Spore, Will Wright's far-reaching game about life, the universe and everything, is a journey, not just from microscope to universe, but of discovery and imagination.

It's also the clearest example of how, in creating his games, Wright taps so deeply into the principals of his grade-school education which was based on a pedagogy built on child development first formulated more than 100 years ago in Rome.

Because of this, Wright's greatest achievement isn't delivering the universe as toy in Spore, the digital dollhouses of the Sims or even the planned towns of Sim City.

It's his ability to touch a gamer's imagination and inspire their intellect. To create not just games, but places and spaces of exploration

Interesting Playthings
The secret of good teaching is to regard the child's intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. Our aim therefore is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his inner most core. — Maria Montessori

In Montessori schools, the emphasis is on instilling a desire to learn in children, not in lecturing them.

"In western education we take theories, we deconstruct them, we categorize them and then we teach them in classrooms," Wright says. "You are going to a school, going to a master, learning theory before you could go practice it."

"Before that system, it was about practice, it was more of a failure based learning. I think that's almost a more natural approach. It seems that Montessori is going with the grain in that naturalistic sense. It was later we moved to this narrative method, sitting back, listening-to-a-lecture model ."

The pedagogy was developed by Maria Montessori while working with intellectually and developmentally disabled children as part of her post-graduate research. By removing the idea that children were adults in tiny bodies that had to learn through lecture and memorization, and instead focusing on sparking a thirst for knowledge, Montessori found children could direct their own learning.

"Her aim was to arouse in the children a spontaneous response to the materials and I see that in (Will Wright's) games," said Virginia McHugh Goodwin, executive director of the Association Montessori International, USA. "Creativity is a component to his work and that is also key to Montessori's work, because she sets the tone for creativity, the way she has her educational methods set up.

"To be creative you have to have the freedom to explore and to master the specific techniques and that leads to unleashing the human spirit so that the process of creating can come from within."

Montessori's first school opened in 1907 in Rome and her methodologies have since spread around the world. Including to places like Atlanta, Georgia, where Wright attended such a school until sixth grade.

Another important element of Montessori education is the use of self-correcting toys. These Montessori toys allow children to play without realizing they are learning.

"The structure of Montessori toy is that the kid will discover things while playing with a toy," Wright said. "Having the kid discover these principals is so much more powerful than a teacher coming up and saying we're going to learn about this.

"The way we approached Spore was a lot like that. What are the components I want a gamer to discover when playing with this?"

And that's not an unusual approach for Wright. None of his games are really games, he says.

"I build more interesting toys than interesting games," he said. "I always thought of Spore as a toy universe. I think there is an interesting distinction between toy and game. I think a toy is more open ended.

"The game is a subset of the experiences you can have with the toy."

And toys and play, Wright says, go hand-in-hand.

"Play is a toy version of problem solving that we're going to encounter later in life," he said. "Getting people to be playful around serious subjects is the most effective ways to develop an intuition to that.

"It gives us ways to kind of map things intuitively."

An Elegant Tool
"Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world" — Maria Montessori

Wright's first experience with Montessori was brief and intense, attending an elementary school in Atlanta until the sixth grade. The school introduced him to the idea of self-directed education through creative inspiration.

"I bring it up every now and the," he said of his Montessori education. "It gives people a grounding of where I am coming from. "

Goodwin says that many Montessori graduates tend to be more interesting in exploring things, in asking a lot of questions.

"They're critical thinkers, problem solvers, because they've had the ability to do that from a very early age," she said.

For Wright, Montessori helped him realize that when he was personally involved or interested in something he learned about it much more efficiently.

"When I was starting to research SimCity I started reading about urban dynamics," he said. "It became more of an obsession, because I was able to play with my guinea pig simulation, instead of trying to learn facts and figures.

"When Sim games started moving forward we wanted to draw that out."

He did that by creating games that were a form of autodidactic toy, that taught by inspiring people to become interested in a subject.

"It's about getting a player creatively engaged," he said. "Computers can get students very motivated to be interested in things."

But Wright contends that Montessori isn't as direct an influence on him as some might think. He doesn't, he says, come up with his idea for games from Montessori.

"I pick themes, things I've been fascinated with, then it's ‘How can I convey this to a lot of people?'," he said. "Montessori seems like a very clean, natural way to make these subjects approachable."

Instead, Montessori's influence is more subtle.

"I don't think it's something you work into a game, I think it's inherit in the structure itself," he said. "It's in the design premise.

"It's an elegant tool. It's not the end state goal. It just happens to be the best tool for the job."

