Spore Is Coming

The November 6th edition of the New Yorker has a fascinating story about Will Wright and the development of his new game, Spore. The article, "Game Master", offers a compelling (and a little scary) portrait of the man behind the best-selling game of all time, "Sim City" and a master mind at Electronic Arts video games. He is known as the god of God games and his upcoming masterpiece is going to be a doozy.

As the article points out "Wright and his backer Electronic Arts are betting that players want to create the environments and stories themselves -- that what players really like about games is exploring what Wright calls "possibility space." Spore, the game game that is evolving out of this philosophy, takes the player from a single celled organism to intergalactic god -- but only if you make clever choices. Your survivial, and the survival of the species you develop depends entirely on the choices you make.

Perhaps most interesting, you can play Spore in a single player vacuum OR you can enable an Internet feature that will pollinate your game with content created by other players. In other words, the Spore servers will analyze how you play the game and pull content from other game players that will offer challenges for your approach. As the article suggests "while you are playing the game, the game is playing you."

Perhaps more than just describing the new game, the real "meat" of the article is in the dicussion of the evolution of video games and particularly our understanding of them. Unfortunately, as games have moved from simple distractions (Pong, for example) to sophisticated simulations to truly creative environments, many critics have failed to adjust their views of the role games can play in educating youth and preparing them for the workforce. Some argue that games have served only to limit players' imagination and creativity because the game provides so much of the context.

It's hard to make that argument with a game like Sim City or Spore, or even, to some degree, "Grand Theft Auto," where the decisions made by the player alter the environment and the outcome of the game. In fact, it clearly takes a great deal of creativity and imagination to figure out how to build a city or a species -- or even an illegal empire -- especially when the rules are not laid out at the outset and the road to the top is unclear.

As Wright notes, the value of most modern video games is that they reward failure -- and, of course, the subsequent learning associated with failure. In the video game environment one can fail (either through the death of an avatar or some other "set back") and keep trying different solutions to learn from that failure. Eventually one solves the problem and moves one. This skill is essential to learning and real world success.

How does this relate to engagism? Well, I believe that the success of games like Sim City, the Sims and Spore can be tied, in part, to a recognition of people's growing desire to actively engage. In allowing players to make choices about how they focus their time and attention -- and demonstrating concrete payoffs from those choices -- these games reflect this fundamental societal shift. Perhaps most important, the young people that grew up on these types of engagist video games are coming into the workforce with a vastly different understanding of how to be effective. They will seek situations where they can probe for solutions, multi-task and creating their own environment -- how many workplaces offer those opportunities? How many are prepared to do so?