Pop!Tech: Will Wright

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Duration: 30 minutes and 42 seconds

Country: United States

Language: English

License: dotSUB Non-Commercial

Genre: Video Podcast

Producer: PopTech

Views: 700 (54 embedded)

Posted by: beth on Jun 12, 2007

The creative force behind The Sims series believes a complex way of understanding the world can be gained through very simple rules. Will Wright unveils his next game, Spore, where players are creators who build—and react to—ever-more complexity within their environments.

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POP!TECH [♪ POP!TECH theme music ♪]
BRINGS TOGETHER
THE WORLD'S LEADING THINKERS
TO SHARE INSPIRATION AND IDEAS
IGNITING CHANGE
AND UNLOCKING HUMAN POTENTIAL
THIS IS PART OF THEIR ONGOING CONVERSATION
POP!TECH
POP!CAST
Presented by Lexus Hybrid Drive
GIVES MORE TO THE DRIVER. TAKES LESS FROM THE WORLD.
I've had about five cups of coffee, so just to warn you.
If we can switch over to the other computer.
As Brian mentioned, life for me was also
[Will Wright POP! TECH 2006]
almost kind of a seminal event, kind of understanding what this is,
because you start with this very simple little system,
and as Brian mentioned, there are very simple rules.
And every generation you run this, it calculates a new pattern.
What we're actually looking at are the cells of life here,
and the rules are so simple, but yet what you're seeing, the patterns here,
are somehow encoded in that rule set.
And every time I run this same pattern, the same starting pattern,
you're going to get the exact same results here.
So if I go back and reload that pattern, and then keep running it, [popping sound]
we'll get the exact same thing again.
We can turn the volume down just a little bit. [audience laughter]
Now if I run this in fast forward,
you see this whole little ecosystem is kind of coming out of that one little starting position.
And every time I load that starting position, we're going to get the exact same pattern.
And the amount of compression that represents is astounding.
And not just compression, but just the generative power
of systems like this, which seem mirrored in reality.
Things like DNA, in chemistry, are able to give rise to this incredible complexity
we see in the world around us.
We can load other rule sets here,
and you get a sense of kind of the diversity.
Just by changing the rules slightly, you get just amazing patterns.
And again, these can be deterministic patterns, or more stochastic random patterns.
The deterministic ones really are more interesting to me.
Some of them could also be used as simulation.
In fact, a lot of the games that we do are based upon very simple rules like this,
giving rise to things that basically mimic reality in some sense.
So you can get very organic patterns; you can get things that
are much more representational.
And people have actually built whole computers inside of these systems.
So you can just get a sense of the complexity that's available within a system like this,
that you can actually build whole computing devices within this.
But at any rate, for me this has been inspirational, not just in terms of the way reality works,
but also a way of looking at the world, that we can convey to kids,
and it's a way of understanding the world.
Rather than top-down theory, it's more bottom up. What can simple rules give rise to?
So I want to go into a Power Point here really quick, and just talk a little bit
about the game business, and where that's been trending,
and give you a sense of where we're going, where I'm going in games.
Basically, we all grew up in this age of industrial mass production,
and we're kind of used to buying manufactured artifacts that professionals designed,
back in some drawingroom or R and D lab somewhere.
We're used to living in standardized areas, housing.
That idea of mass production has kind of followed through the rest of our life,
all the way to media, entertainment.
There's this broadcast model that some guys back in a room make a movie, a book, whatever.
And then throw it up on the wall, and the consumers go eat it up.
But yet as kids, I think we all have design aspirations.
I think it's something we innately kind of want to do, or enjoy doing.
There was this professor that went into a kindergarten class, and asked how many kids could dance.
And all the kids raised their hands.
How many can draw? They all raise their hands. How many can sing?
Again, they all raise their hands.
Then they went into a college class and asked the same three questions.
And, of course, nobody raised their hand.
And he concluded that education was the process of teaching us what we can't do.
