The Wright Stuff

But will you be able to pick and choose what creatures or buildings are shipped down to you, or is it just the server doing it automatically?
Oh no, it naturally happens automatically, but you can also browse the entire database of content and if you see stuff you really like, you can say I want this or that. So let's say I wanted to recreate Paris in the game, and I'm looking for the Eiffel Tower and I'm looking for the Arc de Triomphe and I can find them on the server I can say 'OK, make sure those are in my game.' And then when I open up the shopping catalogue in the city planning part of the game, those would now appear. So what we're hoping is that players will be able to create very well-crafted worlds even though they didn't create all the content. Just like The Sims, there's this giant library of props and actors I have available just to download and then tell a cool story with. Maybe I'm really good at telling a story but I'm not that great at making the actors and the items, or maybe somebody else is really good at making buildings, but for the most part they want to download vehicles and creatures. So people can specialize.

We're basically building a model of the player's aesthetic. So if you keep picking things from the shopping catalog that are like super-cute, Disney-like, then it will start offering you and downloading more stuff that matches your aesthetic. So in some sense you're teaching the computer your aesthetic and it's building a model of that. And when it makes a request to the server it's taking that into account, so the world will slowly start to represent your aesthetic choices.

When we moved from Sims to Sims 2 there was more emphasis on gameplay, on goals, on winning or losing. Where does Spore stand†can you win Spore?
In terms of the level gameplay, working your way up from cell to creature, definitely yes, because we have goal conditions where you have to get to a certain goal to go from creature to tribe, or tribe to civilization. Within those levels we want to have a large number of different ways in which you can get to that goal. Once you get to the space level, that's where I'm saying it becomes more of an open sandbox. And we have all these different metagoals to pursue, so there's really no winning the space game, although there will probably be people out there who have probably conquered the most planets, or built the largest federations, or done the most trading†we'll have metrics around that as well, so there will be stats where you can compare yourself with other people.

And there will be an online leaderboard?
Yeah, but it's not head to head, it's everybody playing in their own little sandbox.

So on the continuum from games to simulations, where does this one stand?
It's a strange hybrid. A lot of our game levels are going to have mission-based gameplay as well, where you are given little goals you can choose to pursue †try to do this and earn extra points †as well as the space level, there will be a lot of mission-based gameplay as well. So I would say this one, within the game, is gong to have a lot of overt goals that you can pursue or not. Like in The Sims 2 you have all these wants and you can choose to pursue the want but the game doesn't end if you don't get there. Your Sim just gets unhappy, so there will be consequences. But when you get into the editors in Spore, that's where it starts feeling very open-ended. and a lot of time people will spend just in the editors, making weird wacky things to see how they will do in the world. So it depends how you approach it. If you want to approach it as a goal-based gameplayer there will be some fairly specific goal structures in there to pursue. But for the most part we're not trying to dissuade the kind of open-ended creative expression player if they don't choose to pursue those goals. With the one exception of, there are specific goals to progress through the levels.

So I can die off? I mean, obviously one failure condition is that I didn't survive to the point where I can play the next level.
Yeah, and in most of those cases you get ratcheted down a level, you don't have to start over from scratch. Like in the creature game, if you die you fall back to last generation, and you might keep dying and dying and dying but eventually you survive that generation then you're ratcheted up, and if you die you fall back to that one. So for the most part you're sort of ratcheting in your progress. But until you get the highest brain level you're not going to enter Tribal, or in Tribal phase until you get 20 members of your tribe you're not going to enter Civilization.

One of the oddball things about Spore, when you look at it, it's sort of a single-player massively multiplayer game, which seems at odds†I kind of like the idea that I won't be killed by a 14-year-old who has more skills than I do, but did you consider having it live online player versus player?
We thought about it. In fact, technically, based on all the stuff we've already done for it, it wouldn't be very hard at all. We've already solved all the hard problems we would need to do a persistent online world version of Spore. The hard part is, what happens when you come to a planet and the planet's offline? Which would be the case. In fact, one of the reasons why I kind of went down this path is that nobody has really explored the hybrid model. And this really is a hybrid, it's what we call a massively single-player game, where we try to get the benefits of an online game, which is all the people building the world collectively together, without the liabilities, which is that the 14-year-old can kill you or that you've invested all this time in your planet and somebody comes along and blows it up, and therefore you had to put everybody on the same level treadmill. And I hate these level treadmill games, and I wanted the players to feel really empowered. You know, you have this whole universe and this UFO and you really want to go out there and do epic things, but in an online game you couldn't. So trying to get the best of both worlds, figuring out what the sweet spot is between the features available through a shared universe experience and then the power available to a single-player experience. The intersection of those two things is kind of where Spore ended up and why it ended up there.