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Will Wright presented Spore at a game developer’s conference recently. A video clip of this has been posted for our viewing pleasure. Will navigates through the game and takes you from the beginning where life begins as a spore in world of one celled organisms and demonstrates how evolution can occur. Gamers can evolve into a more complex species onto land, create tribes, cities, and conquer the planet. All the while editing each piece as you see fit. Once the planet is conquered the game does not stop. You can zoom out further and go from planet to planet in your solar system. It goes as far as being able to go to different star systems and invading other planets with intelligent life. What is most unique about this game is that it is extremely open ended. There are countless possibilities for animations that might take place and whereas in Will’s other games like the Sims and Sims 2, all of the animations were generated by pre-designed animations. Spore utilizes ‘procedural programming’ to create the animations that depend on mathematics and algorithms rather than using something like 3D Studio Max, the game will determine the mobility of a character based on the bone structure that the user creates and some simple in-game laws of physics. This is along the same lines of how vector imaging in Flash works. Rather than having bit-by-bit information on what color each pixel should be, there are equations that determine what color an entire area should be. In short, Spore should prove to allow endless possibilities limited not by how much money and time was spent on creating different actions that can be preformed, but by the gamer’s imagination.