But yet we are allowed to convey our design aspirations into safe areas,
like decoration, wardrobe, et cetera.
So we are kind of allowed certain areas to express ourselves.
And some people can carry that further, into the design, manufactured world,
but really it requires fairly elaborate skill sets.
Other people kind of take it more to the fringe.
They want to express themselves, and they kind of break outside the box and do it in other ways.
But when computers came around, one of the really popular things
that people first figured out they could do, was personalize their desktop.
And it was amazing how powerful that concept was for the average person.
Just the fact that my computer looks different than yours.
And now we're starting to see that trend carried out into the manufactured world.
That the artifacts, the tools that we surround ourselves with,
want to become an expression of our identity, on a deeper and deeper level.
And we've been seeing that in games as well.
We give players tools to build things in games, like characters,
and it's amazing how much they will grab these tools and just use them and surprise us,
and do amazing things.
And the amount of stuff they make is incredible, too.
They will just make huge amounts of content.
This is one of the fan sites we have for the Sims,
and they have over a hundred thousand pieces of furniture,
close to a million characters, et cetera, that they've made and anybody can download.
And they enjoy making this as much as they enjoy playing with it.
And it makes it very deep and personal to them.
But if we look at what they're making, and the quality of it,
to be honest, really, most of it's crap. [Quantity vs Quality]
We have this, basically, power law of distribution here.
Some of it's okay, but we have a few people that are actually quite good.
They will take these tools and make really good things. [Crap, Nice Try, Pretty Good, Great]
And so this is kind of one of our challenges.
We want to increase the right side of that curve there.
[Content Development, Code Development] Now looking at the history of game development,
[1984 - Robb] everything, and the next game I did about five years later. [1989 SimCity]
It took about four people. And the next game, about ten. [1994 SimCity 2000]
The next game, [2000 The Sims] next game [2004 The Sims 2].
So this has been the trend in computer games, for team sizes.
If you look at the dark computers on top, that represents the content development.
In other words, the fixed assets like art, animation, sound.
And you can see that that section of the team is increasing faster
than the code section by far, and if we extrapolate this trend out,
by 2050, it's going to take about 2.5 million people to make a game,
and it's going to cost $500 billion.
So clearly we can't just keep going with that trend.
What's also happening is that we've doubled the amount of effort that we put into a game; [Cost, Value per Content]
the value the player's getting isn't double. It's, in fact, diminishing returns.
So we're fighting a losing battle, on that end.
[ Players love making and sharing stuff] So we're seeing that players love making stuff,
[Content is getting very expensive for us to make] and it's costing us a huge amount to make it.
So this is one of the major trends in games, and I think we're starting to see it in other forms of media as well,
things like YouTube.
These are little toy models of reality, some representation of reality,
and as a kid I built a lot of these models.
Very static, plastic models, but now these computer models are dynamic.
They show systems over time.
[SimCity] Something like SimCity is, in fact, remarkable how simple the underlying model is for it.
And it relies heavily on generative systems like life, with pretty graphics on top of it.
But yet these simple little rules come up with very elaborate,
realistic-looking, organic behavior.
But the player, as they play a game, are basically, they're reverse engineering
that model in the computer.
They're building a more and more elaborate model.
They test theories, they try them out, and as they learn to play the game better,
they're building a more and more elaborate model.
So in some sense, we're actually building a model in the player's head.
That's the real model we're building.
The computer game is just a compiler for that model.
It's a way to help that person build a more elaborate model in their head.
Now, what's interesting now, is we're finally getting to the point where we have the ability to start
doing the reverse, that is, to have the computer start building a model of the player.
By observing what the player is doing, get a better and better sense of what the player's good at,
what interests them, what they're drawn toward, what their goal structures are,
what story they're trying to tell, or play out in the game,
and in some sense you can look at a game as kind of a landscape
of challenge, reward, et cetera, goal states, and the players are moving across that landscape.
