Last year, Will Wright gave an amazing demo of his super-game, SPORE. For those of you that aren’t aware, SPORE is the game of everything. You start off as a single-celled microbial life form, and then you grow. You evolve, and get bigger, grow social systems, build cities, and eventually go off into the vastness of space to explore. But the coolest part about SPORE is that you can fully customize the features of your little creature. The models have stretch zones and realistic skeletons that you can deform through the game tools to create things that are completely unique. The procedural systems in the game are able to realistically animate any possible combination of elements that the player can think of. The game is a good ways off, but the demo he showed last year was the big event of the conference.
People were expecting more of the same this year from him. What we got instead was an hour and a half walk around Will Wright’s head. There were two main themes that he focused on during this amble through his cerebellum, Game Design and Astrobiology. Yes, you read that right, astrobiology. The science of life in space. What Will wanted to share with the audience, was that while the industry as a whole does an excellent job of explaining how we go from pre-production to production to testing to marketing, we sort of lag when it comes to explaining the conceptual and research sides of game development. So he opened his head to us.
The first key thing he tried to explain to the audience is that he’s obsessive. Once he finds a topic that interests him he dives into. He talks to the experts, he reads books, he scours the web, he tries to soak up as much information on the topic as possible. For a game like SPORE, you can only imagine how much information Will Wright has chewed through. Will talked about the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox, a mathematical equation for the number of sentient species that could theoretically exist in the universe and the paradox that attempts to answer why we haven’t encountered any yet. He talked about experiments in recreating early life on earth with clouds of gas and electrical shocks. He talked about the theories about how life might have come about, touching on topics like panspermia, the theory that life might have come from space. He talked about the tons of material that get tossed around the solar system in something called planetary-cross talk. He even had a program that modeled the expansion of a sentient race across the galaxy. He talked about how the Russians had managed to sneak secret spy-space stations into space that were mounted with anti-aircraft guns that had the potential to knock them out of orbit if they were over-used.
These were all the things that ran through Will Wright’s mind as he did the very early concept work for SPORE. According to him, he’s read well over one hundred books gathering information for this project. And judging from what he exposed us to today, I don’t doubt it. In all honesty, I think Will might have gone easy on us today. Either way, this walk through his head was fascinating, and just baffling enough to make me want to know more. And if anyone ever asks you where Will came up for the idea for SPORE, you just look them in the eye and say, "Armed Russian space-stations, a guy named Drake, and the contents of 100 other books."
And the TV says to me, "I will eat your children." I look back, and say, "Only if I get to play their games after you're done."
