KEY POINTS:
If it were up to you to build the universe from scratch, how would you do it?
Would it be the same as it is now, but perhaps ridding it of obvious mistakes like rollerblades, brussel sprouts and synchronised swimming? Or would it be a fantastic world full of wild, complex creatures with a bent for interplanetary travel?
Ground breaking game designer Will Wright has again remapped the computer gaming world, and this time he's done it from the ground up.
Responsible for one of the most successful game titles of all time, The Sims, and many other titles to boot, Wright has done what many have tried and almost all have failed to do. He's crossed the boundaries of video game appeal and given female gamers something to get excited about, while still keeping the average 15- to 24-year-old male player happy.
After selling 100 million copies of The Sims, which allows players to build houses, buy stuff and interact with friends and neighbours, Wright now takes us somewhere we've not yet been: . It all starts with the recently released Creature Creator, which can be downloaded for free. Spore itself isn't out until September 5, but 2.6 million user-made creatures have already been uploaded to the Spore Show website.
The game takes evolution right back to the Big Bang and starts the ball rolling all over again. It is governed only by the creativity of players who are charged with making everything from the creatures themselves to the world that they live in.
From the creation of single-celled organisms, players gradually haul their creations from the primordial ooze and evolve through different stages. They become creatures before eventually entering a tribal phase, then become an actual civilisation and develop culture, religion, war and technology before starting to explore the universe.
It's here that Spore truly becomes interesting, with a real living, breathing universe to explore and settle. The game is almost boundless. Creatures, buildings and vehicles created can be uploaded from the user's PC or Mac to allow other players to use them. Wright calls it a "massive multiplayer single player game" ... you make your own world, but others can use the parts of that world, as opposed to making their own.
Wright's colleagues at market-leading game publisher Electronic Arts speak with reverence about not only his skill in creating titles that catch the game-buying public's imagination, but also of his boundless knowledge of science, politics, religion and the arts. The application of these topics make Spore über-engaging, as you apply culture and technology to your critters' worlds and watch them thrive, or destroy themselves.
Wright, in the flesh, presents as a highly driven, slightly mischievous geek with absolute passion he talks about Spore like it's his baby and, after seven years in development and many more years germinating from a basic idea, it may as well be.
"Spore's meant to be like an epic look at the universe," said Wright at the game's press launch in Singapore, "we step way back and say 'where did life come from, and where's it going, what are things like from the very small scale to the very large?'
"It's meant to be a game with the player is in the primary creative role. So while playing the game players are creating the whole universe the creatures, the buildings, the cities, the vehicles ... essentially entire planets.
"If you could take the entire universe and turn it into a toy, what would that toy look like?"
God games have become one of the staples of the virtual world, with titles that allow players to do everything from rebuilding Rome to making a rollercoaster fun park or running a zoo - or, like The Sims, making a real, human world. Spore expands this God concept about as far as it can go.
"You can call it a God game, which is a really whole genre of games," said Wright, "but it's only really interesting if the world is a little bit out of your control.
"So if you're a god in the game, you're a pretty lame god, because things never quite unfold the way that you expect them to. The world is pushing back, and a little bit out of your control. So there's a god-like perspective on the game, but you've never really got a god-like total sense of control otherwise the game becomes very boring, like a paint programme."
So as God of the God game, what does this make Wright?
"Our old marketing slogan was 'we're not gods, we just make them'. I like to think of our fans as the gods."
All game development comes with a certain amount of technical challenge, but the key difficulty in getting Spore to behave as its makers wanted was allowing them to stretch their creative muscles without having to be computer animation whizzes. The drag-and-drop, stretch-and-manipulate and self-texturing abilities showcased in the Creature Creator are just the tip of the iceberg.
"There were technical issues in Spore that we had to solve, and that required a fair amount of computing power," he said. "We couldn't have built this game five years ago. So we were definitely looking at a lot of increases - not just in terms of computing power, but in terms of software complexity as well. We developed a lot of interesting algorithms for Spore that didn't exist before. We had to teach the computer to do a lot of the art - stuff like animation and texturing that normally are done by human professionals.
"Artists on my team were all Maya users and were really excited that once they started using the editor they could achieve the same sort of results that they could in Maya with about one-tenth the pain.
