LOS ANGELES -- For many years, Will Wright has been hailed as one of the greatest creative minds in the game industry.
Starting with Sim City, Wright has enjoyed hit after hit. The Sims, with its many expansion packs, is the best-selling PC game franchise in history.
Next year, Electronic Arts will release Wright's next attempted masterpiece, Spore, a game some are calling "Sim Everything."
Spore will give players the chance to control life -- from the ground up.
Starting with single-cell organisms, players work on designing life with ever more complexity. As the game progresses, players must figure out how to take creatures from individual animals to small tribes and then to cities, whole planets, solar systems and galaxies.
Wright and his team of about 30 claim to have broken new ground with Spore.
While it's a single-player game, everything players create, from huts to spaceships, can make its way into a giant database, which will be used to populate planets in the online Spore universe.
It's what they call a massively single-player game.
At E3, the video-game industry's mammoth annual convention, Wright showed off Spore for the crowds. And though he wasn't supposed to be giving interviews, Wired News managed to corral him for a conversation about the new game, its design philosophy and how it may change the way people play games.
Wired News: What do you want players to get out of Spore?
Will Wright: One of my goals for this whole thing has been to give somebody an awe-inspiring global view of reality, almost like a drug-induced epiphany with a computer. The kind of, "Oh, man, what if we were a molecule inside of a galaxy?" type thing. Can we transfer that experience -- that, I don't want to say drug-induced, but I guess it is, or almost theological meaning-of-life-type experience -- into an interactive computer game?
Can a computer game bring you to theological discussions, or philosophy, but at the same time remain eminently whimsical and playful and approachable? That's an interesting balance to strike. I like the idea of an extremely whimsical toy that has deep philosophical implications.
WN: In the design process, was there any discussion of how religion would play into the game?
Wright: Well, we're looking at what we called Cultural as one of the ways a civilization on your planet can then acquire another civilization, and we're roughly thinking of that as possibly pseudo-religious. And I'm not quite sure how specific we're going to get.
It's almost better to be a little more abstract and let the player read into it.... So that distinction, let's say, between religion and art, I'd almost rather leave to the player.... They can design little churches or minarets if they want to. In the game, they can use the tools to instantiate a very specific instance of what they think Cultural means.
WN: What do you think about people calling Spore "Sim Everything?"
Wright: That was actually my first choice for a name. I thought I would call it Sim Everything, but we needed a secret name for the project, and our lead artist, Ocean Quigley, said, "How about Spore?"
The more we thought about it, the more we liked it. It just felt right. It works on different levels: You start as a little spore-like thing, but also you're seeding life in the world, and you're spreading it like a spore. Also, the content you're creating, that's very much what Spore is: the compressed representation of something that you send around and which propagates.
Also, not putting "Sim" in front of it was very refreshing to me. It feels like it wants to be breaking out into a completely different thing than what Sim was.
WN: Where did the idea come from?
Wright: Part of it was what I saw with The Sims, with people sharing content. Part of it was the Eames (Office) thing, Powers of 10, and a lot of my favorite science-fiction things, like 2001.
I got very interested in the SETI project, and astrobiology. The whole idea originally was an astrobiology game. But as you look at astrobiology and SETI, all the factors you're dealing with resolve all the way down to the chemical level. So that spans the Powers of 10 very nicely. So basically, it was a matter of molding all these things into one consistent, coherent concept.
WN: What aspect of Spore are you most proud of?
Wright: The animation. I knew right off the bat that that was going to be really hard to do. And it was the very first thing we started on.
The whole concept was dependent upon this technology that did not exist, what I'm calling procedural animation. The fact that the player can create any creature, and then we figure out how it would walk and move and behave.
We went through all the research work in that field that we could find, and we ended up having to go several years beyond it to get to where we are, to where we felt confident that we could solve this problem to the level to where we can base a product on it.
So knowing what I know about computers, and algorithms, that's what blows me away the most, the fact that we can take any arbitrary creature the player's made and then bring it to life like that.
WN: How important is user-created content to the whole concept?
Wright: User-created content has two extraordinary benefits. No. 1 is that when somebody makes a piece of content, they are so much more emotionally attached to it. It doesn't even matter if it's good or bad. If they made it, it's really cool, and they're totally interested in what happens to it. No. 2, players love trading and sharing and spreading this stuff around and having it come to them, and building up their worlds.
So it has a tremendous potential benefit to other players. For the few people that make really good content, if we can distribute that to all the other players, then the players in some sense become part of the game-design team. They are helping us to build the game. I'm trying to figure out, how do we take that cool dynamic and burn it into the game to where it's part of the game's DNA, as opposed to something we taped on later?
WN: How much of a side benefit is that in terms of keeping the development costs down?
Wright: That's not a side benefit. That's a primary benefit. Actually, there are two issues: There's player-generated content and then there's procedural content, which are closely related.
And in fact, it turns out that they hang off of a lot of the same technologies. So the things that allow us to give the player the ability to edit a planet very easily are the same things we need to randomly generate a wide variety of planets, this procedural generation of the meshes and textures, etc.
So by developing one central technology core, we now have the ability to give the players extreme creative leverage on editing it, and we also have the ability to give the computer that same extreme leverage.
And that is what gives the content high compressibility, because every piece of content can be defined parametrically. Every piece of content has, in essence, a genome, which we can now transport across the net very cheaply, because it's so small, or put a database on your hard drive that has 1,000 creatures and occupies a very small amount of space.
WN: What would a Spore expansion pack be like?
Wright: Well, I'm more interested in expanding this game broadly rather than deeply. With Spore, I want to take parts of the game to different platforms and then sell parts of it to people who never bought the original game.
That's what I mean by expand broadly. So, for example, we could pull out the creature part of this game, where I'm designing the creature and having them live and interact, and do a version on a handheld system.