And, in fact, we're actually mapping these landscapes now.
This is a thousand people playing the Sims, across three metrics
that we measured, every day that they played the Sims, where they moved in that kind of phase space,
or that possibility space of the game.
So we're actually able to measure things like this and get trends.
Where players tend to congregate. Where they tend to diverge.
What goal states they tend to head towards. And we can learn a lot from that.
We can also look at things like when they buy stuff in games,
what things that they tend to buy preferentially.
What sort of social interactions or relationships do they form in online games?
What sort of social dynamics they encourage with other players.
All these things are measurable, and that's interesting,
because games are a formalized kind of environment, that in normal life it's really hard to measure these things,
but in the game this stuff is already formalized, so it's very easy to capture the metrics from that.
[ Player created content (and lots of it)] So we've got lots of player created content coming,
[Model of player (abilities, aesthetics, social)]
and we have the ability for the computer to start building a model of each player individually.
Now the third thing that we're really looking at, is back to this curve here.
How can we give the players more powerful tools?
What we really want to do, is take the right side of this curve,
and kind of stretch it up, and increase that area over there,
so the stuff that the players are making isn't just more stuff, but it's better stuff,
that we can then kind of share with other players, and even give them more value.
So we're not fighting this war of content, where we're having to develop more and more stuff,
but the players themselves are developing it, which they enjoy doing,
they love doing that.
So we've been looking at things like toys, basically.
Various standard, easy-to-use toys, as metaphors.
What are simple systems that players can kind of interact with, that they're comfortable with,
and basically, how do we take those things, and bring them into a process
that replicates what our artists are now spending their time doing?
We have these skilled professionals that are doing modeling and animation,
sound work, et cetera, texturing, and it's turning out that a lot of this stuff
can be automated through generative processes.
And computers are getting powerful enough, and we're kind of learning tricks,
to where we can actually recreate a lot of what our artists are sitting there doing by hand, in data.
So the idea here, is we take the player, we give them a very simple little generative system,
where they're fiddling with a few levers, but the computer can take that,
analyze this simple little system that the player has built,
and actually elaborate on it through generative systems,
build a much more elaborate model, more elaborate textures,
animations, and eventually behavior, and eventually create professional assets
that right now our game developers are having to create,
at great cost and expense.
So in some sense, the computer becomes a creative amplifier for the player.
And this, to me, is what computers are really amazing at, is amplifying people's abilities,
especially in the realm of imagination.
So once we have that, if we have this amplifier for the players, we can take the content that they've made,
bring it up to a server, collect it, and then, if we also have a model
of that player, what they like, what they're trying to do in the game, what their goal states are,
we can preferentially download stuff that other players have made to them.
So in some sense, players are making the game collectively, as they play.
And the game itself is individualizing each game to each individual player.
So in some sense—I'm going to show you a demo of a game we're working on now called Spore,
and the idea of the game is that players are collectively building this world together as they play.
Playing the game is the process of kind of building this world.
In some sense, in this game, I don't want the player to be Luke Skywalker,
I want them to be—or Frodo Baggins—I want them to be George Lucas,
or JRR Tolkien. I want them to feel like world creators, not just like a protagonist,
kind of moving around in a pre-scripted story.
Now, this game was kind of roughly inspired by a couple of things.
The Powers of Ten idea by Charles and Ray Eames, [The Films of Charles and Ray Eames]
which is showing the universe at all these different scales,
also by the SETI Project. [SETI — Drake's equation]
Originally, I kind of got drawn to this because I was very fascinated with the question
of aliens and extraterrestrials, and looking at the terms in the SETI— in Drake's equation,
these are things like the number of stars, how many of those might have planets,
how many of those might have life, intelligence, et cetera—
they map to all the different scales that the Powers of Ten idea did.
So I found it very interesting that this question of life in the universe covers all these different scales.
And so, we end up with a very interesting map, in some sense,
a conceptual map here, not just of scale and space, but of time and life.
