Stupid Fun Club

Computer-game visionary Will Wright, responsible for The SIMS and its precursor: Sim City, and the latest mega-success Spore

has released on Thursday that he is exiting EA Entertainment and focusing on his think-tank project Stupid Fun Club


He started Stupid Fun Club in 2001, with the focus is development of NEW forms of entertainment including movies, toys, as well as video games. He will be channeling all his energy here for the future.

Wright: "The entertainment industry is moving rapidly into an era of revolutionary change,"

"Stupid Fun Club will explore new possibilities that are emerging from this sublime chaos and create new forms of entertainment on a variety of platforms."


Personally, as an artist I like to think I participate in a lo-fi discussion/version of what he would call “possibility space” or creativity made available to a “user” by a program which allows for a seemingly infinite - yet clearly contained - set of parameters.

Wright is the visionary responsible for pushing the limits of user-customization and play and coining this phrase. The opposite of the spectrum is of course the academic or 'schools' of art and thinking.

I am speaking of the space opened up between the ideas and intention at conception and the forms that go on to symbolize those ideas. For me it is in increasing that gap which maximizes imaginative power.

Wright has claimed that his brainstorming for The SIMS came about after his Northern California house burned down (among many in the Berkley/Oakland fires) and after moving into a new home. In putting back together their life he would arrange things in a completely different way and observe the process. The game had been originally dubbed "Home Tactics: The Experimental Domestic Simulator."

even prior to that (the fire was in 91') Wright had already been schooling in domesticity.

from the New Yorker:

In 1986, Wright and Jones had a daughter, Cassidy, and Jones made Wright promise to share the parenting equally so that she [his wife] could continue painting. “He really did stick to that,” she told me. “He spent a lot of time with Cassidy.” While he was at home with his daughter, Wright began to turn over the idea for a new game, a kind of interactive doll house that adults would like as much as children. “I went around my house looking at all my objects, asking myself, ‘What’s the least number of motives or needs that would justify all this crap in my house?’ There should be some reason for everything in my house. What’s the reason?”

in another article on the web:

"At some point, I got more interested in architecture. The process that architects go through to design a house was really interesting to me. They start with a functional task description of where you spend your time and what kind of environments you need to support your activities. And that eventually evolves into a house plan. I was trying to figure out a way to turn that into a game about architecture. So I started down that path."

Wright was heavily influenced in his research by A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, an architectural theory book based on function rather than form. For Alexander, common sense rules about architecture were often overlooked/never consider or just treated as 'window dressing', such as "Don't make a balcony more than six feet deep or it won't get used much; and if a roof appears to be supported only by spindly posts, it'll make people nervous. " The results of this ignorance: pompous musing of architects about 'transparency' and Derrida, or conversely some kind of Michael Graves idealization and appropriation without context or content.

In Wright's research, he discovered a curious statistic: Home-design software was a big seller! It couldn't be that ALL these people were remodeling their homes, they probably just wanted to play with architecture.

One of his first projects with Stupid Fun Club was participating with his daughter Cassidy, in Robot Wars with the contender "Kitty Puff Puff", "who fought against its opponents by sticking a roll of gauze onto its armature and circling around them, encapsulating them and denying them movement. The technique, "cocooning", was eventually banned." (from wikipedia)

For Wright, getting people to focus on their environment - albeit virtual - is a trove of sociological study into how our environments affect our habits and conditions and CAN change behaviour.

That was his inspiration, that and spending time away from his office to be at home with his daughter..where he would play with her with her doll houses and watch her mind interact and dream.

Shih Chieh Huang Connected: Eject before disconnecting

Shih Chieh Huang

Connected: Eject before disconnecting
March 6-October 18, 2009
The RISD Museum
224 Benefit Street
Providence, RI

Fearfully cowering below the battle of the bland faculty show at the RISD museum is a lurking futuristic but sad 4-D super-being. Rendered in electronic appliances, toys, plastic bags and containers in participation with water, air, light motion sensors, computer and electrical parts and video footage this little guy communicates the effect of visiting a distant relative of the old-world on life support from a overburdened late 20th century.

Coming across at random in the dark and knowing nothing about the work or artist it was liberatingly enjoyable to experience the 'being' without any judgment of the idea from the artist or institution (too dark for plaques). It sorta was what it was. For me, the 'promises of technology' concept could have either been inverted or very well championed depending on your position or how well you interacted or were put off by the thing. My guess was it is both.

For those not experiencing it, I'd say it was pretty close to E.T. in cuteness factor. The creature, a casting call cast off from a "Matrix Reloaded" revival - Lower East Side play - circa 2069, contributes great ambiance but little utilitarian purpose. The creature floats at the top of the ceiling like pathetic caricatured balloons at a childrens' party - breathing in and out its own oxygen.

Visiting the space is like ogling any creature at the zoo, or some replication of a futuristic one. quite a feat on behalf of the artist showing in what amounted to a dead space between galleries, as I almost felt empathy for the thing. In fact, it reminded me of George Saunders' short story Pastoralia which featured a "historical reconstruction" theme park where humans are paid to reenact the banal cave life of eating imaginary bugs and drawing figures on walls while suppressing their desire to speak English or complain about their paycheck during work hours.

On further research, the artist's intent IS to showcase the alienating quality of technology in his self-created medium of "interchanging process between people and space." Technology for Huang inevitably separates us in our own little worlds, and not surprisingly in forms we did not anticipate such as existentially emitting from our twitter box and facebook. This is in stark contrast to the past conceptions of future alienation predicted in 20th century Sci-Fi, of which Huang's creation emulates like a drag queen.

The low tech - rather than being just a medium or trope as with much art - really encapsulates our foolish premonitions. think: VR (virtual reality) or hovercraft cars

Huang's achievement is constructing a creature that is far more organic than the master of the medium Nam June Paik. Similar to Brooklyn-based artist Noah Fischer (whose more recent emphasis is on a more sterile objecthood, and the fetish for Judd-esq sublime multifunctionality), this creature becomes the empathetic mascot at the pregnant intersection between waste and the promise of technology.

A being of absolute detritus, breathing in, breathing out, kept on life-support by the museum, but somewhat endearing at the same time. Each object in the piece (the main creature is surrounded by a less impressive entourage of blinking-trash-orbs), metaphors aside - is literally in flux of personality and energy, and since it is not really all that advanced exists as probably the most intriguing transformative DIY art I have seen in recent memory, especially considering the RISD surrounds whose halls I can only imagine have run amok with such tropes.

A creative Gollum, or harbinger for good art in boxed in times.
The title of course, referring to the warning message that flashes on a peripheral (such as an ipod) when it’s connected to another computer via USB. As if we do not have the ability to just walk away from the situations we create, we have to ask permission and sign out slowly.

images @Shih Chieh Huang http://www.messymix.com/