For those of you who missed that evolutionary step, here's what happened: You created a microbe through a streamlined version of the Spore interface and then used the accelerometer to tilt your creature around endless levels of a primordial ocean. As you bumped into smaller microbes that you could eat or bigger ones that you had to fight or flee from, you gained DNA and were able to increase in size. You could also edit parts of your creature, so such as color and specific body parts that helped you fight or flee.

What Is It?
Spore: Creatures is an adventure game much like Origins — only now we're on dry land with other evolved lifeforms. Players still control their creature by tilting the iPhone in different directions to move and can accelerate them toward other creatures by tapping the creature with your finger. The game adds a social interaction layer, has a total of 45 different parts to customize your creature with and four other abilities in addition to socialization. There are four zones in the game total with an "Epic" boss at the end of each.

What We Saw
I played through an early level of the game and fought one boss that required you to push poisonous mushrooms at it.

How Far Along Is It?
Near final. No release date has been provided, however.

What Needs Improvement?
Quicksand Is a Drag: There are various environmental hazards your creature can fall victim to as you tilt your iPhone around. Quicksand is by far the most frustrating because you've got the shake the iPhone to free your creature — which could bring on a sudden case of Dropped iPhone for a klutz like me.

You Can't Fall In Love: The social interaction is limited to making friends or enemies. You make friends by bringing certain creatures certain items; you make enemies by attacking other creatures. That's about as deep as the socialization gets. You can't "apologize" to creatures you attacked and you can't fall in love.

It's Pretty, But... I really, really liked how in Origins the world around you changed as you changed. Like at first the background was a hazy, faraway thing that suddenly sharpened and came closer as your creature grew. I just don't get that sense of accomplishment or wonder from Creatures.

What Should Stay The Same?
Steady Progression: The game has a structure I didn't get with Origins. When you know you've got to beat a boss in a level to get an epic skill, it gives you a goal to work for instead of roaming around wantonly eating crustaceans.

It's Super Cute: In addition to being able to make your creature a whole lot cuter and less sperm-like than a microbe could ever be. Also, one of the bosses was called King Mussle-Ups or some such — and yes, he was a mussel. Hilarious!

Someday We'll Get To Space: If Spore on the iPhone continues the steady trend of evolution, that means that someday we'll get to space. I cannot express in words how much the idea excites me.

Final Thoughts
If evolution is essentially small changes made over time to a core being, then I supposed Creatures fits the bill. However, I can't help but feel like the added features that make Creatures more like a video game than Origins might be some kind of step backward for people who liked the aimless roaming in Origins.

"I'm always looking for unique worlds to go to in animation," said the director, Chris Wedge. "From every perspective - visually, thematically and comedically - the world of 'Spore' provides the potential to put something truly original on the screen."

Variety says Patrick O'Brien, of Electronic Arts' EA Entertainment division, will executive produce the picture with Lucy Bradshaw, the vice president of Spore developer Maxis.

Spore joins a number of other EA titles that have reached deals with Hollwood, including The Sims (Fox); and Army of Two (Universal). Dante's Inferno, Dead Space and Mass Effect also have been set up for production.

EA sets up 'Spore' at Fox [Variety]

If not, he's probably best known—in addition to his contributions to Spore—for one of his Game Developers Conference talks, in which he described the Wii as "a piece of shit" and slammed Nintendo for its hardware design choices. He later apologized for those remarks.

He may also be recognized from his rant Do Your Job Well, Please, an editorial delivered at this year's GDC on video game journalism.

By Hecker's estimate, the cutbacks at Maxis numbered 24 (he thinks). He estimates in his personal list of contributions to Spore that some 80 people were working on the game as development wrapped up.

Hecker announced on his personal site his follow up project, an indie game called SpyParty, which he describes as "a very different multiplayer espionage game" that apparently offers a level of excitement on par with ski jumping away from massive explosions.

