Will Wright MBTI Personality Type
Personality
What personality type is Will Wright? Will Wright is an INTP personality type in MBTI, 5w6 - so/sx - in Enneagram, RCOAI in Big 5, ILE in Socionics.
The man is an INTP through and through, and it shows in his way of thinking and his work. There's a lot of Ti and Ne wrapped up in this quote of his: "Well, one thing I've always really enjoyed is making things. Out of whatever. It started with modeling as a kid, building models. When computers came along, I started learning programming and realizing the computer was this great tool for making things, making models, dynamic models, and behaviors, not just static models. I think when I started doing games I really wanted to carry that to the next step, to the player, so that you give the player a tool so that they can create things. And then you give them some context for that creation. You know, what is it, what kind of kind of world does it live in, what's its purpose? What are you trying to do with this thing that you're creating? To really put the player in the design role. And the actual world is reactive to their design. So they design something that the little world inside the computer reacts to. And then they have to revisit the design and redesign it, or tear it down and build another one, whatever it is. So I guess what really draws me to interactive entertainment and the thing that I try to keep focused on is enabling the creativity of the player. Giving them a pretty large solution space to solve the problem within the game. So the game represents this problem landscape." The man is talking about possibility spaces (Ne) and system models (Ti). His games are simulations that operate according to rules and which evolve in this bottom-up, organic way; the way that Ti would have it. "The problem with our education system is we've taken this kind of narrow, reductionist, Aristotelian approach to what learning is. It's not designed for experimenting with complex systems and navigating your way through them in an intuitive way, which is what games teach. It's not really designed for failure, which is also something games teach." The "reductionist, Aristotelian approach" he complains about is exactly the kind of criticism that Ti would make of Te. Experimenting with complex systems in an intuitive way is what INTPs are born to do.
Biography
William Ralph "Will" Wright (born January 20, 1960) is an American video game designer and co-founder of the former game development company Maxis, and then part of Electronic Arts (EA). In April 2009, he left EA to run Stupid Fun Club Camp, an entertainment think tank in which Wright and EA are principal shareholders. The first computer game Wright designed was Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984, but it was SimCity that brought him to prominence. The game was released by Maxis, a company Wright formed with Jeff Braun, and he built upon the game's theme of computer simulation with numerous other titles including SimEarth and SimAnt. Wright's greatest success to date comes from being the original designer for The Sims.