"What happens when you give a tool with almost the power of Maya to a five-year-old? Some of the things that come out of a five-year-olds' imagination are really amazing compared to what comes out of an adult's imagination. To me that's the really interesting part.
"I think adults have basically learned to close off possibilities, where kids haven't. To a kid, anything's possible, and that's why when you give a high-powered imagination tool like Spore to a young kid, the things that come out of their imagination are just astoundingly wonderful things that we would probably never think of.
"Teaching the computer to replicate some of the deeper processes that our artists have to do required fundamentally deep technologies that didn't exist.
"The other big challenge was design. We were basically building a game that had to meet all of these different challenges. It had to be acceptable to the Sims player by control system, UI, camera scheme etc. That was a pretty huge design challenge for us to face."
The massive leaps in computer power have left Wright open-mouthed - especially considering he constructed his first game using the grunt of the now-limp Apple II.
"I probably wouldn't have guessed [how far technology would advance], especially on the graphics side.
"I remember being blown away by these Evans and Sutherland image generators which were dedicated machines that cost millions of dollars - now a PlayStation 3 would blow them right out of the water."
The infrastructure behind the game is huge in itself, allowing players to share and rate content, even using the inbuilt video recorder to catch any part of their game and upload it to YouTube.
"Collectively the players are all building the content that we'll populate the world with," he said, "and as you've already seen we're going to have far more content on our servers than you could ever encounter in a lifetime of playing. Then it's more of matter of managing that data flow between your client and our servers. The data is very, very compressed - the creatures themselves compress down to 20K, but within the game are about 3MB. All of the content's like that, which means we can load the content very rapidly.
"When you're actually flying around the universe and you find a star, that's the point that it substantiates the system. It randomly generates planets, downloads species, cities, buildings and vehicles, and then keeps track of it from that point on, so when you go back, the same things are there.
"But as you actually bring these places into existence - and some players will visit 500 different systems - there's a world evolution simulation that's running in all of these systems. So when you do go back, it's advanced and changed."
The game-geek forums are running hot with Spore rants - from Alabama's finest criticising the evolution component of the game as "anti-Christian and un-American", to those mapping the numerous delays in its release and others complaining that as Wright once said anyone could finish it, Spore was going to be too simple for 'real gamers'.
"If a hardcore gamer plays the game on hard, it's actually incredibly difficult," he says to the easy play argument.
"That was one of the key issues in tuning it - that I couldn't beat it. I guess the later levels of the game on the harder setting will still be totally challenging, while the casual gamers, who maybe play The Sims, won't totally get their butt kicked."
And the evolution/creation issue: "A lot of people have been asking me if the religious people have been objecting to the evolution in the game, but it's actually been the opposite - I've been getting a lot of hardcore atheist people objecting to the religion in the game. You get it from both sides."
As Wright sees it, the game shares a big similarity with The Sims in that many people will concentrate on making and sharing stuff, while others will set out to conquer the universe.
"Since the release of the creature creator I'm getting a lot of stories that I heard from The Sims about people who hadn't actually ever touched a computer game, saw the creature creator and started to produce them - it wasn't so much a game as a new toy or a new tool.
"They discovered that they could now do new things because a tool at that level gives them something they've never seen in computer games: that opportunity to create things that interest them. A lot of people just want the creativity side, and once you've made these things you naturally want to do something with them, like put them in the game and watch them evolve. So we only use the tools as bait for people to come in and make toys. Once they start thinking of them as toys they want to play with them.
"It's endless in terms that you'd never have time in your whole life to explore all the worlds, it kind of depends on what your goals are.
"Some people are going to get totally hooked on the creative aspect - they're going to want to rebuild London, or whatever, or make giant collections, or have the biggest Sporecast in the world.
"Really the most satisfying part for me is seeing what the fans do with it. I've already been just astounded at what they're doing with the Creature Creator - it's blown away any expectations I had both in quantity and quality.
"I'm looking forward to seeing what they're going to do with the other editors and some of the storytelling features in Spore. There are some incredibly elaborate storytelling features and it's going to be interesting to see some of the stories that they create within the game."
- NZ HERALD STAFF