Elvis Has Left The Building [Chris Hecker's Website]

Even if you weren't one of the chosen few, you can still get a lot from watching what went on at the panel. I pulled some quotes I thought were interesting, but really, there's much more wisdom and points for discussion to be had from the total two hour run of the panel.

In particular, I call your attention to the Part 6 and 7 clips where the panelists talk about the importance of having gay characters in games and respond to that effed up game, Watch Out Behind You, Hunter!

VIDEO: GLAAD's Panel on Homophobia & Virtual Communities [GLAAD Blog]

Caryl Shaw, Senior Producer at EA's Maxis
To developers: "Who doesn't want to be a gay super hero? Are you thinking about this stuff when you're making your game? Well you should be!"

Dan Hewitt, Senior Director of Communications & Industry Affairs for the Entertainment Software Association
About the ignorance of the general public toward gaming: "We need to come together. We need gay and lesbian gamers to step forward. Come out, and then come out again as gamers."

Stephen Toulouse, Program Manager for Policy and Enforcement, Xbox Live
On expressing sexuality in Gamertags: "Who we choose to love is part of our identity."

Cyn Skyberg, Vice President of Customer Relations at Linden Lab
On expressing sexuality online: "The process for how we display ourselves as we really are [determines] what are the values we have as a virtual community."

Flynn DeMarco, founder of GayGamer.net and Kotaku alumnus
On blogs and gaming sites censoring the n-word, but not the other f-word in headlines: "They need to let people know that it's not okay [to use that word]."

There were two other issues that came to mind as a result of the panel that, sadly, I didn't encounter until after the Q&A ended. The first was brought up by my friend over at GamesRadar, Henry Gilbert: On Xbox Live, you can download McCain/Palin and Obama/Biden icons – so is the message that it's somehow more acceptable to express political orientation than sexual orientation?

The second issue stemmed from the part of the panel where moderator Justin Cole brought up the Flash game Watch Out Behind You, Hunter!, where players have to shoot gay men to keep from being raped: I thought to myself, what if you re-skinned the hunter to be a woman on her way home late at night from a club? Would that somehow make the game more acceptable because it removes the anti-gay sentiment? Or is it equally uncool because the game still advocates murder as a solution to sexual assault?

Discuss.

Cole used commenters' responses to his post, The Impact of Homophobia in Virtual Communities, to drive discussion among panelists Caryl Shaw (Senior Producer at EA's Maxis), Dan Hewitt (Senior Director of Communications & Industry Affairs for the Entertainment Software Association), Stephen Toulouse (Program Manager for Policy and Enforcement, Xbox Live), Cyn Skyberg (Vice President of Customer Relations at Linden Lab) and Flynn DeMarco (founder of GayGamer.net). Read on to see if you made the cut.

First up was McLuvin's comment about flaunting sexuality. Next was GameBuddy, continuing the discussion. Then came bLaZINcOdE3's comment about the "gay mafia" forcing companies to hold "token meetings." OrigamiNinja's comment about how harassment makes the game less fun made it in, as did Nnooo's about whether or not gamers can expect Mario to save a prince instead of a princess someday. User saulpimpson's comment steered talk toward developers refusing to make games based on gay or gay bashing content. Then DanoruX's tongue-in-cheek "this is so gay," statement got a discussion going on "innocent" slurs. Phydeaux's comment on "play to file" introduced the topic of abuse reporting in online communities. Lastly, ach77 made it in as part of a general statement that gay gamers just want to have fun like every other gamer – and to introduce the founder of gay-centric World of Warcraft guild, The Spreading Taint who happened to be in the audience.

Aside from being shamelessly proud of Kotaku commenters, I was interested to see how Kotaku alumnus DeMarco reacted to comments from his ex-audience. He did almost half the talking at the panel and demonstrated the most gaming expertise. Whenever an issue was raised, DeMarco could name at least two games in response whereas everyone else just fell back on their own games (like Shaw's Spore and Skyberg's Second Life) or defaulted to Halo.

