Spore

Yesterday I downloaded the Spore Creature Creator and I'm hooked.

Will Wright, notorious creator the mind-sucking Maxis franchise of simulation games, has returned with a galactic scale sim called Spore. It is a god game which does the simple thing of expanding the role of god. Instead of giving you a garden to plant and capture animals, like Viva Pinata, it gives you a planet or two and allows you to evolve creatures. The full game is due in September, but in the meantime you can join the Spore community and download the creature creator.

The implications of Spore, if Wright is onto what I think he may be onto, are enormous. What Wright should know is that this is the brainspace we've not been using creatively. It's one thing to play dress-up with Sims who are all human, it's another altogether to open the box and allow you to create every sort of species of vertebrates. From there it's just a relatively small step conceptually to go to invertebrates, virii and bacteria. The scale of interactions between all of these species is extraordinary and the opportunity to design those interactions is an untapped vein of human curiosity and art. That's why Spore is colossal.