Computer games live!

It's been a long time since I've gotten really hooked on a video/computer game. Katamari Damacy was pretty good, but the variety of gameplay is pretty limited. My interest in games has really dimmed since the good old days when I would stay up for 30+ hours playing Civilization or Master of Orion.

But now Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, has cooked up a new game, Spore, where you start out controlling a single microbe swimming around in maybe a drop of water, get it to eat, reproduce, and evolve. And evolve, and evolve, so that it grows, gets a backbone, musculature, maybe some lungs, feet, claws or tentacles. Its brain grows, too, until the critter manages to form societies, at which point you stop controlling the single critter and start controlling a tribe of critters, and the evolution stops being biological and becomes cultural and technological. The tribe becomes a village, then a city, and so on.

At every stage in the game, you're playing in a world fully populated with other critters (other tribes, other cities), with which you can interact in more or less friendly ways. These Others are drawn directly from the games played by other players: when you create a critter or a city, your creations are uploaded to a server and used to populate the game-worlds of other players.

How far does the game go? Pretty dang far, as seen in this video of Wright going through a demo.