Will Wright talks Spore, comics, and the Russian space program

PowerPoint presentations--does anyone really enjoy them? Be honest. We're not sure if any rational human being would actively seek out the opportunity to sit through a clipart slideshow for an hour. But when the person guiding that presentation is Will Wright, all bets are off. This morning, the man behind Spore guided a group of eager Comic-Con attendees through what might have been the most hilarious yet enlightening PowerPoint presentation we can recall. His topics ranged from Spore to creativity in games to the Dukes of Hazard to Werner von Braun, but it made for a consistently entertaining display throughout.

Wright first started out with a few remarks about the Comic-Con crowd, and how everyone has a little otaku in them. His inner-otaku revolves around 1960s sci-fi, particularly 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sci-fi touches on his two interests of robots and aliens, and how lifeforms unfamiliar with humans and artificial lifeforms designed after humans both give us insight into our own humanity. Whether it's scary sci-fi aliens or just Alf, these inspirations played a big role in the decision to create a game like Spore that allows you to design your own race of aliens and craft the path of their civilization.

Wright then began to talk about the place of videogames in today's society. He discussed how every new medium has been looked down upon as something crass and unable to match true artforms. He recited a line about someone walking into a room and seeing another person staring down at a strange portable device, unable to believe that person was so transfixed that they couldn't notice someone enter the room. Nope, it wasn't a DS--this passage was written in the 1500s about an emerging technology called the book. It seems Wright does believe games can be considered as art, but at this early stage in the life of the medium there's still a generational gap in which people don't really understand what they're about.

And much of that is that developers still don't quite know how to strike the right balance between offering entertainment and offering means for creativity. When games are at their best, they're both things at once. They can offer a story that's deep enough to deconstruct and examine its finer points, while offering gameplay that's generative enough to give players the ability to shape their experiences and give the story their own twist.

As for Spore, Wright talked about the tools behind the game and how they offer users the ability to express themselves in the game. One of the things they used the Spore Creature Creator for was to see what types of creations people would come up with, and how many of them would be made. They aimed at seeing 100,000 creatures by the launch of the game, but it turns out that many were made in the game's first 22 hours. It only took 18 days for the game to match the 1.6 million number, which is the total amount of unique species known to exist on earth. By Wright's tongue-in-cheek calculations, that's an impressive 38% of the speed it took the world to be created in seven days. At this point, the number of Spore creatures made is well over two million.

He showed some of his favorite creatures made in the game, which ranged from robotic creatures to realistic-looking animals to Wall-E and the Companion Cube to one that amazingly looked like a Boeing 747. The team at Maxis never anticipated the Spore community to be able to make these types of creatures, but their ability to do so has given Wright a newfound appreciation for the power of creative tools in games. Another tool they're aiming to empower players with is the MashON comic creator, which is a comic service they've teamed up with to allow players to take screenshots in the game turn them into a webcomic. You take the images you've taken in-game and then use a drag-and-drop interface to adorn them with panels, speech bubbles and the usual bells and whistles of comics. From there you can share them on Facebook, Myspace, or any site that let's you embed Flash. Wright calls this giving players "creative leverage."

But it wasn't all academic, as Wright soon got into the game itself. He guided the audience through a whirlwind tour of the game that brought him from the civilization stage to the space stage. His civilization was a very materialist, economic-minded society, and he decided to take over a religious city. Instead of firing shots, he sent over a propaganda machine that blasted commercial messages at them until the submitted to the demands of materialism. This religious city eventually caved, accepting Wright's offer of an economic merger. Once the city was taken over, Wright had the option to convert the city to capitalism or keep it a religious state. He kept it religious since he didn't have any of those cities, and then used his new city to attempt to convert another one by way of an evangelist hologram parked in front of the city gates. This didn't work quite so well as the first time, so Wright decided to use the "global merger" attack he'd unlocked (massive propaganda bombs sent all over the world) to take over this planet for good.

Wright managed to do just that, and with the planet conquered, he unlocked the space stage and the ability to design a spaceship. Seems the spaceship editor is every bit as simple as the creature creator. You're just dragging parts onto a body and stretching or twisting them as you see fit. Cruising around space, Wright talked about his desire to make this space as intimidating as the real one, so you'll see plenty of black holes, red dwarves and so on. Those black holes can even be used as teleports to other parts of the galaxy, though it's a crapshoot as to where exactly you'll end up.

Wright finished off with an example of some of the planetary destruction you can wreak. He found a planet and started using meteor showers and asteroid attacks on, then began firing heat rays on the surface. If done long enough, this will raise the overall temperature of the planet and create a mini-greenhouse effect where the oceans and rivers begin to overflow, but eventually dry up once things get too drastically out of hand. At that point the planet's core begins to melt and every last bit of vegetation on the surface disappears.

Wright capped off his panel by giving up a lightning fast five-minute presentation on the early years of the American and Russian space race, how Wernher von Braun's two biggest influences early in life were Hitler and Walt Disney, and how early prototypes of the Saturn V rocket were early Nazi designs to blow up New York. Sounds crazy, but it all tied back into Wright's theory that technology is always created to solve a problem (books for keeping rain tables, the Internet for military defense purposes, etc.) and from there it's a matter of overcoming growing pains and obstacles that result from more widespread usage. To Wright, videogames are no different.