Wright tells reporter Dean Takahashi that his post-EA venture, the expanded Stupid Fun Club, is staffing up but staying small, adding some ex-Maxis employees but keeping headcount under 30. At least three projects are underway, all of which will have a web component and all of which seem that they will be playable in some way.

Two choice excerpts:

VB: Do you feel you are looking back on the game industry, as something in your past, and do you have a take on it now?

WW: I feel we are still in it because a couple of projects are games. We are taking the games industry into other areas. We are expanding what we call the "play industry." Games are limited in some ways. Play can be applied to so many different kinds of experiences.

And

VB: Do you think the future is more about Facebook games, or is more about console games?

WW: I think it is going to be a lot broader than either one of those two. Those are both experiences where you sit in front of the screen. They're very structured activities. I'm thinking much broader than that.

Plenty more in the full post, though you'll have to guess as to what Wright is actually making. I see clues. No specifics yet.

Will Wright on his entertainment startup, the Stupid Fun Club [VentureBeat]

For game enthusiasts who may find themselves in the greater Los Angeles area, you'll be lucky enough to have access to indie game exhibitions for a nominal entrance fee. That means more than two dozen selected independent games, all of which will be on hand at the Wonderful World of Art Gallery, Culver Hotel Mezzanine and Gregg Fleishman Gallery daily from 10 AM to 7 PM.

Also attending this year's IndieCade will be game development luminaries such as Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, Will Wright, Henry Jenkins, Jenova Chen and many, many more. Some will even give thrilling keynote speeches! Hearing those in real-time might cost you a little more.

More information on IndieCade 2009 is available at the official site. I'll be there. Will you?

IndieCade 2009 [Official Site]

The interview starts off with Wright showing off his new business cards, which he's had printed on replicas of foreign money. It then quickly drops into the topic, pulling this gem of a quote from the famed developer:

"If you look at what people are doing with this technology it is, or has been, mostly directed at 12-year-old boys. But it has the potential to do a whole lot more."

Wright, when asked about educational and serious games, says that he thinks sometimes these games are a bit too focused on the idea, hinting that maybe they're not so fun.

What they need to do, he says, is be a bit more abstract in how they deal with the idea.

Why should serious and educational game developers listen to Wright? He's made a career out of making educational games, people just don't realize it.

Wright says, as he told me, that the real power in gaming isn't in its ability to educate, but its ability to motivate. Motivate people to educate themselves.

Creator of 'The Sims' Talks Educational Gaming

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Wright explains that the true key to motivating your employees is to know what motivates them, and not just from a development standpoint. Everyone has something they are passionate about, and once you discover that you can use it to help relate on a much more personal level.

...this to me is one of the important points of working collaboratively with other people - trying to get a sense of what is the one thing that makes their eyes light up, they get excited about and they won't stop talking about. And if you can get a sense of what that is from somebody, and you can harness that, that's going to have more impact on how they perform their job, how they relate to you, how you can convey a vision to them in a way that they get excited about it.

Talking about Wright as a manager and not as a game designer provides us with an interesting look into how the man operates. I think we tend to think of big-name creators like Wright and Sid Mead as if they simply give birth to video games, rather than managing a talented team of developers focused on delivering a unified vision. Wright began programming games at a time when a huge team wasn't necessary, so it is intriguing - to me at least - to see how he has developed as a manager over the years.

I particularly like how he filters prospective employees by how they react to seemingly impossible ideas...those who get excited make the cut, while those who get stressed or depressed generally don't. In the interview Wright also speaks extensively about balancing the team, and how an extremely skilled programmer who can't work well with others might be worth less than a merely competent programmer that is truly a team player.

The key idea I took from the interview is the importance of knowing who you are working with on a level deeper than many traditional managers are willing to explore. It isn't merely about putting people with the correct skills in the correct positions...it's about knowing how said placement will affect the other people around them, and what they will bring to the table in the long run. In a way, it's much like a complicated puzzle game, in which some pieces explode and others strengthen the other pieces around them. It's the getting to know the pieces before dropping them that makes all the difference.

On Will Wright's Team, Would You Be a Solvent, or the Glue? [The New York Times]

Capcom isn't completely sure and that's why they're asking their blog readers to go support their iconic blue-clad hero by voting for him on the Robot Hall of Fame's official site. The French robot, Maillardet's Automaton is currently ahead of Mega Man by 8% — but I'd say Dr. Wily's foe has much stiffer competition from Futurama's Bender and Invader Zim's Gir.