The other big talker was Microsoft's Toulouse, but I think he was being targeted. At the beginning of the panel, Cole presented a video that outlined the issues facing gays and lesbians in online gaming. All of their in-game examples seemed to be from Xbox Live – most specifically, Halo multiplayer. To his credit, Toulouse responded to almost every issue raised by Kotaku comments and admitted that Xbox Live hasn't got it right quite yet – but they're committed to making their community a safe place to game for everybody.

The quietest panelist was Second Life's Skyberg. It takes all types to make a virtual world like Second Life and I know they've had issues that prompted developer Linden Lab to create an adults-only space. Skyberg did pipe up at one or two times to talk about anonymity making it easy for people to use gay slurs in online communities – and made an excellent point that as people invest in their online identities more, this anonymity goes away.

The only dull part of the panel was the Q&A. I'm not sure if it's because the two hour time limit was almost up and everybody wanted lunch, or because the audience was the choir being preached to – but nobody asked anything that hadn't been addressed. One lady asked if the "dehumanizing" aspect of violent games like Halo brought about gay bashing and DeMarco responded that the problem wasn't that the game that engendered homophobia, it was that the audience that the game tended to attract was immature and ignorant of gay issues.

In sum, this is what I took away from the panel: Don't hate the game, hate the player. Or better yet, don't hate anybody.

Hot on the heels of this morning's announcement that the Robot Chicken team was providing downloadable adventures for Spore's Galactic Adventure's expansion comes this video, proving the fact. It features one hell of a Spore rendition of the titular chicken, along with a bonus appearance by Breckin "Garfield's Jon Arbuckle" Meyer. It doesn't get much better than this.

Using Maxis' "in-house exporter", which is able to export all the "skinned, rigged meshes along with all of the textures (normal maps, specular, diffuse, gloss, etc)" of a Spore creature, toy designer Hellopike whipped up these renders of a "Cthulhoid".

They're just renders. Not pics of a real toy. But wouldn't it be great if, some day, your little bundles of alien joy could look - whether in-game or just as a figure - this damn pretty?

Cthulhoid Spore Creature Render A Go Go [GameSetWatch]

It was all looking very mysterious, with a mysterious website and a mysterious Spore-branded teaser (Find out what happens...May 19th), until Reuters went and blew the project's cover.

And that project is "Titan Maximum", a piss-take on 80's giant robot cartoons like Voltron that's due to begin airing in September. Robot Chicken producer/writer Tom Root explains:

There were always teams of extraordinary young people with the fate of the universe in their hands. In reality, that would end terribly. The last thing you want when giant monsters attack is a bunch of teenagers in charge of defending you. 'Titan Maximum' is about what would really happen if a team of idiot kids was in charge of a six-story-tall robot.

Watch the clip and you'll see that Spore is being used extensively, at least in the design process, for the show's various alien and robotic characters.

Whether it'll be used in the actual show - Spore replacing Robot Chicken's clay in the actual animation - I guess we'll find out on May 19.

"Robot Chicken" crew constructs new series [Reuters]

UPDATE - Oh no! Despite the video and the announcement hitting within a few days of each other, and both involving aliens and robots, Robot Chicken tell us they're not the same project.

Titan Maximum will be a stop-motion animation project, similar to Robot Chicken. The clip above just shows the production team helping promote the upcoming Spore: Galactic Adventures by kicking the expansion's tyres a little.

According to the Spore fanatics at Spore Illustrated, the mark was reached around 5:10pm EST yesterday, April 30. And while it's an impressive feat, we can't help but wonder how many more there'd be if EA hadn't been so strict with the penis monsters.

1 trillion? A trillion billion million? Eh, probably more.

