Monday, August 11, 2008

Build a better being

Will Wright's hugely successful games SimCity and The Sims let players shape the structure of urban areas and the lives of virtual humans; his upcoming game, Spore, lets them control the universe.

Although it is just a game, the young gamers of today may grow up to be the bioengineers of tomorrow. If Spore has any influence whatsoever, we foresee an utterly comical genetic future.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Huh! Will was once a business client of mine many years ago--we fixed and upgraded the Mac he helped develop Sim City on, or so he mentioned at the time.

I told him m'kay, but that I wasn't too interested in computer games other than the original Stanford mainframe "Spacewar" and chess. D'oh! Funny coincidence, or ...absurdly inverted Jungian synchronicity!? (He and his Berkeley company became rather wealthy on the various Sim derivations later.)

Go figure. I'll wait. 8^}

Then there was the wistful time the eccentric Captain Crunch introduced me to the Woz, at Homebrew, and who asked if I was interested in helping him develop this little perf board circuit in a cardboard box he boasted was a "home computer" prototype, oddly called an "Apple" of all things...and I turned him down. Thought phreaking was more exciting at the time. Double D'oh!!

OK, I'll stop. Strange, but true. "Garsh...!" (to be said in a disneyesque Pluto sotto voce over tonality) Heh!

Tony F. said...

Are you freaking kidding me? Spores? I'm already addicted to "The Sims 2," I don't need another life-simulation game to take up the rest of my free time.

Curse your brilliance Will Wright!