Video games - Forget the predictable consoles from Sony and Microsoft. Iain Simons finds a higher level in Spore
It was the hottest part of the day. A plane swooped alarmingly low over downtown Los Angeles. The traffic slowed to a crawl. The crowd on the sidewalk looked up at the sky and saw five marines throw themselves from the plane. To avoid being mistaken for Hollywood stuntmen, the soldiers touched down in front of a billboard announcing: "America's Army: Empower Yourself, Defend Freedom. The only official US army video game." Next to me, a slight man in shorts and a Space Invaders T-shirt suddenly and inexplicably shouted, "Freedom!" before striding off to claim his free bottle of Mountain Dew from the underdressed young women nearby.
That was the scene outside the LA Convention Centre, as more than 70,000 geeks gathered for the annual three-day Electronics Entertainment Expo, or E3. It's like being at a ludicrously expensive party with several hundred DJs playing their own choice of music as loud as they can. In the same room. At the same time. For about an hour, it's intoxicating. The sheer scale of the enterprise is seductive: you find yourself hypnotised by video walls bigger than your house. Then you try to play a game - and that's when it hits you. It's impossible to hear anything, there's no context to the game and there's a crowd of sweaty fan-boys watching over your shoulder. This is the worst place in the world actually to play.
The big stories this year were the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft. It's certainly hard not to be impressed by their stunning visual output, but it is harder still to stifle the yawn at what this power is applied to. We are shown just how much more photorealistic war, sport, racing and (more) war could be. Given the high concentration of the world's creative talent at the event, one would expect to find a little more innovation.
Fortunately, you find it from Will Wright - a legend among gamers, the nerd's nerd, undisputed king of the simulation. It is also very difficult to get an audience with him. Wright, who decided to make computer games his profession when he found himself spending most of his time playing them, first found global success in the 1980s with his genre-forming game SimCity. Since then, his company, Maxis, has made a hugely profitable business by prefixing nouns with the word "Sim" and creating games to match: SimEarth, SimFarm, SimSafari, SimGolf, and so on. The Sims - in which the player manipulates families through their (deeply conservative) lives - is one of the biggest games of all time. Always up for a challenge, Wright has now created a game that seems to aspire to be "SimEverything". Called Spore, it attempts to model the history and then the future of life itself.
When I finally penetrate the tightly controlled Wright compound, I find myself in a small, dark room. I am invited to sit down on the brown leather sofa in front of a four-foot plasma screen. The door is closed, killing the noise from outside, and all we hear is the gentle whirr of a computer. Wright sits at his PC, stroking the mouse like a very non-threatening Bond villain - he's an intense but charming host.
Spore begins to happen in front of us. It starts small: a two-dimensional pool of primordial slime, within which primitive organisms are floating around. Wright points out "you" - a cluster of cells that needs to feed and reproduce. This is a liquid Pac-Man. You flounder around the screen, eating what you can and avoiding the organisms that are able to eat you. Eventually you become powerful enough to lay an egg, and you are invited to design the way your species will move, feed, hunt and evolve.
In "GodSims" such as this in the past, there have been huge lists of statistics to shuffle through, making the experience less like play than working through an Excel spreadsheet. Spore dispenses with all of those figures, and instead allows you to edit your life in an easy, entirely visual way. With a drag of the mouse, you can alter your creature's body mass, limbs, bone structure - anything. The level of control is incredible.
Wright has to fast-forward through the game experience. We evolve legs, we leave the swamp, we learn, grow and reproduce, we develop culture, economics and politics, and we come across other creatures and races utterly unlike us. And this is where Wright introduces a new idea. As well as the species that you create, the game contains the life forms that other players have produced. Wright's innovation is to compress the data needed to define any species, in effect creating their genome, from which Spore builds the creature when the game is played. This makes it very easy for players to share their creations, uploading their genome and downloading yours in an endless cycle of creativity and pollination. The players truly own the game - if you can call it a game. The only goals Spore has are those you make for yourself. It is more an exploratory toy, a sandbox for experimentation in genetics, ecosystems, politics and economics. It's on a higher level than most games.
There is a beautiful moment about halfway through Wright's presentation. You have fought and traded with other cities and cultures, and have developed the technology to travel beyond your own planet. Wright flicks his mouse and the game suddenly, smoothly flies away from you - your species, your city shrink into the distance and you see your planet floating in space. You can make out weather systems, cities, travel still taking place on the surface, and you feel the true weight of the game. We fly back in to take a look at other planets, solar systems and, finally, entire galaxies. Spore provokes in you those "What if the whole of life is just a game that some other species is playing with us?" kind of questions that you last asked yourself when you were a drunk teenager.
As in the Charles and Ray Eames film Powers of Ten (which Wright cites as an influence), the zoom back isn't just visual; it's also conceptual - you feel the ideas move beneath your feet. We end the demo above a gently spinning galaxy, staring at stars and listening out for signs of life. Suddenly we are all forced to squint as, without warning, Wright turns on the light.
Iain Simons is directing NTI (Non-Trivial Interaction), a weekend of video-game culture at the National Film Theatre, London SE1 (020 7928 3232) on 9-10 July. Spore will be released in 2006
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