(2006-10-15) Johnson Spore

Steven Johnson profiles Will Wright's coming-soon Spore, and connects it to many contexts. Long Zoom, Powers Of Ten; Generative Music; Educating Kids; MMORPG... That small file size is crucial to the way the game allows players to share their creations with other players in the Spore universe. As you work your way through the Spore levels, your creatures are automatically sent back to the central Spore file servers, where they are then used to populate the worlds of other players. This approach was directly inspired by Freeman Dyson's notion of Panspermia - the idea that life on earth may have been seeded via meteors carrying microscopic "spores" of life from other planets. (Dyson's concept is also the origin of the game's title.)... In this respect, Spore breaks decisively from the fastest-growing genre in gaming today: the so-called massively multiplayer networked games - like World of Warcraft - where thousands of players share a single persistent virtual world, interacting with other players via their onscreen characters. (Interestingly, Wright's only foray into massively multiplayer design - the online version of the Sims that launched in 2002 (Sims Online) - was a flop.)... Instead of a single shared world with millions of active participants, Spore promises a million alternate worlds, each occupied by a single player. You will meet creatures invented by others, but ultimately you are alone in your own private universe. Wright calls Spore "massively single player."... Thus far no one - that we know of - has been able to grow a life-sustaining environment on a lifeless planet. "I've had a few people ask me if I think Spore will help teach evolution," Wright said, "and the ironic thing is that, if anything, we're teaching intelligent design. I've seen a few games that relied on evolution - I've even designed some of them - and it's just not as fun." But, of course, there's one crucial way in which Spore breaks from intelligent design. The universe of the game is not dominated by a single, all-powerful creator. It's a universe governed by a million intelligent designers... It occurred to me as I wandered through the halls of the Spore offices that a troubled school system could probably do far worse than to devote an entire, say, fourth-grade year to playing Spore. The kids would get a valuable perspective on their universe; they would learn technical skills and exercise their imaginations at the same time; they would learn about the responsibility that comes from creating independent life.