Spore: Will Wright's Astrobiology Evolution Toy

This fascinating video takes you a tour of Spore. You can mimic the evolution of life by creating your own Darwinian World of alien creatures from the tidal pool to next generation leading to super-intelligent  beings that can colonize toy planets and design cities, weather systems, biochemistry, geology, artifacts, food webs, weapons, spacecraft -an entire interactive universe.

Experiment and explore with climate control. Remap your intuition across vast scales of space and time across dynamic unlimited worlds -solar systems, black holes, supernovae, and galaxies. Design your own self-replicating Monolith and spacecraft and religions and gods drawn from SF classics -War of the Worlds, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Solaris- and Hubble space telescope photos.  Learn longterm dynamics that may help change the world. A totally cool Galaxy five-star favorite.

Designer Will Wright is a rare exception in the video-game industry, a 47-year-old superstar developer responsible for the creation of millions of virtual cities and people through his best-selling Sim titles (Sim City, The Sims and The Sims 2). He spent seven years creating Spore -a simulation of life, society, civilization from the microscopic scale up to the galactic -rough arc of the way life evolved from single cell to multicell to intelligence..

According Wright, in the "evolution part of the game, the player is actually designing the creature, so in fact it's almost like intelligent design rather than pure evolution for your creature. The creatures around you are in fact kind of evolving more naturally, but in fact behind them of course are intelligent designers making the specific versions. Once we get up to the civilization level it's kind of an abstraction of human history. Once we get to space the scope of the size of the galaxy is an interesting little model of the real galaxy in terms of the distance between stars, the type of other objects you have up there, planetary nebula, black holes, stuff like that are fairly accurately represented in terms of their distribution in the galaxy, the number of stars we're dealing with is actually a very small fraction. Even though we have millions of stars in our galaxy, it's a very small fraction of what a real galaxy has. But still from the player's point of view they're both still huge numbers – almost inconceivable. Unless there's a compelling reason to break reality we've tried to follow reality, but again, in a caricatured format."

Story Links:

Will Wright Video

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/f1a18906612a0110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

Related Blogs:

http://kotaku.com/gaming/will-wright/gdc-06-liveblogging-will-wright-162561.php
http://func-auton.net/blog/?p=22
http://www.pcgamersblog.com/50226711/will_wrights_spore_blending_casual_and_serious_gaming.php
http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2007/03/sxsw_will_wrigh.html
http://blog.longnow.org/2006/06/26/will-wright-and-brian-eno-playing-with-time/

Comments

[Daniel Appleton]

We've come a long way from the classic MS - DOS game of " LIFE " & even " Civilization " where one watches a miniature, slightly pixellated Earth grow, evolve & mature & one guides civilizations based on classical Greece, Rome, Egypt, etc. - Boy, does this date me! - I haven't seen the video yet ( Watching videos using dial - up requires patience & buckets of coffee ), but it must be like a variation of ST II's
" Genesis Project ". A model of Intelligent Design that hopefully doesn't get befouled.