Q & A: Spore creator Will Wright

Few video games have been as eagerly anticipated as Spore, an evolution-inspired game and the latest creation of The Sims and SimCity creator Will Wright.

But part of the credit for that anticipation is the wait Wright announced the game in 2005, but it's taken three long years of development before it was ready for its release date, scheduled for Sept. 7 for the Mac and PC.

Part of the delay can be attributed to the game's scope: It gives players control of a micro-organism in a tidal pool teeming with life, and follows the creature's ascent from its first steps on landto its eventual formation of a tribe, civilization and race of galactic explorers.

But another unusual feature of the game is its unique use of user-generated content: The game actually draws many of creatures that populate its worlds from those the players themselves create. CBCNews spoke with Wright about his unusual creation, where it took him and what it might do for interest in science.

What inspired you to take on a project of this size?

There are a couple of things that are really interesting overviews of life in the universe. Three really come to mind. First of all the SETI [Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence] program and what came out of that, which is astrobiology and looking at all the different sciences in terms of the questions of is there other life in the universe. The second one was thePowers of 10look-in movie, which was a really interesting way of looking at all of these different scales. And the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey has always been a huge inspiration for me because I can't really think of any other story that tried to encompass such an epic storyline. I always enjoyed all three of those things and they all kind of impressed me as ways of looking at this giant, seemingly intractable subject in ways that give it simplicity and clarity.

What is it about the name Spore that resonates with you?

Well originally it was a codename that my art director Ocean Quigley came up with. I was considering SimEverything for the longest time but after living with the title Spore it just fit on so many different levels of the game. First of all you start the game as a spore, this tiny little agent of life. But also when you create stuff in the game it goes to these computer servers and then it gets sent to other players, a process we were calling pollination.

And the other reason is that the Sims had become such a franchise I was afraid if we put Sim in front of it people would start thinking in terms of the Sims, and I really wanted Spore to live on its own landscape.

One of the more interesting features is the procedural animator, a tool that formulates the animation of the player's creature based on how the creatures are drawn rather than having a set of stock animations. What were the reasons behind creating this tool?

We had to go back to the way the artist thought about this stuff. We realized that if we were doing this by hand the artist would approach this in a certain way. If you were to give an artist any kind of weird creature you can imagine they would think about how would the thing move or eat and it turned out we were able to formalize a lot of the internal algorithms an artist would use to do these same tasks.

And that became the basic strategy for how we approach the procedural content no matter whether it was texture modelling or animation or music. By doing that it bought us a number of different things. It bought us the ability to let the players build the stuff at a very high level in other words make the tools much more powerful than they would have been otherwise. But also it allowed us to make the content very compressible, and that makes the information very portable to pollinate across players, so we can do this without having to charge players a subscription fee because the bandwidth is so low.

You've described this game as being at the intersection of science and creativity. What do you mean by that?

There's a perception of science in some ways as something that's either esoteric and inaccessible, that's done in universities with lots of equipment or something that's very impersonal. The universe has these laws that are set this way for arbitrary reasons, etc., etc. Whereas when we have immersible entertainment experiences we tend to think of those personal and very connected and very centred on us. I think that's the bridge I was trying to build.

You've alsosaid the game as less an educational tool and more a motivational tool. Does that stem from the idea that people learn by doing?

Well that and also if you can get someone interested in something, and I mean really interested, they will go and learn it. They will take every opportunity to absorb it. The really the hard part for most people is getting them to understand why certain things are interesting. Every is obsessed with one thing it might be baseball cards or Britney Spears or fast cars and once they get obsessed with it, it doesn't feel like education when you are researching about it.

Something I've noticed is in talking with many scientists they all have a personal story about what got them interested in science, and it was either like Edward O. Wilson digging up bugs in his backyard or whatever, but there were clearly a few events in their life when they tuned in and they lowered their perceptual filters and they learned about the world in a new way, and after that everything else was natural.

Is there anything you learned in your research for this game that particularly stuck with you?

I learned plenty. One was in researching the whole SETI project, which was one of original inspirations. I actually found myself getting more skeptical about the SETI program in terms of its near-term results. I think there are definitely other alien intelligences out there but I think they are really far away, like not in our galaxy but rather several galaxies away from us. So that was a surprising thing I learned.

Do you see any potential for this game to be used by scientists?