Spore 100 Million Creations Milestone [Spore Illustrated, via VG247]

In an interview with GameDaily, Wright says it was a matter of balancing output with creativity:

You know, we either [port the game to console] or we continue creating new applications on the PC or we kind of go into the handheld arena. I can't specifically say what the plans are right now, but really all these things are measured against each other. We can't do everything at once, so we have to say, 'What platforms would it kind of evolve the fastest on?' So you can sort of look at a straight port to the PS3 and Xbox 360 and basically have the same game we have on the PC... or we could say, 'What can we do on this platform that will help us explore different parts of the design?' I think the Wii is really unique in that sense, with the things you can do on Wii that you can't do on other platforms right now. It's represented a lot of learning for us in terms of the directions we might take it. So I'd say that's one of the under-appreciated aspects of how we choose to deploy this on different platforms.

A mouthful, yes, but we appreciate it. If only more developers could be so honest when explaining why games don't launch on certain platforms, or may (as he seems to be suggesting) come to one platform later than another one.

Will Wright Confirms Future Involvement in Spore Franchise [GameDaily]

Librande plans to guide students through Spore Galactic Adventures' Adventure Creator and tech them how to make game concepts come to life.

"Maxis and EA are huge proponents of college game design programs and nurturing rising talent," said Lucy Bradshaw, VP and General Manager at Maxis. "The robust creative capabilities of the Adventure Creator in Spore Galactic Adventures, empowers future game developers with a different way to experiment with game design. I can't wait to see what the students create."

The tour kicked off late last week at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It will head to the University of Southern California later this week and then Carnegie Mellon University on May 1.

"The games industry continues to grow with the rise of online gaming, casual gaming and the exciting challenges of new markets," said Cindy Nicola, VP, Global Talent Acquisition. "EA is passionate about attracting and hiring the brightest graduates as they are our next generation of leaders. Our university partnerships and the talent they produce are key components of our overall talent strategy and we are deeply committed to continuing to hire interns and new graduates across EA."

Once space exploration is unlocked, players can choose the Galactic Adventure tab from the main menu and get down to some real exploring – like where you get out of your ship and walk around. This gives players more of a connection to their Captain characters, especially when you start going on quests and leveling up with experience points.

What's really going to be the draw of the Galactic Adventures, though, is the adventure editor. This is a shame because there's so much to that particular facet of the expansion that I don't feel like I got to see enough of it to really write a fair preview.

Oh well. Here goes…

What is it?
Spore Galactic adventures is an expansion pack for Spore that lets you extend the space exploration segment to actual adventure gaming – kind of like the creature phase, only now you have guns and armor and stuff.

What We Saw
I got about twenty minutes with the title toward the end of an EA press junket held in possibly the noisiest club I've ever been to.

How Far Along Is It?
The build looked pretty final to me, but the game ships June 23. It's likely Maxis is doing a very careful polish with the extra time.

What Needs Improvement?
Spare Me Spore: Whatever else this expansion accomplishes, it's not going to change anyone's mind about the game. It doesn't address all the issues critics attacked the game for; it doesn't do anything particularly new or different to the established method of playing the game. That doesn't mean it's a bad expansion – it just means it's almost exclusively "for the fans."

Wings are in the way: You play the adventure mode pretty much the same way you play the creature mode – from a behind the shoulders view. However, because it's an adventure and not a virgin planet, there is often a lot of stuff on screen at one time that narrows your field of vision (buildings, trees, cars, etc.). This kind of makes it hard to play the Captain like you would an adventure game – especially if they have wings that get in the way whenever they walk into a building-dense town to talk to an NPC.

Adventure ADD: Twenty minutes wasn't really enough time to get a handle on how intuitive the adventure editor was – but I get the distinct feeling that all of the stuff you can do (planet editing, object editing, NPC dialogue trees) will likely overwhelm more than a few seasoned Spore players. Even my demo master said he'd start to create an adventure then "get ADD" and never finish it. He'd get side-tracked by some neat gimmick he invented (like disguising mines as cakes – see below) and forget what he wanted his enemy NPCs to do when they encounter the Captain (follow, territorial, defend, etc.).

