'The Sims' creator focuses on world-building

The creator of the worlwide gaming phenomenon "The Sims" is shifting his sights from city-building to world-building.
Game designer Will Wright recently talked to media at the Singapore Zoological Gardens last week to talk about his latest game "Spore", which is set to launch this September. The game allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture.
Below are excerpts of an interview with Wright:

What is Spore all about?

Spore is your own personal universe in a box. In this universe you can create and evolve life, establish tribes, build civilizations and even sculpt entire worlds. In Spore you have a variety of creation tools at your disposal that allow you to customize nearly every aspect of your universe: creatures, vehicles, buildings, and even spaceships. While Spore is a single player game, your creations and other players’ creations are automatically shared between your galaxy and theirs, providing a limitless number of worlds to explore and play.

How is it played, and why is it unique?

Unlike most other games, Spore is focused on developing and nurturing your creations. Players are given the creative control to make their imagination tangible. The Spore Creators tools can be used to make cells, creatures, buildings, vehicles, spaceships, and ultimately shape and sculpt planets. In terms of game play, the Spore universe is made up of five phases with different challenges and goals. You may choose to start with the cell phase and nurture one species from its humble aquatic origins to its evolution as a sentient species. Or you may decide to start building tribes or civilizations on multiple planets. There is much more freedom in the decisions you make, that translate directly to your creations. What you do with your universe is up to you.

How can Spore connect people?

Spore is a unique blend of single-player and massively multiplayer online games. Although simultaneous multiplayer gaming is not a feature of Spore, a single-player’s content can be uploaded to the internet to be shared with the millions of other Spore players in the world. Your creations and other players’ creations are automatically shared between your galaxy and theirs, providing a limitless number of worlds to explore and play within. Currently on Sporepedia, we have almost three million creatures being shared online. Players will also be able to upload YouTube videos of their creations’ activities.

So who is Will Wright as a designer?

I tend to look at games slightly different from most other designers. For example, I enjoy taking a real world system, dismantling it and putting it back together in a way that makes it this amazing toy-like interactive game. I’ve been heavily influenced by how players of my previous games had interacted and with the tools that we created for those games. I always like to have games that enabled player creativity and giving players the tools to create their own stories. In terms of Spore, it is a leap in evolution from some of the tools that we have created for games like SimCity, with the Building Architect Tool, or The Sims, with the Transmogrifier or Body Shop.

What were his inspirations and vision for Spore?

Well, my inspirations are quite varied and I like to draw from all different sources. For Spore, the original idea came from my love for space and discovery. The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI), books such as the Drake Equation, and a film by Ray and Charles Eames called The Power of Ten, all of which seek to answer one simple question: “Is there somebody out there?” But my vision for Spore is a game is on a more human-level, where player creativity and the sharing of player made content is fundamental. From the microscopic to the macroscopic, it is about bringing people together through their own imagination.