At Will Wright’s keynote speech at SXSW he started with pictures from the Hubble telescope then waxed about the state of game design. To Mr. Wright games should be like “the Truman Show, where you would allow the player to run around with a certain amount of free will and the computer is like the director who controls the envelope around Truman but can’t directly affect his movements.” Later he mentioned the power of user created content in video games. “Players love making content in games, we’ve been riding that wave a lot. They love sharing and collecting content, some people love just organizing it. The power of that collective effort is amazing. You’re seeing this on social network sites. But most of the content is not so good and a smaller percentage is great. But as we give them better and better tools, we’ll increase the quality of what they’re doing.” Spore is designed to take players out of being the “Luke Skywalker” hero and into the director’s chair. In the shaky cam video clips past the break you can see how his vision is evolving.
This first video demonstrates the beginning of Spore where you start out as a single celled creature and shows how the world grows with you similar to fl0w. Later Mr. Wright demonstrates how players can create their own characters with the built in tinker toy like toolset.
In this video we get a deeper look at the game in its later stages where you can design your own home planet. This demonstration has Mr. Wright fly around a spaceship that resembles something from Star Trek. Mr. Wright wants to give players tools to accurately make their favorite things so he can see an “interstellar war between the care bears and the Klingons.” Afterwards there is a demonstration of how you can terraform and destroy the world you’ve created.
The last video shows how players can put a monolith on the planet and get the inhabitants to worship their creature as a god. All the way at the tail end you can see a little of Spore’s intergalactic network of planets.
