“I’m not really trying to educate,” says Wright, batting away a common misconception of his games’ purpose with some finality. He’s an intense speaker in person, alternately delivering ideas in short, abrupt bursts and eloquent lectures in a way that makes the interview feel rather more like an energetic rally than an easy conversation.

“I’m trying to motivate people to get interested in these subjects,” he continues. “But, as you do research, you realise just how inaccessible these subjects are. They’re buried in layers of obscure terminology, segmented out in their academic fields. A lot of the interesting science is inter-disciplinary, and academic institutions tend to compartmentalise. The geologists never talk to the economists, and they never talk to the biologists – but in fact there are some really interesting intersections between these things. What you get from stepping back and looking at all the different fields, all the different scales and all the different illusions of time as well, is a very valuable perspective that you almost never get stuck inside one of these disciplinary boxes.”



In attempting to draw together so many scenes from a species’ evolution, albeit in some light, digestible form, Spore’s scope exceeds that of Maxis’ previous games. We ask if there’s a risk that, in taking such a broad view, the depth is compromised to the extent that the necessary elisions end up misleading. In representing evolution in game form, for example, Spore gives players the opportunity to dictate their species’ shape, adding pincers, teeth, fronds and proboscides in an attempt to dominate the ecosystem; could players come away from Spore thinking that evolution is driven by the conscious choice of the animal in question rather than random mutation and natural selection?

“I think most people understand evolution enough to understand that we’re misrepresenting it in that sense – if they believe in evolution at all,” says Wright. “The idea that these forms are radically changing over time, well, the American creationists just don’t believe that at all. People either believe in creationism, that the world was built 4,000 years ago with all the life forms, or they believe in evolution. The intelligent design movement, as far as I can tell, is more of a political ploy to get creationism taught in schools by looking for a chink in the armour of Darwinism. Regular people don’t believe it. There’s no theology or philosophy built up around it.”

If Wright’s assertion of the public’s understanding of evolutionary principles sounds a little naïve, then the presentation of religion in the game is likely to raise eyebrows, too – and has already done so, judging by the debate raging on Maxis’ forums. Religious domination becomes one of three strategies, alongside economic and military, that are available to the player in the civilisation phase of the game – an RTS-style section that sees you expand your empire from city to city until you have brought your entire species into unison beneath your banner.

Your civilisation’s particular strategic proclivity comes as a consequence of your actions in the previous phase, taking place at the tribal level. If your major interaction with rival tribes was social – wowing them with song or dance, rather than subjugating them with force – then your predisposition in the next phase of the game is as a religious nation. While, according to Wright, this simplistic segue has enflamed the more militant atheists amongst Spore’s community, the manner with which religious conquest is represented is unlikely to be wholly satisfactory to the devout either – the practicalities of this strategy differ little from military warfare: your vehicles and planes bombard enemy units with coloured beams, effectively preaching them to bits.



For all Wright’s evident fascination with science, Spore is a game which paints its subject matter with the broadest brush strokes. This is no bad thing: it is perhaps a relief that the game’s notional gestures to harsh Darwinian reality are shackled firmly behind the idea of play. Even the most outlandishly shaped creature will be able to navigate the world in some manner, facilitated by the astounding efforts of Maxis’ animation team. Nonetheless, players’ aesthetic freedom is to some small degree constrained by feasibility. It is still possible, says Wright, to create a creature that is something of an evolutionary dead end: “You can certainly make creatures that are unplayable. There were discussions when we were building the editor about whether you could make a creature with no mouth, and we decided that unless there was a compelling reason not to, then we should let the player do that. The creature will starve to death, but you get the opportunity to go back in and fix it.”

It is in Spore’s deconstruction of a complex system such as evolution and its subsequent recreation as something playable that Wright sees a common thread among the company’s output over the last 21 years. “I think, starting with SimCity, we were kind of wrestling with the idea that games could be about reality,” he says. “Science is a narrow range of reality. The Sims isn’t really about science; SimCity is more about economics and sociology and urban dynamics. But I think they’re all about taking aspects of the world around us and reinterpreting them as toys. Toys are a superset of games. If you think about a ball, you can think of that as a toy and you can mess around and even learn about physics from a ball. But you can also put rules around it and play a game with it: here’s the goal state, here’s the high score. That’s where you take a toy that’s inherently a more open-ended experience and constrain it to make it a game experience.”

Potentially, at least, they don’t come much more open-ended than a toy which allows you to create life and coax it to evolve from microscopic cell to space-faring super species. According to the game’s executive producer, Lucy Bradshaw, it has taken a good deal of iteration to work out how it should be constrained, eventually settling on a three-way balance between the freedom to create, the impact on gameplay, and fidelity to reality. If the gameplay becomes too ‘casual’, the less personal input players feel they have upon the game and the less interesting and varied stories they can tell. If the gameplay dictates the design of the creatures to too great a degree, the greater players feel that their creativity impaired.



“Will’s original idea was that it would be a lighter game in each stage,” she says. “What we found was, in order to give a lot more weight to the player’s input in the editors and creators, we went deeper in terms of how it plays out in a strategic sense. As a creature, your primary definitions are being either social or aggressive, and the secondary strategy is movement type. Are you going to be sneaky or big and lumbering? Are you going to be fast or be able to jump and glide? And these really do add quite a bit of strategy in terms of how you approach other species on the planet. You might, for example, go the sneaky and social path – the meek shall inherit the Earth!”