f13.net

Spore is a sprawling multi-genre title which follows life from its smallest single-cell origins all the way to planet-spanning conquerors, and the gameplay spans all the way from Cubivore-style animal consumption, through real-time strategy in the controlling of tribes, all the way up to a Civilization-reminiscent planetary (and eventually interplanetary) expansion phase.

Perhaps more significantly, the player's imagination becomes an integral part of his or her game... as well as a part of others' experiences as well. Not unlike the upcoming Infected for PSP, Spore will make use of online connectivity to share each player's creations with a central database while simultaneously retrieving others' work to help populate his own game world. The game's community will be an essential element of the overall experience; although the networked aspect of the title is asynchronous -- that is, no simultaneous multiplayer -- other gamers will influence each player's experience in many ways. Each person's game environment will feature creatures, structures, vehicles and ultimately entire worlds created by their peers and exchanged seamlessly over the Internet.

While the rest of us designers are freaking out about the staggering cost of content, Will Wright creates a game where a fully textured and animated player-created mobile takes less than 1K of memory.

Will cited the demo scene as a core influence in what he was doing, and there are many useful outputs of this. One is that, if you are connected to the Internet, the game will populate your worlds with the player created content that other players have generated. If your world lacks predators, it will hit the Maxis library for a compelling predator and drop it in your world space. At the end of the game, when flying around in a UFO from planet to planet, the other planets you visit will be copies of other player’s worlds. Which is to say that Will managed to capture one of the most compelling parts of the MMO experience - the creativity of other people - without actually forcing you to log in and deal with them.

"if you wonder what the demoscene is all about, you should imagine a huge underground community of young people organized into groups which compete in the art of creating realtime multimedia presentations called demos. demos combine realtime 3d graphics, 2d effects and bitmap graphics into one fluid presentation that is synchronized to music, somewhat similar to music videos. it is to be emphasized that 'realtime' is really the keyword here as a demo is never just a prerendered animation."

taken from the madwizards homepage

edit: I know more now, although understand would be too strong a word.  Here is another link I cribbed off of Corpnews, http://theprodukkt.com (http://theprodukkt.com/index.html). 

I think Fabricated and I mentioned Produkkt like a year ago.

My demo scene bookmarks are dated around June 22, 2004 so that sound about right.

That's because we're ahead of the curve.

Farbrausch made .kkrieger and you finally noticed, probably because it involved shooting things.

for it to truly be more than a sandbox. 

But if Will Wright is behind it, I expect sandbox first, game very second.

I think it's been said that his games are more of a toy, where the user's initiative and imagination are really what make it work. Which I think is great, I love the sandbox style of game and wish there were more out there - Spore seems to be the ultimate sandbox toy, I'm really looking forward to it.

Which is not to say Spore won't be worth looking at, I just don't know. But if Will Wright is behind it, I expect sandbox first, game very second.

All I know is that I greatly enjoyed playing SimCity2K in cooperative mode with a couple buddies of mine.  We'd each rotate 10 year terms and do whatever we wanted to do.  We each had our own quirks, but mine was to simulate the reign of the late, great Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit.  My mansion was built on a giant mountain that I spent vast sums of money on earth moving to achieve (to the great detriment of my city, I might add), surrounded by a moat (also very expensive) with only one access point to get to it.  It had it's own water and power supplies, and it's own private airport.  I was a feudal warlord, surveying the ashes of the city my friends actually tried to somewhat run in a competent manner.

I named it the Manoogian Mansion, and let me tell you, it was glorious.

I'm picking nits here, but didn't water only cost $5 or $10 per tile and terraforming cost like $15 per 9-tiles/per level? Unless you were surrounded by a moat named the Atlantic and mountain as tall as Everest, I can't see that costing more than $5-$10k which is less than a month worth of income for an effective mayor after about 10-12 years into the game.

Will Right, Please pee on us!

Will: This whole game is procedural! Procedural procedural procedural! Procedural? Procedural!

See, every time I hear the word "procedural," I have a mental orgasm. It might be a coder geek thing.

Eventually someone will write a shitty game that writes itself and eventually evolves the ability to write other shitty games that write themselves.

Then EA will finally be out of business.

Will Right, Please pee on us!

There must be someone else who feels this way, but I've never met them - to the best of my knowledge Gabriel is the only person who doesn't find Will Wright's games enthralling. Or, in any case, he's the only person who doesn't mind saying so, willing to put his gamer card at risk by taunting Olympus.

I've said in the past that what distinguishes me from him (and perhaps from you) is that I am willing to meet a game half-way. There may be more points of distinction, but this one is germane to the discussion. I can (as an archaeologist might) use a tiny broom to brush away particulates on an otherwise fascinating surface. Gabriel's issue with Will Wright's games (if I am paraphrasing him correctly, here) is that Will Wright doesn't do the opposite: they won't meet him. He's hesitant to even call them games, actually. They often don't define any kind of linear progression outside of those you determine yourself, which for him is the equivalent of handing someone a box of potentially intriguing but largely alien widgets and telling you to "knock yourself out" before running in the opposite direction.

Of course, systems based on interlocking parts I must generate a narrative framework to contain, well... Yes. I probably don't need to tell you that even the construction of an ordinary sentence, clearly stated, is my life's great pleasure. I have esoteric refrigerator magnets, I have an H. P. Lovecraft set and a Cooking set whose coitus has breached a terrifying, if perhaps overly specific, cavern of linguistic delights. So the management of towns, the ratios of their districts, yea, even unto the codified feng shui of their tiny living rooms bears a certain grammar that has been my constant fascination.

I don't know if this specifically is a console/PC gamer distinction, I'm open to a discussion on the topic, but I believe that is my associates' contention - that I've been trained as a PC gamer to find the sweet liqueur even in an otherwise revolting bonbon - isn't entirely without merit. Simultaneously, I find interacting with systems I have personally imbued with meaning to be an experience that transcends the raw mechanics of most games I play. So, yes. I am willing to put up with a lot, if the upshot is that I can author universes.

I'm going to remain firmly skeptical about this game.  To date, anything that's  promised to combine genres as Spore promises to has never done all of it well.

How dare you denegrate the genius that is the Battlecruiser series!

YES!

I'm so making a race of five-assed monkeys.

Regarding 'open-endedness' and getting sand from your box into your vagina,

I've always thought Populous was the perfect balance.  You had a very specific goal (kill heathens.  win) and there was no confusion about what it was.  However, you had an enormous amount of flexibility in how you got there.  The Civs also come close to this, but even there I think there are too many ways to win.  I'd prefer if each scenario only had one victory condition.  I enjoy SimCity X for the first couple of hours, then it devolves into sending natural disasters all over the place and other forms of deity masturbation.  The Sims was the same. . fun to explore the interface and possibilities. . not compelling after that.  This new thing. . probably more of the same.

"FROM THE MAKER OF THE SIMS, A NEW LIFE SIMULATOR BLAHBITTY BLAHBITTY BLAH BUY IT DIPSHIT"

I was pretty skeptical when I first heard about the concept, but my skepticism was of the flavor "pfft, that sounds too hard for anyone to pull off, I smell vaporware." 

Am I confusing Wright with Molyneux?

watched the first 20 min or so of the video, it was a little to slow to bare to watch it all. My prognosis is that it will be very cool but boring. During those 20 minutes I watched I saw nothing which seemed to be really fun.

No, Will Wright had nothing to do with Black and White.  As excited as I was by that Spore video, I'm just trying to avert a case of fanboyism by remembering another high-concept God Game by a celebrity developer that turned out to be shit.