Will Wright followed a typically eccentric path into computer-game design: some college classes in computer science and architecture, a few homemade robots, no university degree. A deep interest in science, however, infuses all his creations. SimAnt, in which players try to corral an ant colony into conquering a suburban home, was modeled on the insights of ant expert Edward O. Wilson. For SimEarth, a global-ecosystem game, Wright consulted with biologist James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia "Earth as organism" hypothesis. SimCity was inspired by urban-dynamics models developed by MIT scientist Jay Forrester. The Sims games, beneath their animated-dollhouse exteriors, are time-management experiments, based in part on a trove of data gathered by sociologist John Robinson on how Americans spend their hours.
Wright's next game, Spore, due out next year, simulates the entire cosmos; he refers to it jokingly as SimEverything. The player starts as a microbe in a cell-eat-cell world and gradually advances onto land, evolves sentience, develops culture, forms tribes, cities, and civilizations, and finally acquires the ability to move freely through a breathtakingly vast universe of planets, stars, and galaxies. Everything is malleable: A player can create a creature with, say, 3 legs and 15 eyes and stretch it like clay. The animating software then figures out how best to make it walk, run, and stalk prey. A player can create ringed planets and watch the moons orbit leisurely for hours. Meanwhile, the many worlds in your Spore cosmos are pollinated automatically from an online database of plants and animals created by other players.
"As you play, you create the elements of the universe, which are used to populate other players' worlds," Wright says. "In a sense, you're creating the universe for other players. We're making the player the game designer."
Through your games, you come across as a guy who's trying to decipher the natural world bit by bit, through computer simulations. That's not far off. When I was a kid, I liked taking things apart to see how they worked. Computer simulation is similar, it's reductionist; you've got these parts, you want to see how they interact, so you build a model and compare it to the real world. When you formulate a model, you quickly see your misperceptions. That's the value of simulation in science, to spotlight our ignorance.