It wasn't really the intent on the software, again the intent was to make a toy that people could play with and come to understand the way all of these sciences are really all part of the same system. There are certainly a lot of things on the algorithmic levels that will probably find uses in other places, especially the stuff we're doing with procedural content. In terms of predictive models of the world, that's a very different thing and if there's one thing we've learned is the world is chaotic and it's very resistant to predictive modeling.

What have you learned from making this game and community that maybe fell outside what you might have predicted?

Self-learning within the community has been surprising. We had a million people out there playing with creature creator making cool stuff of amazingly high quality, but they are also not just learning in individual little pockets, they are very effectively sharing learning amongst themselves. We have the ability for people to tag content and you can tag your content as a "monkey" or as "green."

So they started using certain tags to indicate they had found a new trick in the editor and if they have a little lesson they are trying to teach with a particular creature they put a certain tag on that creature, so that other people that are interested can search for that tag and a thousand creatures come up that have cool little tricks that people have learned.

And this is the way the community has accelerated the learning process. It's interesting to me how much intelligence is actually embedded in a collection of a million individuals that don't know each other and will probably never meet but yet have a shared imaginary playground to romp around.

Given that, can you even hazard a guess of what the Spore universe is going to look like six months from now?

That's one of the things that make it interesting; I can't even begin to guess. We look upon our players as really our co-developers, so at the point where we launch the game is really about half-way through the development process because we kind of expect at this point that players are really going to do surprising and unexpected things with the game. And our future expansion of the game is going to be very much driven by what we see the community doing with the game. This happened with the Sims as well.

You've been known for games that aren't so much about "winning" and "losing" as "playing." Is the same true for Spore? Is there a way to "end" the game?

Well there is a major goal, which is kind of like the biggest goal you can pursue in the space game. The game doesn't actually end if you manage to reach that goal which is quite hard but there is kind of an ending, although it doesn't stop the game at that point.

Spore has a little bit more of winning and losing, there are definitely goal states at every level to progress to the next level. But the progress is optional, so you can actually choose to stay on that level as long as you want to and they don't necessarily lose game over at the level either. But at the same time we have a lot of different goal structures associated as well, so for the goal-directed players, there's always plenty of goals they can pursue.

I think we were also trying to appeal a little bit more to gamers with spore than the Sims did we were really trying to straddle two groups here. We did a lot of play testing on Sims players, especially which creativity tools and the social networking stuff, but also with gamers that may be played the Sims for five or ten hours and then put it away. We wanted Spore to have a much more of a strategic experience.

What ultimately do you hope people get out of this game?

Part of what the game is attempting to do if you play all the levels, in some sense it's extracting a whole immense world from each player's imagination. Most people, if you ask them if are they creative they will say no. But if you give them the right tools and put them in the right context a few hours later they can step back and realize to their surprise they've created this whole thing. As with the Sims, in some sense it transitions from being an entertainment experience to almost a skill or a form of self-expression that they are using.

That's part of it, and another part of it is giving another perspective on life and scale and time. Most people have no idea how long life has been on Earth or how big a galaxy is, and by giving people at least a toy version of that they can get some sense of not only the size of a galaxy but even the size of relative things within a galaxy.

The game is populated with other player's content as if it were an online, World of Warcraft multi-player game, and yet it's a single-player experience. Do you see this as the future of gaming?

We have a lot of games in the single-player space and a lot of ones in the multi-player space but we have almost none that are in between the two. Spore is really almost a hybrid straddling between the single- and multi-player game. There are so many areas of design where the given assumption is it's either A or its B and there's nothing in between, until something appears in between.

How does Spore compare in game play to other games you've played?

It's interesting because there are so many different avenues you can go in Spore and so many places that are almost like little tidal pools or cul-de-sacs that you can get almost lost in. The editors are one where you can drop into the vehicle editor and spend hours and hours and hours designing your attack fleet or sitting there and terraforming a planet just right so it looks like, I don't know, [the face of] JFK. These weird things that you can do that attract me, I tend to get sidetracked by these side goals a lot which I think is great.

But it'll be interesting for me to see at the end of the day what sort of stories players are telling about the game experience. I think probably the highest-level goal is that the stories we hear from players are as diverse as possible. I think that is going to indicate at the end of the day whether we hit our target.