[SimHacker]

I fell in love with SimCity when I first saw it in the 80's, and I got a chance to port it to Unix as a third party contractor. Although it didn't make a lot of money, it did show I could make something work while respecting the original design, so he later hired me to work on The Sims.

His approach to game design is very exploratory, which involves making a lot of prototypes, playing around with them to evaluate the game play terrain, and then climbing the fun gradient towards the high points, and looking around for new ideas from that perspective. He purposefully designs for emergent behavior, but nobody has any way of telling what that behavior will be without actually playing around with a working prototype. It's the kind of stuff you can't just imagine, that you have to experience. So I would say the end product is more like 5% of the original idea, and 95% from prototyping!

The kind of person who wants to do the fun part for glory and have other people do all the hard work is very common, and I've run across many of them. It's a form of narcissism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism . Will is not at all like that: he's very humble and willing to listen to anything anyone has to say, and very good at explaining his ideas, and that's why he's been so successful, because people enjoy working with him, and enjoy playing his games. Though I don't know him personally, I get the impression Notch is a lot like that too. (Although I'm sure his lawyers wish he wouldn't shoot his mouth off all the time! ;)