So in some sense we're kind of looking from the very small to the very large,
in scope, and from the very distant past to the distant future.
And that's kind of the gist of this game I'm working on right now, is that you start down here,
as a very simple single cell thing, and eventually work your way up [Today the tide pool. Tomorrow - the universe!!]
to the other end of this graph.
And I'm going to boot this up; this takes a second.
Let's try this one here. So we're finding that players, when they make things in these games,
that it is so much more meaningful to them, and there's this quality-level discrepency,
where our professionals can make very professional-looking characters,
we can give the players tools, and they can make a character that's pretty good looking,
but the fact that they made it, that it's uniquely theirs, is very meaningful to them,
and it drives the empathy for the player.
And it's amazing how much these games are also becoming, not just a form of play,
or entertainment, but also a tool of self-expression.
Because we see people taking games like the Sims,
and one of the things they can do with it, is they can kind of tell a story with the game,
and then share it with other players.
And they're starting to tell much more meaningful stories,
so in some sense it's becoming like a musical instrument for a lot of players,
as they get good at playing this thing, they then want to share, and use it for creative self-expression.
Now, this game Spore occurs, as I have mentioned, on these different scales.
We actually have kind of subgames.
You actually start at a cellular level, work your way up through evolution--
you design your own creature--eventually, if it becomes intelligent,
you go to kind of a tribal phase, and you start dealing with the sociology of the creatures,
and then eventually, you start building cities, an entire civilization,
and then eventually you go out into space. I'm just going to show you a little bit of the game to give you a sense of it.
I'm going to start with one of the editors.
Now the core of this game is this set of very powerful editors that we've built,
where anybody can take the computer, and in a few clicks, create something amazing.
So we have this torso here, there's a little backbone,
it's very physical, very tactile.
I can use the mouse wheel to kind of expand and contract it, sculpt it very much like clay.
Again, every bit of this wants to have some existing metaphor.
So we want players to kind of touch this and feel like, oh, this is like clay.
I kind of understand this. Or, this is like a very simple little backbone.
Now, we've also got pallets of parts over here.
So we have things like limbs I can drag out,
these are feet.
Each one of these parts as we drag them on, has meaning,
and our little creature starts coming to life.
They're also morphable, so I can stretch them, scale them with a mouse, whatever.
And you'll see sliders over on the side, so whatever I design in this,
the computer basically has to bring to life,
and calculate how the thing would behave.
So now it's starting to talk a little bit.
We'll get a mouth, shorten it a little bit.
And this is the sense pallet, where we have things like eyes.
We have a handle, so we can adjust them.
So, typically, to create a character like this in a computer game
would take a computer game professional several days, or maybe a few weeks to create.
But we've basically gotten it down to a couple minutes,
for an average game player to create this and bring it to life.
So here in about 20 mouse clicks, I've created a character.
Now, that's the modeling side of it.
If we go to the texturing step here--again, this is generative,
so basically I pick a color here, and then each one of these represents a different texture script.
It'll actually analyze things like where the backbone is, where the shadowing should be,
the belly, and each one can apply different patterns to this creature automatically,
and when I'm ready, I can actually see how it would animate.
So this button up here will now bring the creature to life.
Now at this point, the computer analyzes the way this thing is built,
and figures out how would it move and behave in the world.
[audience laughter]
Or what would it sound like?
[creature screeches]
[chuckling in audience]
Fight, play.
[Noises from creature]
And show emotional reaction.
So anything the player can create in this editor,
and they can create a very wide variety of things,
the computer will figure out, basically, how it should come to life and behave.
Also it'll calculate kind of what the babies would look like.
[Audience laughter]
[creature noises]
So at any rate--so what you do with this creature is, this becomes your game object as you play Spore.
Now, what you're actually going to be doing with this creature,
is you're going to be playing through its entire evolution,
from single cell up to intelligence.
