designers with a median age of just sixteen years, thus irrevocably spreading the notion that pro-sumerism (consumers becoming micro-producers) and serious games as a potent economic force are for real. Thanks to Wright, no one on this planet will ever again look at the gaming the same way.
(cont.)
Of course, Wright is the brilliant poster-child of a broader User-Generated Content shift that traces it’s roots back to the launch of Linden Labs’ Second Life”, a pervasive open-ended virtual world that has of late showed signs of a possible resurgence. But it is undeniable that he is a cut above when it comes to blending function with fun.
Runners-up for Person of the Year 2009 included life scientist Craig Ventner (for his applied artificial life-forms), exponentialist Raymond Kurzweil (for popularizing the concept of Acceleration) and iPhone brainiac Steve Jobs (for designing such a popular hand-held mini-computer that it now rivals the PC market).
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