It may be that Mega Man still has a chance, even if the Automaton tops him in the voting pool; the Robot Hall of Fame has two categories to honor robots. One is for real-life robots like Honda's ASIMO and the other honors robots from science fiction where robots "have achieved worldwide fame as fictional characters and have helped form our opinions about the functions and values of real robots."

Hm. Maybe Bender and Gir's chances aren't so good, then. Also Will Wright is on the jury, so that may be Mega Man's ace in the hole.

Get Mega Man into Robot Hall of Fame [Capcom]

ZootFly's first game will pit the mohawked one against Nazis, obviously, bustin' up the gigantic machines of the Third Reich in "South American rain forests, lost ancient cities, industrial complexes and contemporary military installations." Mr. T will joined by SimCity and Spore designer Will Wright, who's trading in his game design skills for genetic engineering skills. Unfortunately, Wright's been kidnapped by them no good Nazis and T's gotta help. Expect to pity those Nazi fools.

According to ZootFly's announcement, each and every game will feature "knuckle-whitening action-adventure, furious brawler combat, gravity-defying platforming, and environmental puzzles." That's right, Jack! Environmental puzzles, sucka!

Whatever these Mr. T games will be called and whether Wright's actually signed off on having his likeness in the T-rated games, they'll be coming to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii and PC. Stay in school!

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]

The famed digital toy maker responsible for SimCity, The Sims and Spore, is leaving video game publishing behemoth Electronic Arts to dabble in every form of entertainment from robots and toys to television shows, movies and, yes, even more video games.

Wright recently announced that he would be departing EA for his new company, Stupid Fun Club, which he describes as an entertainment think tank. The company was actually started in 2001 as a club for designing robots to compete in television's Robot Wars, he said.

At entertainment think tank Stupid Fun Club, Wright will be able to spend more of his time focusing on creating entertainment and less time worrying about how to bottle it.

Shortly after announcing his departure, Wright spoke with me about his decision. It's one, he agrees, that will allow him to be much more media neutral in his creations.

There are two ways creative things are made, he said.

"One model is the Marvel, Lucas Arts idea, where you focus on core themes," he said. "The other side is where you concentrate on developing core technologies. Then you figure out how to build a new property around these new tech-enabled experiences. "

Wright hopes that Stupid Fun Club can meld both ideas, working on concepts and themes from the bottom up. Once an idea achieves critical mass, the company would work with an external product team to turn it into something marketable.

"We will have to have a very tight working relationship with companies like EA," he said.

What excites Wright the most about his new company is the potential it will have to blend the languages of different forms of entertainment.

"You see television shows picking up the language of video games, toys borrowing from the web, it's all kind of already happening, but it's a little unnatural," he said. "We will be an entertainment company first and then figure out how to get a great TV show or video games. "

While Wright's company is already working on potential video game ideas, he seems most interesting in delving into the process of creating physical toys.

"The toy industry has almost been like the television industry, in a slow decline," he said. "Kids are growing up in this digital age, they are finding video games so compelling and centered on them that they find that a plastic toy isn't very compelling.

Wright thinks that if toys can be made to feel more personal, more about the children, they will become more compelling and thus more relevant.

"Toys gives you an interesting way of looking at the world around you," he said.

I asked Wright what he would tell people he did now that he's leaving the more familiar realm of game design.

"I don't know," he said. "I suppose entertainment designer."

Well Played is a weekly opinion column about the big news of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

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."

I've been messing around with all three for a bit now and am most intrigued by the one you can access by clicking on the black hole where a rectangle should be on the front page. Maybe Wright is just messing with us, but I'd like to think that if we get the order "right" it might reveal something.

Of course the website was created back in 2002, so maybe it's just a bunch of silliness. Afterall, he did have a hand in making this M.Y. Robot video.

Stupid Fun Club

"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."

The luminaries this year are Will Wright, Brian Fargo, David Perry, Neil Young, Rob Pardo and Warren Spector. The talk will be chaired by Gary White.

Follow along with the fly-on-the-wall observation of the chat in the live blog.

First up is Will Wright, at #84. Sure, The Sims and Spore are big sellers, but they're seen by Rolling Stone as more important for their efforts in creating popular forms of artificial intelligence as they are for making EA millions of Simoleons.

According to the magazine, Gears of War's Clifford Bleszinski is the 73rd most-changingest man in America. Yes, Dude Huge ranks higher than Will Wright. Why? "Because video games need Michael Bay-style blockbusters too". Oh, and because he is rich in nickels.