I'm going to just pop into the evolution side of the game just for a second,
to give you a sense of what that looks like. But now as you're playing the game—
Now I talked about how what we want to do is make the other players' content better.
Now, one of the reasons we want to do that is,
we want to be able to redistribute that content.
So this is a typical world that you would encounter in this game,
and all these creatures are actually coming from other players
automatically, as you play.
So what we do is we harvest the best creatures that players create in that editor,
bring them up to our server, and then redistribute them to the other players automatically.
And that way every time you play the game,
You're dealing with a different set of creatures, different challenges.
And you never encounter the same worlds twice.
So this is the creature that I'm playing right now.
I'm actually driving it around this little world,
and what he needs to do is basically kind of survive, and eat,
look for things that he might— he's a carnivore.
That guy's kind of mean, so we don't want to go there.
[audience laughter]
We'll head over this way.
Now, here's some little guys, so this is basically the evolution game,
and now I can kind of fight these little guys, because I'm bigger than they are.
On the other hand, they're very social, so they're kind of sticking up for each other.
So even though they're small, they're not easy.
So I'm going to run away.
I'm too lazy to fight those guys.
I'm going to look for an easier meal.
Maybe over here. Wait, there's another little guy.
That doesn't look good.
[Audience laughter]
So life is hard, but—
Now, these are herbivores.
So depending on what you've designed in the game, you might have a carnivore,
herbivore, omnivore.
These guys, I might be able to get their egg really quick.
They won't eat me, but they are going to try to defend their nest.
They're coming after me.
Oh! I have to cheat. Okay.
I'm going to erase— So I'm cheating.
[audience laughter]
Yeah, okay. I cheat.
But there's also a whole social game that you can play here.
And these are my own species, these creatures over here.
One of the things that I can do is choose to become more social,
I can interact with primitive vocalizations.
Now, this one with the hearts is ready to mate.
So I can actually click on this one.
And what you're doing is you're actually playing through every generation of this creature.
[Audience laughter]
Now the animations and everything are procedural,
which means that they're going to be different for every creature,
so every creature's going to mate differently; it's going to eat, fight, move differently,
and, again, this is how we take the players' creativity and amplify it,
to a tremendous degree, which drives their empathy,
and gets them really interested and connected to this thing.
So, we've just laid our eggs here.
Now we'll actually earn points that we actually go back into the editor and spend
at the end of the generation, but we have to defend our eggs until they hatch,
so we have like scavengers and predators.
Again, it's a dog-eat-dog world out here.
Okay, now they're ready to hatch.
So when I click this I actually go back into the editor, and I have a certain number of points
that I can spend on my creature to improve it.
So in this case I might decide I want it to be a little faster, so I'll put some better feet on it,
down here, and maybe give it another set of arms, because that might be useful.
There we go.
And then I can repaint it as well.
So, basically, I will play through maybe 10, 20 generations of evolution for my creature,
and eventually bring it to intelligence, and I can choose to make a very peaceful herbivore,
and maybe go for a more social, herd-like existence.
Now as I'm born, I'm actually born as a baby, so I'm actually this little baby here,
and I can socialize with the other—my siblings, here,
and as we socialize more and more, we start bonding together and act more as a herd,
and they'll start mimicking what I do.
So now as I move around after socializing with these guys for a little bit—
Yeah. Now they'll start following me around and we can go bother our neighbors over here, the herbivores.
Oh, that's the carnivore that tried to eat us.
So we can go tease our friends here.
[Creatures howling]
But now we have to run away, or else they're going to eat us again.
Oop, they got one of us.
Now, from this point of the game, eventually you'll achieve intelligence.
Now you're controlling a whole group, tribal dynamics, basically investing in their tools,
what kind of path you want them to take.
They can be hunters, gatherers.
They start interacting with other tribes, and then we start dealing with relationships
and the sociology of that.
Eventually they start— The player can create their own huts, tools, et cetera,
eventually planets.
