The latest issue of the Escapist deals with god games, most of which are quite grand in scale. John Carr, however, looks at the micro god game — in this case, SimAnt, Will Wright's first foray into games decidedly small in scale — and declares its inspiration (childhood games of playing god with hapless insect) the 'original god game.' SimAnt is certainly one of the weirder little titles in Wright's repertoire, but certainly an important title when looking at later games:

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An article in Science magazine discussing why Spore flunks various kinds of science after close scrutiny by a variety of scientists reminds me of history buffs that get hysterical when a movie is historically inaccurate. While a couple of them had a few nice things to say, Spore in general got poor marks in organismic and evolutionary biology, squeaked by with barely sufficient grades in cultural anthropology, physics, and astrobiology, and was reasonably highly rated in sociology and galaxy structuring. But they're not just trying to grouse, really:

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SCE President Kaz Hirai recently addressed the importance of games on the PS3. This must have been great news to Spore creator Will Wright. I recently spoke to Wright at an event held in Midtown Manhattan. Of the handful of questions I asked, I wanted to know what he thought of LittleBigPlanet, since he's interested in user-created content and all. His answer was a bit surprising.

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Will Wright attended the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards ceremony at the Hearst Tower in New York City last night where he saw Spore pick up an award for Setting Benchmarks in Design, Creativity and Engineering. I caught up with him afterward for a bit to find out his take on the whole DRM situation. EA's John Riccitiello said a few days prior that he isn't a fan of DRM, but something had to be done to stop those pirates. I asked Wright how involved he was in the decision process to include DRM for Spore or if it was mostly EA's doing.

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Back in February 1Up took a broad look at who the gaming industry, on the whole, was giving to in U.S. political campaigns. Develop Magazine revisited the subject this weekend, going through Federal Election Commission records to find the donation history of games industry heavy hitters and see who's backing whom in the U.S. presidential smackdown. Interestingly, Will Wright's given $3,000 to John McCain, after crapping out with a $2,350 bet on Rudy Giuliani in the primaries.

On the other side, Take Two Chairman Strauss Zelnick, has gone hard for the Democrats -- no surprise there, considering how his games are such pariahs in the culture war demagoguery of the right. Zelnick's given $2,000 to Barack Obama, and hedged his bets in the primary with $2,500 for John Edwards in the primary, and a grand each for Joe Biden and Bill Richardson. No Hillary? Dis! Yeah, wonder why. Anyway, there are more names and numbers on the jump.

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Spore's about evolution? What are you thinking? It's not evolution at all! Well, that's what Tim Dean over at Trembling Hand theorises:

When you're playing Spore, and you periodically pause to 'evolve' your organism, you're not emulating evolution. But you are nicely emulating the way Intelligent Design works ... Every time you meddle, it's the hand of, um, whatever it is the ID crew think is running the show (just between you and me, I think they might actually think it's God, but it could equally be a player of MetaSpore in another universe) that is shaping the direction of the organism. Not evolution.

The man does have a point. I'm not sure it's what Will Wright intended, but that is how the game plays out, in a nutshell.

Spore: The Intelligent Design Simulator [Trembling Hand]

Well, maybe we won't have to change the filters on our office Bullshit-o-meter after all. As we kinda-sorta-maybe suspected, the cleverly named Anti-Spore website Antispore.com was not all that it seemed.

Rather than a blistering attack on Spore's neo-Darwinist pro-evolution agenda and pollution of our children's precious bodily fluids — a post to the site today revealed it was in fact an incredibly elaborate Rickroll.

In a post entitled "Understand my beliefs please" the creator of the site laid out a scripture-heavy exegesis culminating in the following nugget of pure genius.

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Game industry legend Will Wright is no stranger to creating life, but Spore marks his first attempt to create it from the ground up. One of the most highly anticipated PC games of the past decade, Spore's ambitions don't stop at expanding what a life simulation can be. The game also seeks to expand the PC gamer audience beyond the hardcore, perhaps acting as a stepping stone for the ever-growing numbers of casual PC players. With a scope this large and ambitions this great, you just know the game critics are paying extra-close attention. Let's see what they saw when the put Spore under their critical microscope.

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Will Wright is such a deep thinker that he doesn't have favourite games, he has favourite franchises. MSNBC recently spoke with the man behind Spore and all things Sims to get his fave five for gaming.

Here's the run down:

Civilization series
Grand Theft Auto series
Battlefield series
Advance Wars on the DS
Flight Simulator series

Wright ownership of a DS confirmed. Now hit up the link for why Wright likes these games.

Will Wright Picks His Top Five Games [MSNBC, thanks Pugnate]

Reader Denis F. sent us a heads up about an interesting chat between Will Wright and Jill Tarter, noted astrobiologist and director of SETI whose research helped inspire Spore. As you can probably guess, the discussion is pretty abstract at times and goes from gaming to the value of science to where we'll be in 10,000 years. It's pretty interesting, and there's a transcript of the interview:

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