While Spore represents an intersection between a game and a simulacra of scientific principles, however, it is not as instantly recognizable a representation of our universe as previous Maxis games. The prevalence of boggle-eyed monsters – though they may well exist somewhere out there in the cosmos – sets the game at a distance from the superficially mundane urban setting of The Sims or SimCity.

“It’s a different sell,” says Wright. “I think [people’s attraction to The Sims] was about accessibility. A lot of games are typically built on these fictional worlds that assume you have read JRR Tolkien and that you know what an orc is. There are filters that require you to be fascinated by World War II or soccer before you can even begin to play or understand the premise of a game. A player of The Sims innately has enough experience to understand what the ground rules are because everyone needs to eat and sleep and get jobs and have friends.”

Yet, as Wright goes on to observe, very few games seem to make use of contemporary reality as a setting, despite its overwhelming prevalence in TV, films and books. Just why does the medium eschew the accessibility of the everyday world in favour of
space commandos and elves?

“I think games started out in the interior reptilian brain which is about fear and aggression and adrenaline,” Wright responds. “It becomes an arcade experience – action-oriented. And over time they begin to move to the outer layers of the brain where we’re actually getting deeper thought and things like philosophy and more subtle emotions. Also I think games were seen initially as this kind of Walter Mitty experience – wouldn’t it be great to be a captain of a ship, or save the universe? We’ve always thought of games on the level of escapism, this desire to be someone else other than who I am – never games that I could make about myself. But in The Sims one of the first things people do is they put themselves in the game, their family, their house – it’s this weird, almost spreadsheet-like experience, an abstract caricature of their real life that is almost more eerie than putting yourself into a futuristic space adventure fighting aliens. Spore really is about pulling an imaginary world out of the player as well. It’s not the story of their life, but the creatures, buildings, cities and planets are all things that the player created, and they can look back at it and say: ‘Wow, this whole world emerged from my imagination as opposed to the imagination of George Lucas or someone else’.”

It’s this absence of a driving, predetermined narrative that unifies Maxis’ games – instead, they give the player the opportunity to create their own stories through the mechanics of play. For Wright, the idea of channelling players through a fixed narrative goes against the grain of the medium.



“When players talk about powerful experiences they had in other games they never describe the cutscene they saw to each other,” he says. “They describe something unique that they’ve done or discovered in the game. If you sit someone down in front of The Sims, even someone who hasn’t played it before, they would inherently be mapping a narrative over the top of the play experience. So they turn their play into a story. Story is just a way to encode an experience that you had in a way that has specific causal linkages revealed. And if you link all the stuff that happened in a causal chain then that becomes the story.”