Weeee, I get to keep my front row seat for Will Wright's keynote entitiled What's Next in Game Design.

The stage is bare and the big screen is showing a bunch of cosmos images. Oh, Wright is up there tinkering around with his Powerpoint presentation.... and he's gone.

Check back on the jump for more as it happens.

Sorry about that. My cell's battery completly crapped so I couldn't post live. Here's what I wrote from the event.

Wright decided to focus his talk on how to come up with concepts and research them for a game.

He said that books are his primary inspiration. Most of my games are usually started by one book.

Sweet, Wright just said Otaku. Now I need to get him to add a K.

His point: Learn to develop your inner (k)Otaku.

Now he s talking about making Sims into Sims Online and why it didn t work. His answer, no way to control time. You re stuck with the boring stuff.

He also found that like 60 percent of gamers use cheats in Sims, but you can t do that in online.

The game became an unmanageable behemoth, he said, which is sorta what drove him to Spore.

Players keep surprising us.

Spore came about because of Wright s fascination with astrobiology.

The rest of Wright s schizophrenic speech intertwined astrobiology and game development research and as funny as that sounds, it worked quite well.

Wright broke his talk into bite-sized chunks, taking turns talking about his technique for taking a concept, research it and turn it into a workable game design and then flopping over and talking about aliens and the evolution of life in the universe.

I won't try to summerize anymore, but I will post a ton o pics for you, many of which are from concept art for Spore.