Will Wright's World of Spore
After viewing a quite interesting video on the creation of Spore, I am very intrigued on how much there is to create and explore in the universe of Spore. I have heard much hype for the game, but have never actually seen it played. I can say, I'm rather convinced in giving it a try.
It's extremely complex, expansive and creative. As a big fan of space exploration type of games (i.e. Mass Effect), I feel that Spore takes it to another level. Will Wright begins to demo the creation of what is a 3D model for the game in less than 3 minutes. According to Wright, It would take hours to render a 3D model by a Pixar artist. The creation is the easiest part though. Keeping it alive is the hard part. Evolution plays a huge role in this game and by "upgrading" or evolving your creature it adapts to the world around it. Soon it becomes so advanced, you're able to take to space, The final frontier.
Spore creates a universe of interactivity, allowing players to travel to different planets, made by other players or computers, to terraform or terrorize it. All choices affect the track of your species you create. Whether the species survives or dominates the others. The demo was super interesting. Wright's talk about generative systems really intrigued me. It was especially great accompanied by Brian Eno's ambient music. Every little action you make effects the rest of the "flow," of the game. It starts with blocks and expands to create amazing symmetrical patterns. As we can see, big things start small.
As I write this post, The demo for Spore is downloading. I really want to try it out and explore Wright's World of Spore.
Comments
Many people go out and buy the newest video game because they want to try the new vehicles, the new weapons, the new physics, the new graphics, on and on and on. Whats not in that list for most people is story. This is great for video game developers because everything in the list above that people tend to care about can all be generated algorithmically. This means kids can get their new vehicles, weapons, and graphics every month - just generate new ones. The video certainly made it clear that "simple" rules can create extremely different and unique results.
We may soon play video games that in 5 years no longer resemble the game they started as - this may come as a result of practices such as genetic programming where the code literally changes over time.
In fact, on the Spore website, you can see just how the Spore universe has grown.
From the Spore 1.0 release, there's now
1.5.7 galactic adventures,
1.3.1 bug parts (creature creator)
... and even a 1.6.0 robot part patch (made and distributed by dr.pepper).
Spore is, currently, a true genetic program as it is today.