Loops of Super Mario Bros.
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed. – Maria Montessori

As with the Montessori Method, in Wright's games failing is almost as important as winning.

"Montessori knew that children needed freedom to make mistakes, to develop skills that are unique to his or her personality," said Goodwin. "The freedom allows for the development of the creative thinking and the problem solving skills. To be able to look at things from a different perspective.

"Montessori allows for success and failure. She felt that people learned from mistakes. Mistakes are not looked down upon or frowned upon, they are part of the process."

For Wright, that was one of the hardest things to come to grips with as a game designer.

"One of the counter intuitive things I needed to learn as a designer was that players enjoy failures more than success," he said. "As long as it's diverse, they like to explore the failure space of a game."

All games are made up of what Wright calls interaction loops, events that have both a success and failure side to them.

"In Super Mario Brothers, once you succeed at knowing how to make him move you go on to the next step. Now you go up and hit a creature and you fail a different way."

Wright's games have always had a diverse and interesting mix of what Wright terms the failure space.

"It's the failure that's fun," he said.

But what you won't find in Spore is any form of direct competition with other gamers, another tenant found in Montessori teachings.

"Montessori does not encourage competition in the traditional sense," Goodwin said. "The idea with Montessori is that children strive to do the best that they can do."

Instead, in both Spore and Montessori, the emphasis is on collaboration.

"Children learn to collaborate and work with one another and then each child is motivated to reach his or her potential so they can contribute to the project in a collaborative way, their best skills," Goodwin said. "So there is competition, but it is done in a very nice way. And I don't see Wright with a lot of competition in his games."

Imagination Amplifier
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. – Maria Montessori

Because Wright isn't trying to lecture gamers or teach them the nuance of physics, evolution, of astronomy or biology, the science of Spore wasn't designed to be "dead on accurate".

"If you step way back and look at Spore as a whole it's meant to show a grand arch, the story of life," her said. "The Sims is like the story of life on Earth, Spore is life with a capital L."

"I wanted people to have a sense of the vast scope that their life is inside of. There's a journey in Spore from microscopic to galactic. There aren't too many experiences in games, books or movies that gives you that distant perspective."

And along with that perspective, the different stages of Spore allow a gamer plenty of aesthetic and strategic creativity, all geared at getting players not to learn but to express their creativity.

"A lot of people have a very low opinion of their own creativity," he said. "When you give them a tool to make things that they didn't think they could make it can be very powerful, especially when five or six people comment on it."

Goodwin says Spore "amplifies the imagination."

"When I look at Spore, that's what it seemed to say to me," she said. "That it really uses the imagination.

"Another thing I think I saw with (Wright), is that he is really, really into that idea of discovery and exploration. That is one of the key tenants of Montessori's work. The materials that she designed allow the child to discover"

They are, she said, manipulative materials that go from something concrete to the abstract.

After the game's launch, Wright and his team started to see people step outside the limitations of Spore and continue to create.

"People were creating narratives of who their people are and how they evolve," he said. "It was really about ownership at some level."

Manchild
The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist. — Maria Montessori

The more than four hundred pages of Maria Montessori's book, The Montessori Method, is packed with lessons that seem at times written as much for game development as they are for education.

It often talks of creating a system of rules that don't inhibit, but enhance the experience.

Wright laughs in surprise when I tell him that after reading the book it seems to me that many games treat gamers as children, puppets that are lead through games by a strict set of rules, rules that often harm the experience.

He seems to be agreeing with me when he says that Spore was created to be very player focused.

"Where Montessori is very child centered," he says, "we are very gamer centered."

But modern games aren't as condescending in their design. They expect more now from players.

"If you look at them ten years ago they were more linear," he said. "But now the Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Roller Coaster Tycoon, even the Wii games or music games, they leave a lot more room for creative expression of the player."

And it's that desire to free that expression that seems to keep driving Wright back to Montessori's methods.

"I'm not trying to evangelize Montessori," he said. "I want people to feel creative and involved and feel like they've doing something constructive. Montessori is a great tool for that purpose."

By: Brian Crecente

The sunken city of Rapture, a world of art deco aesthetics, neon sales pitches and looming architecture, is home to more than just murderous splicers and lumbering Big Daddys, it's also a surprising breeding ground for introspection.

BioShock may have been conceived as a study in nuance, a place for gamers to discover and explore at their own pace, but its dip into the ethical morass of Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophies has brought her beliefs back into the mainstream spotlight and even piqued the interest of the Ayn Rand Institute's president, Yaron Brook.