What Should Stay The Same?
The Cake is teleporter Lie: All adventures have an item component. You can make your own items or choose from an extensive selection of random stuff that Maxis has cooked up for you – and then drag and drop them into your adventure. Once you do this, you can choose to set that object's "behavior" for different parts of the adventure. Like in Act 1 of your adventure, you can put a bunch of cars down in a town, but set them to be invisible. Then, for Act 2, you can set them to visible – so that when your Captain completes Act 1, the cars magically appear before him. Or – you can disguise objects with other images; like setting down a teleporter, bur disguising it as a cake. It's a very clever game mechanic that empowers the user.

The Planet Editor: I've longed for this since the original game, so I'm glad Maxis included it. You can't really change the size of the planet, but you can customize the colors, the weather, the water-to-land ratio and drop some really weird geological formations almost wherever you want.

That pre-created "Bar Hoping" adventure: According to my demo master, the Bar Hoping adventure I chose wasn't done yet – but whatever it was, it looked cool. My Captain was put in an alley between two clubs playing loud rave music (another customizable feature) and I had to get him past the bouncers to go inside and start picking up beer bottles.

Big Bang for your Buck: There is so much stuff to do in this expansion. Sure, it's overwhelming, but never let it be said you weren't getting your money's worth.

Final Thoughts
Whatever its flaws, Spore: Galactic Adventures does exactly what an expansion is supposed to do. It expands on the original gameplay, adds a bunch of new stuff to make the purchase worthwhile and does little (if anything) to appease people who've already given the game up or never tried it in the first place. The only thing you can really fault Galactic Adventures for is possibly dabbling in the dark side of EA's expansion pack practices — but I'd wait for a Spore: IKEA expansion before getting upset about it.

When asked if he felt like he was leaving his gaming fanbase behind, he said no.

"That's definitely not the case, some of the coolest things I'm thinking of working on are new games," he said.

And those games won't be a total departure from Wright's history of making open-ended simulators. There will be "an almost unbroken lineage" between what he has done in the past and where he hopes to take gaming with Stupid Fun Club, he says.

Earlier today, Wright announced that he would be departing Maxis and Electronic Arts to spend all of his time working at an entertainment think tank developing new intellectual properties for all forms of entertainment from toys to television.

Stupid Fun Club, which was initially started in 2001 as an offshoot of his work building robots for Robot Wars, was dramatically restructured recently in time for the deal he signed with EA on Monday, he said.

"It started out in Berkeley, " he said. "We were all doing Robot Wars together. We started building strange robots and then started doing these fun social experiments where we would have them encounter people and film it to study peoples' reactions."

That led to a lot of ideas, Wright said and people started stopping by to see if they could invest in the company. But Wright said he was reluctant to go down the path of an IPO or start up again, like he did with Maxis.

They started showing some of the ideas to Electronic Arts and the publisher got interested. "They were the perfect VC for us," Wright said.

The relationship Stupid Fun Club will have with EA will, in some ways, be a broad version of the one Steven Spielberg has with the company, Wright said.

Wright says he was fascinated with the concept of the film maker working as an entertainment designer in a field he was unaccustomed to. And Boom Blox, he says, was a interesting product of that effort.

"Boom Blox was remarkable because it was not the game I was expecting from Steven Spielberg, but it was a blast to play," he said. "There were no cinematic, no story, no anything. You could just pick it up and play it.

"He clearly understood games at a level I didn't expect him to."

Wright has been working for some time now trying to grow his understanding of other elements of entertainment as well.

"I've been kind of talking to people about TV shows and movies for awhile now," he said, declining to say which games they would be based on.

When will we hear from Wright and his company again? Perhaps at this year's E3? The designer said he wasn't sure quite yet.

"Give me a few months and I'm sure you'll hear something."

"The entertainment industry is moving rapidly into an era of revolutionary change," said Will Wright. "Stupid Fun Club will explore new possibilities that are emerging from this sublime chaos and create new forms of entertainment on a variety of platforms. In my twelve years at EA, I've had the pleasure to work alongside some of the brightest and most talented game developers in the industry and I look forward to working with them again in the near future."

