I missed Will Wright’s demo of Spore when I was at SXSW, but thanks to zachinglis and his sometimes-shaky-but-who-cares hand-held video, I just got to see it on Viddler.
Wright is the guy behind Sims. Spore is a “massively single-player online game” due out 3rd quarter this year, and after seeing the demo I intend to be one of the first amoebas to crawl out of the primordial soup.
It started out conceptually as “Sim Everything” — in which you and an online community can create stars, supernova them, terraform planets, build creatures that then evolve and become sapient and join up to build tribes and civilizations. You eat or get eaten, but you can also build things that other players can use. You can drop monoliths among promising lifeforms and make them want to do intelligent things, à la 2001. You can pump carbon dioxide into your planet’s atmosphere and watch on an accelerated timescale how the glaciers melt and sea level rises and civilizations start to fight over water scarcity. And, unlike in real life, you can hop into your Starship Enterprise and find another planet to mess with. (There are elements of Wright’s favorite sci-fi woven into the gameplay: in addition to the Enterprise and the Monolith, there’s a Genesis Device for transforming a deserted planet into an ecology-rich life support system.)
Creature creation looks like something that binds aspects of Mr. Potato Head crossed with Lego crossed with Clay modeling crossed with a Pixar studio.

The demo shows just how simple the basics are, how smart and intuitive the editor is, and what howlingly complex , bizarre, and lifelike things you can make and animate with nothing but mouseclicks. Thrillingly, Wright has been quoted as saying he doesn’t want to make players feel like Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins. He wants them to feel like George Lucas and J.R.R Tolkien.
This is a big, big conceptual game that looks about a thousand times more interesting than Second Life. Wright at one point calls it a philosophical tool disguised as a game, and talks about Spore in the context of Montessori toys (“I went to a Montessori school until I was in the 5th grade [11 years old or so in the American school system], and my education went steeply downhill after that.”). Montessori toys are designed to allow you to intuit, rather than be told, natural laws and systemic patterns.

There’s lots here that I think will appeal to wannabe gamers like myself. I dabbled in arcade games, but only carved out time for occasional forays into stuff like Myst and Riven that made my brain sweat. A game in which you have to learn a different base system to master the mathematics and intuit the alphabet in order to learn the language — now THAT’s a game. Well ok, there was that short spell when I was was modding Doom, but that was pre-kids. My eight year old son Doony and I have enjoyed working our way through Lego Star Wars together, but we part ways when he goes deep into the Pokemon and Yu-gh-oh card trading games: too much specialized knowledge capacity required.

But I have a feeling we may both be spending some time in Spore. For me, there’s that big picture evolutionary anthropology context. For him and his love of collections, there’s a trading card system built right in so you can scan and capture to a card every place you visit, every creature you see or eat. Kids being able not only to make their own creatures, but then being able to capture them as cards and trade them? Tell me this isn’t going to be massive.
And just to ratchet the dang thing up a few more notches on the cultural phenom meter: The music will be by Brian Eno.

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