Brook, a former member of the Israeli Army military intelligence and award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University, first took notice of the game when he discovered his 18-year-old son playing it. It's a fact that didn't bother Brook despite his son's objectivist beliefs and the game's not so positive take on the philosophy.

"My son has to find his own way in life," he said. "There are certain games I wouldn't want him to play, like Grand Theft Auto, games that celebrate criminality. But a game that might lead him to think and have him challenge his ideas, I'm fine with.

"Luckily for me he doesn't agree with the game, he still seems to believe in objectivism"

Objectivism as a central theme in BioShock was actually the result of a confluence of ideas and happenstance. The heart of the game started, as do most of Ken Levine's games, as the answer to a problem.

"How do we make an environment that feels really complete?" Levine said. "That's where we came up with a space ship for System Shock. In BioShock we said what can we do similarly and simulate fully as we could a space ship."

The answer was an underwater city, but that simply formed the game's outline, the walls that kept a player from remembering they were in a confined space.

Levine wondered what sorts of people might live in an underwater city, what would drive someone from the rest of the world.

"I started thinking about utopian civilizations," he said. "You have these traditional utopian notions. I've always been a fan of utopian and dystopian literature.

"The more I started thinking about making a compelling place and compelling villain, someone who had a real concrete set of beliefs made sense."

Enter Objectivism. Levine said he had been reading Ayn Rand's books over the past few years and was fascinated with her "intensity and purity of belief."

"The surety she has in her beliefs was fascinating," he said. "She almost spoke like a super villain, like Dr Doom."
And her characters, Levine believed, projected that same intensity.

"I started to wonder, what happens when you stop questioning yourself? It becomes a set of accepted truths, instead of something you're constantly using in the lab of reality."

FLAWS IN LOGIC AND CHARACTER
Where Rand had Fountainhead's Howard Roark and Atlas Shrugged's John Galt, Levine had Andrew Ryan, Rapture's founder.

Levine said he views the game's chief protagonist as a cross between Howard Hughes and "one of Rand's characters if he were put in the real world with all of the real problems people have."

"Rand's characters are super heroes," he said. "Great people without flaws. "

But Brook says, that's not really a fair interpretation of Rand's beliefs.

"It seems to me that he's misrepresented what Ayn Rand believes and her ideals beyond objectivism," he said. "He's setting it up to fail. He believes , based on what I've read, that any system that is absolutist is ultimately going to lead to disastrous effect. Any system of black and white, any system of ultimate morality.

"In many cases that true. But I think what lessens the game is that misinterpretation of objectivism."

Rand's characters aren't flawed because not everyone is, Brook says.

"I think its flawed logic in the sense that he thinks that people have to be flawed," he said. "I think in many respects (Rand's) books do put her characters in real life.

"I think there are great people and perfect people and I think we all should strive to be great and perfect."

That's how Levine's Ryan starts out, a "new man", an incredible individual, but in the end he fails and falls.

Ryan fails, Levine says, because while building the utopia of Rapture he never questions himself, never stopped to think if he had gone astray. And because of that he betrays his own belief system and ends up "wanting his cake and eating it too."

Despite his failings, Ryan still remains true to his ideals in the end, an important point.

"He brought his end upon himself and didn't shirk away from it," Levine said. "He wasn't a hypocrite. He may have failed, but he really believed what he did and put everything on the line for it."

THE GLUE THAT HOLDS THE GAME TOGETHER
Levine was careful how he presented to his team the idea of injecting philosophy into what was meant to be a mainstream game.

"The game doesn't lead with objectivism," he said. "I didn't pitch it to the team that way. If you pitch it that way to the team you're going to get the wrong game."

So initially, the team concentrated on capturing a time period. They studied furniture from the pre and post-war period. Levine went out and took pictures of New York architecture. They brought in Jack Beatty, senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly, to talk about the time period. Levine also brought in a few copies of Rand's books.

"There was a bit of an education process," he said. "The artists mostly had to think about the art deco stuff, I wrote about 95 percent of the dialog."

Late in the development process Levine decided that the game and the underwater city of Rapture needed more propaganda, things like the larger-than-life bust of Andrew Ryan and its slogan: No Gods or Kings. Only Man and the constant barrage of public service announcements.

"I felt the philosophy wasn't coming across enough, " Levine said. And objectivism "was the glue that holds the aesthetics together."

A CAUTIONARY TALE
Levine says he didn't set out to torpedo objectivism with BioShock.