At #44, it's Harmonix founders Alex Rigopulos & Eran Egozy, who were picked as much for inventing Guitar Hero & Rock Band as they were for helping change the way the music industry does business through Rock Band's extensive downloadable content offerings.

And all the way up at #13 is someone who is not even American. And no, it's not Peter Molyneux. Or Dennis Dyack. Or Itagaki, or Brown Man, or Jeff Minter. It's Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, who Rolling Stone anoint as "the Bob Dylan of video games".

Can't he just be the Shigeru Miyamoto of video games?

The 100 People Who Are Changing America [Rolling Stone]

Will Wright previously hinted at a DS title, but it turns out there are two DS titles that I misread the display screen at the event and thought there were two. Spore Creature Keeper is a PC title dated for Summer 2009. The standalone game looks to be a mix between MySims and Nintendogs: the clip I saw was a monster running on a treadmill and then decorating his house before having his tummy rubbed by a hand cursor. Clearly, Creature Keeper is aimed at younger gamers, so skip it if you can’t stand the cute.

The second DS standalone title is part of a pair of games born of a Nintendo partnership with EA. The working title is “Spore Hero Arena” and it ties into a Wii game called — wait for it — “Spore Hero.” There wasn’t actual gameplay footage for Arena, but Spore Hero looks to be an adventure game where you create your own creature to guide through a preset world and plotline. These games are slated for a Fall 2009 release.

Last, but first (in the release schedule) is the Spore expansion Galactic Adventures. More than just a content pack, Adventures adds a layer of gameplay to the space exploration part of the main game as well as a separate branch of Spore to screw around in. Check out my impressions later today for full details.

Create, Play and Share With Spore Franchise as EA Unveils Diverse Software Line-up for 2009

Four Unique Launches Prove That Possibilities in Spore are as Infinite as the Cosmos

EMERYVILLE, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—The Spore franchise is evolving! With more than 65 million pieces of user-created content shared online, fans from around the globe have gravitated to the game’s powerful creativity-centered experience and massively single-player content sharing site. This year, the award-winning Spore franchise continues to evolve as Maxis, an Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) studio announces four new titles, each designed to deliver a unique experience to a specific audience; Spore™ Galactic Adventures, Spore™ Creature Keeper*, Spore™ Hero* and Spore™ Hero Arena*. This roster offers unique gameplay for space hunters, creature creators and action adventurers, proving that Spore has something for everyone – gamers, kids and Nintendo fans alike.

“Last year was a very exciting year for Maxis with the release of Spore. We were overwhelmed by the massive response to the game from the millions of people that created, shared and played in the Spore universe,” said General Manager of Maxis, Lucy Bradshaw. “This year we’re going to experiment with new experiences that extend the powerful creativity tools of Spore to all-new audiences. With the universe as our backdrop, the only limit in the Spore universe is your own imagination.”

The next big bang for Spore on PC comes this spring with the deeply immersive and customizable expansion pack, Spore Galactic Adventures. Spore Galactic Adventures adds a tremendous amount of variety and depth to the original “space game” in Spore, allowing players to beam down to planets, play mission-based adventures and even create their own customized adventures for the first time. Each adventure has a unique reward to upgrade a space creature with special accessories – from an Energy Blade and Stunning Charm to a Jump Jet and more. Players can fight their way to victory as a Warrior, dance with new friends as a Bard, and much more. With an almost unlimited number of user created adventures, there’s more to play than ever before. The “adventure creator” in Spore Galactic Adventures gives gamers the tools to make their own missions and share them with friends via www.spore.com.

Younger Spore fans will have a blast with the Spore Creature Keeper, a stand-alone PC game that has players nurturing, training and playing with their own personally-created creature. With lots of toys, clothes and gizmos to play with, players can pamper their pets to perfection! With Spore Creature Keeper, fans can play with their creation alone or have a play-date online for endless creature fun. Spore Creature Keeper brings all the fun of creature creation to a new level by adding nurturing, teaching and social components to the experience.

Spore will make its highly-anticipated debut on the Nintendo Wii with Spore Hero, an all-new adventure game focusing on creativity and evolution that was built from the ground up for the unique controls for Wii™. Spore Hero takes players on an exciting adventure through a beautiful, colorful world. Spore Hero Arena for Nintendo DS™ builds on the success of 2008’s hit Spore™ Creatures and allows players to create fully-3D Spore creatures and take them into battle with an array of other creatures across the galaxy. Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena offer two all-new Spore experiences available exclusively for Nintendo platforms this fall.