As we get to the city phase, they are actually creating not just the city,
but the individual buildings as well.
We have editors for each of these things.
Once you've learn one editor, you know how they all work.
Eventually, they're creating vehicles at the civilization phase.
I'm going to skip ahead here really quick, just to show you what it looks like later in the game.
So this is actually the same planet we were on before,
much later in their evolution; they're now an intelligent society.
Just to give you a sense of what it looks like later.
And, again, the entire world here was designed by the player,
and will then be visitable by other players.
So this is a city that was built; all these buildings were built in the editor.
These are the same guys, evolved to intelligence.
We can actually pull back a little bit.
This is another city, a much more modern city.
At this point in the game, they're actually ready to enter the very last phase,
which is the space game.
So I can actually have them enter the space age here.
I pick a UFO for them, and now they're going to actually launch
their first spaceship, which brings you to the last part of the game.
Now up to this point the player has been working on one world,
and the player owns that world, really.
They own the evolution of that species, the evolution of the towns,
the design of the civilization.
At the civilization phase you can kind of choose your civilization,
become more militaristic, or economically oriented, or culturally oriented.
So here's our UFO.
They're having a little celebration, launching it.
Now I'm actually flying this thing around,
and in some sense this is like a Swiss army knife.
It's just a collection of tools that you can upgrade
to higher and higher levels in the game.
So we can look at the whole world that we've been playing on up to this point,
Now one of the things that we might want to do at this point,
is start collecting samples that we can bring, to actually bootstrap other worlds,
because we're actually simulating a whole ecosystem here on this planet,
so I can go to my cargo bay, open the abduction beam,
and start abducting creatures into my UFO here.
[audience laughter]
And now they are basically in my cargo hold
that I can use for seeding other systems.
We've also got it so that you can throw things with this really nicely.
So we've managed to get things into orbit—
[audience reaction]
For the first time we can actually pull back
and see the entire planet that we've been playing on up to this point.
So the entire game has been played on the surface of this planet here,
and, again, we're building this on top of very highly leveraged,
very generative systems.
So this entire planet with all of its species, buildings, and everything,
compresses down to about 80k of data.
Which means that it's amazingly portable because, like life,
we are relying on extremely simple but powerful routines to generate all the detail you see here.
One of the creatures on this world, one species, compresses down to about 3k.
So we can basically take these things, and make them very portable.
Now we can pull back from this planet, out to our solar system,
and here we see other planets around us here.
We can fly over to these worlds; some of them have primitive life;
some are lifeless where we actually will go in and play a terra-forming game,
and establish the right kind of temperature, get water on the planet, et cetera.
Now here's a planet that has primitive life, but no intelligence.
And you can see this is a somewhat the more imaginative world.
Now with the UFO, we also have terra-forming tools,
so, in fact the players can sculpt their own entire planets,
very much like a ball of clay, with very imaginative tools.
How many of you have ever seen an old program called Kid Picks?
And it was a really cool paint program for kids.
And that was kind of our model for what the planetary editor was,
is we wanted these really cool creative tools that felt like kind of out of control,
but really fun.
And so we have things like volcanos, and comets,
But as we come down--so one of the things we want to do is kind of bootstrap
a whole ecosystem on the surface of this planet.
Now this does have some indigenous life,
so we can drop down that species that we had abducted earlier from our cargo hold.
[spaceship sounds]
There he goes.
And that doesn't look good. Okay, so—
[audience laughter]
Now, we might decide we want to scan these guys.
We have a scanning tool, that as we scan the creatures in this,
they get entered into an encyclopedia that we have here.
We have this thing that we call Sporepedia, which really keeps a record,
and the format is that of trading cards.
So everything in the game gets a trading card associated with it.
This is our home star; if I click on that, it shows the planets around it.
This is the planet that we're currently visiting.
And these are the species that I've encountered.
This is the thing that just ate my creature.
Now you'll notice that it actually has a creator name.