"I think I'm more sympathetic to it," he said. "I find a lot of positive in it. I find her notion of selfishness is very interesting, not living for the abrogation of others, believing in the individual man as the central powerful force in the world rather than a government or a supreme being, the reintegration in belief of man/woman.

"We live in a country where atheists are distrusted, but you can be proudly religious and proudly political, but to reject those things and be proud of it I think that's a very brave woman.

"But I'm not a person who buys anything hook, line and sinker. I view life more as a buffet style.
"When I look at anything in my life one of my saving graces is the ability to step back and examine things. It's very easy to get mired in ideology."

Levine said he actually wrote the story of BioShock as a fan of Ayn Rand's precepts.

"I'm probably way more similar to her in my terms of how I think about religion and politics than any other philosophers," he said.

But Levine believes that Rand would reject that take on philosophy, that Rand believed it was "her way or the highway."

So BioShock wasn't meant really to be a game about Rand's beliefs, but more about her intensity.

"I wasn't setting out to make a game about objectivism, I was setting out to make a game about someone who had a very strong belief in a philosophy that was similar to this philosophy.

"It's a cautionary tale about wholesale, unquestioning belief in something."

While Brook cautions he hasn't played the game, his take on what Levine was trying to do with the story and its use of philosophy is surprisingly similar to what Levine himself says.

"My general sense is that the game's author is suspicious of any absolute philosophy and clumps objectivism in there," Brook said. "While he sees certain virtues in it, he thinks anything taken too far ultimately leads to disaster."

GUNS, EXPLOSIONS AND PHILOSOPHY
"Some people just like to blow shit up and some people like to think about the themes and the metaphors," he said.

And there were plenty of both in BioShock. Take for instance the disturbingly symbiotic relationship between the Little Sisters and the Big Daddys.

"The more you know about objectivism the more interesting the little sisters become," Levine said. "The little sisters are an examination of the question: Do the means justify the ends"

The weapon dispensers found throughout the game are meant to be another metaphor.

Rand, Levine says, is a believer in a completely free and unfettered market. Rapture and its vending machines were intended to be an illustration of what can happen when intellectual examination of a philosophy or a way of life stops.

"Some people complained about the vending machines and guns and ammunitions in the world, but there would be no restrictions on the market at all, so I could see that happening, especially if there was a civil war on."

Levine understands that not everyone wants to have a thoughtful experience when they play games, but he believes strongly in providing one for the people who do.

"I think by trying to throw some reflection on it you make people step back from the games they've played and think about it a tiny, tiny bit," he said. "But it has to be an entertaining experience first.

"The game was never intended to be a screed against Rand because I think there is a lot to like there, but if you take anything to its extremes it isn't good.

While in the end, Brook doesn't agree with what he believes to be the anti-objectivism tone of the game, he still sees it as a good think for the Ayn Rand Institute and objectivism.

"There have been a lot of people writing about the game and its connection to Ayn Rand," he said. And that's a good thing "in a sense, if you believe that any publicity is good publicity because it creates a level of curiosity and sends people to read the books. We probably had more kids going to read the book because of the video game.

"I think there is a certain benefit. Ultimately it doesn't portray objectivism well, but the mainstreaming of objectivism is important too. And it's important to see the willingness to debate those ideas even in a video game."

VIDEO GAMES: THE NEW LITERATURE
When BioShock hit, it was met with both high game review scores and a level of intellectual fascination that surprised even Levine.

"We joke that everyone should have known that a game about a pseudo-objectivist dystopia would be a huge hit," he said. "My initial goal for BioShock was to create an environment that people could buy into and to have a level of detail that you just don't see in games now. We have an opportunity to have players pull content out of the game rather than to push it at them."

But in wrapping their world around questions of morality and philosophy, Levine and his team managed to do something else, they managed to spark in some players the desire to, like Levine, step back from their beliefs, their ideologies and study them from afar.

"I like that people walk away with different interpretations," he said. "We weren't creating a polemic, we were creating a piece of art that has different meanings to different people.

"We were trying to ask questions more than answer them."

While the game can certainly be viewed as an attack on objectivism, despite Levine's intent, Brook says he really doesn't have a problem with it, or with the idea of the medium of video games taking on the challenge of dealing with an issue as complex as Rand's philosophy.

"I don't see a problem with the medium," he said. "I think it is potentially a very exciting medium with which to introduce people to ideas. I think video games replaces much of literature's impact. The literature today is dull and boring and video games allow kids to experience the heroism that the books don't provide them.

"Who knows where the medium is going I think that's one of the exciting things about video games and technology. I think it will be interesting to see what kind of issues they take on."