I came across this interesting interview today with Will Wright, the creator of the new computer game Spore, along with classics like SimCity, SimAnt, and the Sims.

From the interview:

WILL WRIGHT: It’s funny because in the game you’re kind of in the role of an intelligent designer. Yet the kind of meta message of the game is life becomes what it is through the process of evolution. In fact the other creatures around you are evolving while you’re exhibiting intelligent design. Personally, I’m very much a strong evolutionist—basically atheist, agnostic-ish. For the game design, though, we really wanted the player to be emotionally involved with what they were doing. Throughout any kind of game, especially a game like Spore, you have to be always cognizant of keeping the player’s emotional engagement with what they’re doing. It’s very much a game design kind of decision to have the player do this. We did have prototypes, actually, where creatures were evolving out of your control and you were picking from a selected set of mutations of your creature. And it was so much less engaging than if you’d actually gone and designed the creature itself. But we kind of liked the idea that the game is fairly ambiguous in that space. It doesn’t really feel like it has a strong agenda. Because we’re actually reading on our forums on the website, a lot of religious people talking to atheist people and basically discussing these concepts and debating them, fairly intelligently, without a lot of malice towards each other.

Congrats on the successful release on Spore (copy-protection issues aside); I, for one, hope it will get kids more interested in science and evolutionary biology.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 11:37 AM and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.