So it actually keeps track of which other player out there made this creature.
And I can bookmark this person, and have her stuff brought to my machine.
So I can bookmark my friends, and stuff that they make will automatically come into my world.
So this is our online database in the game, but it also tracks every piece of content.
Again, all this content—the worlds, the creatures, buildings, and everything—
are coming from other players.
So at some point what you're doing, is you're terra-forming these worlds,
you're building colonies, you're expanding, and you're doing that to upgrade your UFO.
and as you upgrade your UFO, you get more terra-forming tools,
but also you get to go further and further distances.
So now we're pulling back from our home star, out to interstellar space.
So this is a region of stars around our home star.
There are several thousand stars here that we can fly to and interact with.
And each one of these worlds will be one that was made by another player.
And it's being played asychronously.
It's pulling down a copy to my machine, is what's actually happening.
So it doesn't really matter what I do to their planet,
but some of these planets are going to be uninhabited.
And I can just go explore.
This one, for instance, is—I can tell by the scan—uninhabited.
And this is a more realistic-looking planet.
The last one we visited was more imaginative.
We want this blend of imaginative to realistic.
This is very similar to what the early earth was like about 4 billion years ago.
A very hot, lava-like world.
This is one that I could choose to try and terra-form,
but it would be very challenging, but not impossible.
Or I might just use it as a strategic outpost.
There are going to be a lot of reasons why you'd want to strategically explore worlds like this, anyway.
Occasionally, you might come across something like this,
alien artifacts or whatever that I can install on my UFO.
So we want to encourage an exploration game.
But, even though this is a harsh world, I might drop down a colony,
for strategic reasons; so I'll build a little colony here.
[spaceship sounds]
Now there are other planets in this.
Now, one of the other planets in this solar system, I believe, yeah, this one,
actually has an intelligent race on it.
And so this is one that another player would have designed.
And again, the computer is now playing this.
This is actually a moon around this gas giant here.
As a minor aside, speaking to the power of generative systems,
we're actually running a turbulence simulation on that gas giant.
You might notice that the surface of it isn't static.
And this is something that used to take a supercomputer hours to calculate,
and now, using very simple generative techniques,
we're doing this with a simple trick on the graphics card,
at almost no cost, to generate fairly elaborate fluid simulation on the gas giant.
But in this case, we're dealing with intelligent civilization on this planet,
that was created by some other player and is now being controlled by the computer.
Now depending on how the player played that,
they were basically training the computer how these people should behave.
So this is a first-contact scenario.
These people have never met us, and we're coming into their civilization for the first time.
We might try impressing them with maybe some fireworks from our UFO.
[explosion, shouting]
Okay, they kind of like that.
[more explosions, cheering]
Now, over time we can develop different relationships with these guys.
We might develop into an economic trading relationship.
Or it might be more of a cultural relationship, or even an alliance--a strategic alliance.
In this case they've decided to start worshiping us as gods,
[audience laughter]
so we might try abducting them into our UFO,
but they didn't like that, so—
[laughter from audience]
now I can sit here and basically fight them, if I wanted to,
or I could just run away, which I think I'm going to do right now.
I don't want to trigger an interstellar war.
But I think they were upset.
[Creature noises] Oh, yeah, they're upset.
I'll try apologizing.
So at any rate, we have basically this little toy universe, is what it is,
and in fact, we're trying to put in a lot of the objects that you'd find in the Hubble Space Telescope,
things like planetary nebula, emission nebula, black holes will all be visible here.
This region that you're looking at is several hundred stars, many of which are computer generated,
many of which are player created.
But, in fact, this is actually a very small region of the whole world,
the whole galaxy that you're dealing with.
We're in fact dealing with a galaxy of millions of individual worlds,
each one of which is unique,
because of the fact that the players a collectively building it as they play.
So, at any rate, that's the idea behind Spore, and that's the demo,
and I'm going to stop talking right now.
Thanks. [applause]
[applause]
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