http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19926752.300-interview-the-games-master.html

A microbial blob in the ocean grows pincers and a flagellum and swims to shore. Half an hour later it “evolves” into a three-legged alien that goes on to build spaceships, colonise hostile planets and dominate the galaxy. This is the hugely hyped new game Spore, brainchild of Will Wright, who also created SimCity and The Sims. Celeste Biever asked him how he does it.

You have created two blockbuster video games, and now Spore is generating huge excitement too. What’s your secret?

You need to capture players’ imaginations by giving them lots of freedom. The trick is deciding which parts to simulate on the computer and which parts to leave to the player to make up. For example, with The Sims we had the characters speak a nonsense language, Simlish , to force people to imagine what they were saying. It turned out to be the right choice because people were capable of imagining them more realistically than a computer could ever simulate. In Spore, you have all kinds of choices – how many legs to have, whether to be aggressive or peaceful, whether to be a herbivore or a carnivore.

Why do you like games so much? At 48, shouldn’t you have outgrown them?

One of the most interesting things is human imagination, and games seem to me to be an amplification of that – just as cars act as amplifiers for your legs and telescopes for your eyes. With games, we build these elaborate worlds in our heads, and the computer is there to do the bookkeeping. You could never imagine a city to the level of SimCity – you need the computer for that. So the potential of games to let us explore our imaginations is significant. I don’t think of them as a mindless diversion that should be limited to kids.

Do only certain types of people like games?

No! The reason we play is because a circuit in our brain makes us enjoy challenging, problem-solving situations. As other animals play too, this circuit probably evolved a long time ago because it’s good for us. I think our culture has tended to misinterpret that – we tend to think that because we find playing entertaining, it must be pointless or frivolous.

What’s your favourite game of all time?

Go, the board game. I love it because the rules are very simple relative to the complexity ofthe strategy. That’s the interesting metric for me . Chess has far more complex rules, but is simpler in its depth of strategy. And I don’t know of any video game with a simplicity/strategy ratio as high as Go.

The complexity of Go is not encoded in the rules, it emerges as a natural result of the rules interacting, in the same way that the elaborate behaviour in an ant colony is not directly encoded in any individual ant’s behaviour. Ants are very simple, but it all adds up to this incredibly complex intelligence. When we make a game, we think about it in that sense. We build it out of very simple parts interacting – and the parts lead to amazing complexity.

What do you think of players whose imaginations go too far? For example, some used the game to make their animals commit obscene acts.

There are always people who want to shock. I was quite impressed with the creations, artistically speaking. At the end of day, we want a vibrant, creative community of Spore players – and that means you want it somewhat out of your control, to keep it diverse and interesting. It’s like cities. Some are totally clean, with no crime, and they are extremely boring.

Spore is based on the concept of Darwinian evolution. But instead of creatures evolving via random mutation, players choose the attributes they will have. Doesn’t that spoil the idea?

To really simulate evolution, you need very large populations – tens of thousands – and many generations with minorimprovements. There’s no way that would have been a fun game. It would have been so impersonal. We tried the game with the creatures mutating, then you pick the best mutation, but it was no fun. So when we break the rules of evolution it’s for very good reasons gameplay-wise.

Which aspects of evolution does Spore preserve?

One is the vast evolutionary timescale. Although Spore only takes hours to play, you can bring up a timeline that keeps track of how long you have been playing in Spore time. In the creature phase there is this conversion of about 10 minutes equals a billion years. Once you get on land it’s about 100 million years. So there is the idea that evolution proceeds through many generations with incremental improvement. Also, how you design your creature determines which niches you will fill on planets later in the game – are you a scavenger, a herbivore, a predator, are you social? You need a certain number of plants to support a herbivore, a certain number of herbivores to support a carnivore, and so on.

Have any biologists complained that you are misrepresenting evolution?

I showed Spore to a lot of biologists. Their first thought was “evolution doesn’t work that way”. But then they see how you play through many generations, how we track time, and they think it’s a pretty fun overview. As a player you have to create the creatures, and that’s what biologists want to do too. They want to build their idea of the perfect creature. Some also point out that some things that don’t look that accurate in Spore are more accurate than you might think.

Photography: Michael Lewis

Are there biological accuracies in Spore that many people may not think would be there?

We think of genes as low-level operators but there are very high-level genes that determine things like bilateral symmetry and placementof organs in a body plan. These are shared by most multicellular life forms and they work in a very similar way to the game, which allows players to take a foot, morph it a little bit, make a copy of it and stick it somewhere else. In a sense our tools mirror the way these genes work.

Have you shown the game to any creationists?

I don’t know any creationists. but in my view the whole argument between religion and evolution is inflated. You have a small number of fundamentalists with a very loud voice and they get all the attention. In my experience most religious people are pretty tolerant and have no problem with evolution.

You also build robots. Is this hobby linked to your love of games?

Robots are a way for us to understand humanity in the same way that Spore might be a way to understand planetary dynamics or evolution. It’s a different method to understanding the brain than psychology, in that you can’t just come up with something that sounds good, it actually has to work. You have to replicate an ability – not just describe it.

All your games have a “playing God” feel, but it seems you have encompassed everything in Spore. What will you do next?

I have plenty of other ideas at least as grandiose as Spore. Although people interpretSpore as a God game, you always have a point of view on the game – you are within a species, a culture or a civilisation. If you truly had the power of God it would be boring – the world would unfold exactlyas you intended. What makes it interesting is that the game challenges you and is unpredictable. I try to give the players the perspective of a god, but not the powers or control of a god.

Were you nervous about the launch?

No. But I am excited to see what the players do with it. I am now transitioning from a game designer to an anthropologist. The players are going to start entertaining me. ●

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