Stupid Fun Club will be "an entertainment think tank developing new Intellectual Properties to be deployed across multiple fronts including video games, movies, television, the internet, and toys," according to the official press release on the matter. It will allow Wright to "explore new projects" and EA retains the right to develop games based on Stupid Fun Club projects.

"We believe in Will's vision for Stupid Fun Club and we're looking forward to partnering with Will and his team long into the future," said John Riccitiello, EA's Chief Executive Officer.

Lucy Bradshaw, vice president and General Manager at Maxis, the studio Wright created with Jeff Braun in1989, will continue to run Maxis and the Spore franchise.

The site for Stupid Fun Club features an image of a ball broken down into rectangles. Some of the rectangles link to information on the site, previous Wright press coverage and an about statement that reads, in part: "the ideas here can be manifested in video games, online environments, storytelling media and fine home care products"

There are also three links hidden on the front page which lead to strange interactive toys of sorts. Two feature five floating images of Earth as seen from space and a selection of multi-hued tubes or rectangles.

The third allows you to select from a number of images to move fill up a blank page. A small yellow creature in the bottom right corner of the screen occasionally comments in a speech bubble filled with what appears to be nonsense characters.

Knowing Wright, I can't help but think that there's at least some new information hidden on the page.

Stupid Fun Club

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."

Doesn't help that he has a new game coming out, while Spore launched last year. Still, the online community for the game has been active — weekly challenges plus and upcoming API contest are what's going on there — and the first expansion, Galactic Adventures, is due out in June.

The house didn't fill up, but it was a pretty decent talk. In the first five minutes, Producer Caryl D. Shaw changed the name of the panel to something about her life story and used the opportunity to talk about Spore online development and her cat.

The big challenge of developing Spore for online stuff was knowing when to get the servers. The online side of the project first went into development in 2005 and Shaw bought the servers early. This turned out to be problematic since by the time the game launched last year, the servers were slightly outdated.

But ultimately, Shaw thinks it's good they started early. It got the Sporepedia off the ground without the servers crashing and set up a system of community management that grew up along with the community.

That system seems to be working fairly well; Shaw showed off the following spiffy stats for Spore's online performance since launch:

89,505,660 total uploads since June
1.5-2m uploads per week (1m per day the first week)
2.6m registered users
3500 new users a day
500-600k uniques a month to Spore.com
4.45 minutes (average time per visit)
5 – number of Web Engineers at Maxis (plus Ernie, the part-time database guy)

Her number one piece of advice to those handling online development for single-player games? "Whether you're on the game side or on the online side… don't hide from your customers," Shaw said. "Don't hide behind your desk, don't hide behind your email – get out into the community."

Oh, and more load testing. That's how you keep the servers from crashing on opening weekend.

EA shared details on the Wii version of Spore Hero with MTV Multiplayer, pointing out that it's not just a down-rezzed down port of the original Spore for Windows and Mac. It's actually more limited in scope, focusing mostly on the game's Creature stage, seemingly bypassing much of the late-game events.

"It takes advantage of the controls explicitly. And even stylistically, when you see the game, you'll go, ‘Oh yeah, that's definitely a Nintendo Wii game,'" EA's Lucy Bradshaw tells MTV. We're not sure if that's a good or bad thing just yet, but EA had us prepared early, saying in the original Spore Hero press release that it "takes players on an exciting adventure through a beautiful, colorful world."

Expect some serious motion control evolutionary fun, as MTV stresses that Spore Hero features "heavy" amounts of motion control. That plus Spore penis monsters is sure to make headlines somewhere.

New Details About EA's Wii-Exclusive ‘Spore: Hero' [MTV Multiplayer]

More than 35 million creatures are online on Spore's Sporepedia, which is more than 22 times the current known number of species that existence on the real planet Earth.

Now go check out Spore's many Darwinian creations.

Darwin Creations [Spore]

One of the issues I had with the game was that it felt a bit too skeletal. Sure you could go from single cell to space exploration, but you couldn't really dig into any of those.

It looks like Spore Galactic Adventure might fix that, at least for one phase.