'Spore' Releases the Pixar in You

Wired examines a side-effect of the long-awaited life-creation game Spore:

Role-playing games have trained millions of gamers in highly
complex resource and inventory control. Basically, they’ve made
screwing around with databases fun. Or think about conducting a big raid in World of Warcraft,
where you need to deploy virtual team-management skills and diplomacy
worthy of the Cuban missile crisis. Previously, this was the concern of
only very high-level employees at multinational corporations — but now
13-year-old kids are doing it.

Wright is the undisputed reigning master of creating games that contain subterfuge training. Ever wonder how The Sims became the world’s top-selling game of all time? It’s not because people actually play it. Most longtime Sims fans quickly tire of creating families.

No, what hard-core fans love is The Sims‘ elegant
“house-design” engine — which they use to painstakingly craft
sprawling, monster homes, customized to the level of individual tile
patterns they hand-draw in cracked versions of Photoshop. The Sims isn’t a game: It’s the world’s most popular architectural CAD package.

Now Spore is going to do the same thing to the world of 3-D characters and the sort of work regularly produced by Pixar.