When Will Wright took the time to explain the significance of his childhood experiences attending a Montessori school, I gave him my full attention. Wright and his colleagues have developed Spore, an evolution video game that enables the player to interact with an entire world and experience the universe. The player can control planetary atmospheric temperature and pressure and can see the results of her actions sped up over time. Wright explains that he created the game so that children (and their adult friends!) can “compress long term dynamics into short term experiences”. Spore has been described as “Pacman, Sim City, Risk, and Star Trek rolled into one mass multi-player game, with intricately modeled biological, ecological, and social phenomenons.”
Will Wright has created a style of computer gaming unlike any that came before, emphasizing learning more than losing, invention more than sport. With his hit game SimCity, he spurred players to make predictions, take risks, and sometimes fail miserably, as they built their own virtual urban worlds. With his follow-up hit, The Sims, he encouraged the same creativity toward building a household, all the while preserving the addictive fun of ordinary video games. His next game, Spore, which he previewed at TED 2007, evolves an entire universe from a single-celled creature.
