Spore: Playing God Circa 2007

I'm not a huge gamer, but I'm certainly appreciative of the culture. And one of my cultural heroes is Will Wright, creator of the Sims, SimCity, and next year's much anticipated Spore—a game that lets you work your way up the evolutionary chain from organism through intergalactic civilization.

I just got a note that Will Wright will be honored on January 20 by the Producers Guild. It's the first time that a game designer is receiving an award usually reserved for the film and television industry. That started me thinking about Will's work again.

If you've never heard the name Will Wright, you will. For starters, he's now been on The Colbert Report, serving up great answers to Colbert's tautological questions like, "Why do I have to go into another world to live a life just as mundane as the one I have now?" And as we head into the new year, Spore is going to be the gaming world's most anticipated event. Already, sites such as SporeStuff are devoted to the game, though it's not expected to be released until the second quarter of 2007.

Wright's been called the father of "God games" because his games let you be the chief architect and planner of your world. In SimCity, you're responsible for designing sustainable cities and balancing a multitude of complex variables. In SimEarth, you're responsible for maintaining the homeostasis of an entire planet. And of course, in The Sims, you're responsible for directing the lives of a real neighborhood of simulated people, replete with their baggage, including the emotional variety. Despite the fact that you got the tough job of having a blank slate to create a world, these games all became consumer hits and countless people spent hours maintaining their simulated environments.

The newest creation, Spore, could have been called SimUniverse. (As a matter of fact, Wright called it Sim Everything when he first conceived of it.) The game begins with an under-the-microscope view of a one-celled organism. Based on choices you make (flagella vs. cilia, predatory defenses), you win DNA points and evolve. As a water creature, you'll choose flippers, claws, and other parts to keep on evolving. You hit land, do your dinosaur thing, and eventually move out of the water and start dealing with tribal life. Here you can opt for the warrior or peacemaker type of survival. Penultimately, you build cities. Ultimately, you build a spaceship that travels the universe. In a nutshell, you replay the history and perhaps foretell the future of mankind. No violence and no sex, unless of course you add them to your own version of the game. The game is what you make it.

Wright's simulations have always appealed to me because they let you test, pretend, and create in worlds other than your own. I've always encouraged my kids to play simulation games like these. Hey, they're destined to be the future architects, so I figure a little simulation to test cause and effect couldn't hurt. What about you? Will you Spore?

Related Links: If you're intrigued, you can't miss this video of Wright demoing Spore at a recent Gaming Developers Conference.