Game Master: The New Yorker Reports on Will Wright’s Spore
New Yorker reporter John Seabrook writes about Will Wright and his upcoming release of his new game, "Spore" by Electronic Arts. Seabrook provides a brief history of gaming, starting with Atari's Pong which was developed by Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn, and advancing to "God games" such as SimCity in the late 80s. Seabrook writes:
Computer animation is a brute-force project of converting graphic art into two-dimensional pixels, and, more recently, into three-dimensional polygons, the building blocks of digital pictures. But to create a truly absorbing simulation, one that offers some insight into the nature of real life, is a much more difficult proposition. The designer must play God, or at least the notion of God in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy -- a god that can anticipate the outcome of the player's actions and yet allows the player the feeling of free will.
For us, the most surprising feature of Will Wright's Spore is that, unlike World of Warcraft, it isn't a multiplayer game. Will Wright describes Spore as a "massively parallel single-player game." While you are connected online, Spore servers will pollinate your copy of the game with content created by other players, but you never compete directly with other players.
If you haven't seen Spore yet, you can watch this demonstration on YouTube.
Electronic Arts anticipates that Spore will be released in 2007.
Posted by Michael Bean