To learn more about Spore, to download a free trial of the Spore Creature Creator, or to visit the more than 65 million player-created creations to date, please visit www.spore.com. For screen shots or press materials about Spore, please visit our press web site at http://info.ea.com

That's right, Pro Gaming's former top dog Johnathan Wendel, was among the short list of gaming experts when the BBC came a calling. If you can get past that you'll find an interesting and varied look at what some though were the highs and lows of this year and where they hope things will head next year.

Fable-creator Molyneux, for instance, seems enamored with the Wii and LittleBigPlanet, though not necessarily with the Playstation 3. Spore head-honcho Wright is also a fan of the Wii, and social networking in games.

Fatal1ty? He's a big fan of his new line of headphones.

Looking back to the future of fun

... Will Wright continued to think about what else he could do now that he had discovered this new scale. If people messed around with ants and kept ant farms because, on a certain level, it was easy to see ourselves in them, why not make a digital "people farm"? This, of course, led to the ant-farm-by-way-of-doll-house know as The Sims, the best-selling PC game of all time.

Through these games, Wright struck upon something essential in humanity. Messing with ants is the original "god game." Software simulations are both an extension and a refinement of this behavior. They let us focus our frustrations and desires onto something smaller than ourselves, something over which we can feel supremely powerful. We can single out a few digital people and decide if we want to make their day heaven or hell. Or we can simply watch them go about their tasks, gently nudging them along, content in the knowledge that we have the power to tear it all down at any moment. For beings that often feel powerless in the face of a vast, harsh universe, this is extremely cathartic.

The whole issue is a fun read, with essays on a variety of god game-related subjects.

A God Among Insects [The Escapist]

In spite of its marketing, Spore clearly has little in common with science, especially evolution. That's a pity, because with very minor tweaks, the game could live up to its promise. Gregory and Eldredge's critique provides several good ideas, such as incurring a developmental cost for making radical body-plan changes. Another easy improvement would be to weave relevant science into the fabric of the existing game. In the game Civilization, for example, you learn a great deal about the history of ancient cultures through a series of pop-up mini-articles. When you stick a limb on your creature, wouldn't it be nice to have an optional pop-up window that explains the real (and fascinating) science behind limb evolution?

Spore flunks, but there's still hope for its future. Once released, games often improve over several generations through downloaded software patches and new editions. Let's hope that noncomplacent families and science educators provide some selective pressure. Then Spore itself might evolve.

I can understand the desire of scientists to see a 'fun' game that is educational, but still — I'm not sure a game that got high marks on organismic biology would actually be fun. Herein lies the great truth of education and 'educational materials': it's frequently not the least bit fun. And really, that's OK much of the time. Sometimes it's OK to let a game be just that.

Flunking Spore [Science via Terra Nova]

"I haven’t seen as much of [LittleBigPlanet] as I’d like to. What I’ve seen of it looks intriguing and very cool. I've seen a couple videos of it, though. Is it out now? I don’t have a PS3."

Wait wait wait, this is where I had to stop him. Not only did I have to tell him LBP's release date (October 21st), I had to ask why the hell he doesn't own a Playstation 3. I mean, he's Will Wright, one of gaming's greatest designers, and he doesn't have Sony's latest system? You mean to tell me over the last two years the thought to acquire one, even for free, never entered into his mind?

"[LIttleBigPLanet] will probably tip the scales for me to buy one. I own pretty much every other system. There’s just been no titles for [the PS3] I’ve really wanted to see."

Oooo, burn. I image Kaz will overnight a few PS3's to Will's house tomorrow now. But c'mon! MGS4? Uncharted? Resistance?

"It was something I probably should have tuned into more. It was a corporate decision to go with DRM on Spore. They had a plan and the parameters, but now we’re allowing more authentications and working with players to de-authenticate which makes it more in line like an iTunes. I think one of the most valid concerns about it was you could only install it so many times. For most players it’s not an issue, it’s a pretty small percentage, but some people do like wiping their hard disk and installing it 20 times or they want to play it 10 years later."

I’m not sure if I totally agree it’s a non-issue only involving a smaller percentage, why else would EA care so much to go back and alleviate some of the complaints? Clearly, DRM is not the best way to go to help prevent piracy, so I asked Wright if he thinks the DRM model is here to stay or if it’s only temporary.

"I think it’s an interim solution to an interim problem. You have games like Battlefield Heroes coming out where the idea is you give away the game and sell upgrades, which works more in the Asian markets where you need to monetize it over the Internet. I think we’re in this uncomfortable spot in going from what’s primarily a brick and mortar shrink-wrapped product to what eventually will become more of an online monetization model."

Oh no :(