If you don’t know Will Wright, he’s the visionary standard-bearer for "sandbox" games – instead of exotic mazes with pre-packaged surprises, these are free-running simulations, where fun emerges from how players use the systems to accomplish goals they create for themselves – hence the industry buzzword, “emergent gameplay.” So in Sim City, for example, you’re free to make your city an idyllic Bedford Falls, or a sleazy, jazzy Pottersville, or a smoking crater. Plenty of fun either way!

In Spore you have whole alien species to play with. You design it, then guide it as it scratches its way up the evolutionary ladder, from micro-organism to animal life to tribal society, to global empire to space faring galactic civilization – as all species must! With each step, the scale of the game jumps an order of magnitude, like in the old Powers of Ten short, which was one of the game's inspirations.

The Creature Creator by itself is already a fantastic achievement in UI design – it’s ridiculously easy to create a vertebrate organism, configuring the spine then choosing from a huge library of arms, legs, sensory organs, skin, body ornamentation, everything positioned, scaled, rotated. It's a powerful 3D design program broken into sweet, manageable toylike chunks, and makes the least of us feel like a Pixar animator. The engine's flexibility seems endless.

Spore then looks at your alien’s anatomy and calculates how it walks, speaks, dances, and fights. It generates ability scores, and these presage something of the future strategic landscape, as interstellar diplomats or hegemonizing military horde.

But that's not all – once you’ve got your alien, it gets uploaded to a communal server, and is downloaded to populate other players' universes. Spore is a “massively single-player” game – the solo experience is embedded in the many tentacles of a fully -featured social networking service., letting you tag and sift and comment other players’ creations. The Creature Creator is being released early as a free download, so that the "Sporepedia" will already be seeded with user-made content when the game launches (I assume there is some mechanism for filtering out the inevitable flood of aliens that look like penises and/or the cast of Family Guy).

As a science fiction fan, I like Spore’s classic, friendly space-opera vision of the galaxy: It's a place where aliens of every shape can evolve, develop space flight, and cruise around to weird planets, messing with less-evolved creatures, and trading and fighting with other aliens. I feel in my bones that this is the way life in the galaxy should be, and now we're going to live it.

A few caveats. Powerful as the editor is, the aliens it makes inevitably bear a family resemblance to one another. Morph them how you will, share a rounded, fleshy feel that makes them look like they're made of many-colored putty. They move with the same stagy, cutesy toddler-like motions, so despite the fabulous variety in shape, it's hard to make something that feels truly alien or dangerous. Walking around the room, one parameterized alien starts to look like another, and I'm left feeling that the possibility-space of alien life is only partly explored.

And…it's an enormously generative plaything, but will it, ultimately, be fun? Without individualized characters or anything human to look at, will we come to care about our legions of BEMs? Will the algorithmically generated galaxy feel like a limitless universe of wonder, or just one randomized planet after another?

It's easy to take shots at a game as ambitious as Spore, a game whose scope, ambition, and top-notch level of execution are frankly jaw-dropping, but as a game designer and gamer, I can’t help but cheer it on. Will Wright and the Spore team are hammering at the limitations of the video game medium itself, as a tool for storytelling and self-expression.

My prediction is that Spore will rock our collective world. Their vision statement references "Sandkings," so that's got to be a good sign. So download and begin seeding the galaxy! Just be careful when they make a castle with your face on it.

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• Will is a huge fan of high dynamic range photography, as well as Olivo Barbieri's tilt-shift photography that makes everything look like miniature models. He said both style of photography take the real world and make them look like toys.
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• He's also a huge proponent of expanding the experience of movies and television shows, pointing to the numerous Star Wars tie-ins like novels and toys, and his own endless slew of expansion packs for The Sims.
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• The new Cylons were mentioned numerous times, and he specifically used Battlestar Galactica to show how new life with old properties can enrich the viewer experience and tell a new story at the same time.
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• He pointed out how people have obsessed over Lost, mapping out the entire island and the deciphering of the blacklight text and drawings from inside the hatch. He compared the maps of both the hatch system and the island to maps from Treasure Island and The Land of Oz.
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• He compared the castaways on Gilligan's Island to the seven deadly sins: Gilligan = Sloth, Ginger = Lust (and how), Mary Ann = Envy (hey, I lusted after her too!), The Professor = Pride, Mr. Howell = Greed, Mrs. Howell = Gluttony (what?), and The Skipper = Anger (we'd say gluttony).
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• He distinctly remembers being 4 years old and having the crap scared out of him by Godzilla on television. He also went on to point out how Godzilla changed an extreme amount over the 24 movies (!) in the series, and how he went from fierce and terrifying to almost cute and cuddly. Son of Godzilla? Ouch.
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• His main point was that "the best stories are inherently deconstructable and lead to the largest variety of play, and those are inherently generative and lead to story." In other words, let's break everything down, mix it up, and have infinite play with the cool things we love, and the stories will come out of it.
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• He hope that one day we have a huge sandbox world of toys to play in, that would include movies, where the Borg could fight Star Destroyers and Cylon Basestars. That actually sounds like too many cooks spoiling the soup. When he started saying "Wouldn't it be cool if Harry Potter could meet Spider-Man?" we had to say "Uh, no."
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