Word: spore
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...working on one of the most ambitious video games ever conceived. The basic idea is to blow out The Sims to the horizon in all directions: this time you create and control an entire species. Wright's first title for the project was Sim Everything. Later he settled on Spore. It will be released on Sept...
...opening act of Spore shows a comet crashing into Earth bearing organic material from outer space. This represents an actual hypothesis of how life on Earth began, called panspermia, which Wright considers to be fairly plausible. (He describes himself as "definitely an atheist. Well, agnostic atheist maybe.") But that's not why he put it in Spore. He put it in because it's more fun than other hypotheses. "We did a lot of prototypes around more of a biogenesis model," Wright says. "Autocatalytic sets, emergent chemistries. The programmer and I really enjoyed playing with those. Nobody else did. They...
...turn the entire history of life into a video game without wrestling with some heavy philosophical questions, but Wright seems to have steered a middle course that avoids both religious and evolutionary blasphemy. You could read Spore equally easily as a model of evolution or of intelligent design, with you in the role of Intelligent Designer. (O.K., it's a bit blasphemous.) "A game like this can actually generate interesting, meaningful conversations between people," Wright says. "I think that's the best thing...
...time after Harvard. Last summer, I wrote a postcard to The Crimson from Beirut. I was working for a non-profit (without a glossy brochure, to be sure) coordinating an exchange program between Middle Eastern and American college students. The summer before, I conducted experiments on the spore covering of the anthrax bacterium, finding lab work too slow-paced to really capture my interest. This past summer, I was one of those pasty i-bankers emerging squinty-eyed into the sun after a long summer spent staring at CNBC and Excel’s Visual Basic editor. And journalism? Outside...
...tell you how many extraterrestrial races have been featured on Star Trek. His latest hobby is collecting outdated Soviet space equipment. But his inner nerd is hardly humorless. Wright's cartoon-like sense of the ridiculous--familiar to all Sims players--is still much in evidence in Spore. The opening stages of the game, in which a player must eat or be eaten by other microbes, is a deliberate homage to Pac-Man. Later, after your amphibious creatures have acquired enough limbs to drag themselves from the ocean, they find one another on land and decide to mate...