TECHNOLOGY AND THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT

Perhaps the most potent example is Spore, due to be released in a few days by Electronic Arts. I haven't played it yet, but I have watched others doing so on YouTube (of course!). What I've seen is amazing. Will Wright, who made the most successful PC game ever, Sims, created Spore.

In its second iteration, Sims allowed players to see the genetic evolution of the "people" who populate the game. Players create them, house them, watch them interact and, yes, mate. Spore goes Sims one further, allowing players to create new life forms and then evolve them. In other words, to play God, as the not so subtle trailer from EA implies.

Here's how the company puts it:

With Spore you can nurture your creature through five stages of evolution: Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization, and Space. Or if you prefer, spend as much time as you like making creatures, vehicles, buildings and spaceships with Spore's unique Creator tools.

CREATE Your Universe from Microscopic to Macrocosmic - From tide pool amoebas to thriving civilizations to intergalactic starships, everything is in your hands.

EVOLVE Your Creature through Five Stages - It's survival of the funnest as your choices reverberate through generations and ultimately decide the fate of your civilization.

EXPLORE your world and beyond - Will you rule, or will your beloved planet be blasted to smithereens by a superior alien race?

SHARE with the World - Everything you make is shared with other players and vice versa, providing tons of cool creatures to meet and new places to visit.

While Spore is a single player game, your creations and other players' creations are automatically shared between your galaxy and theirs, providing a limitless number of worlds to explore and play within.

What struck me about Spore how its development parallels the growth of a government game, this one evolving under the benevolent sun of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Ironically, it's called Real World. I've already written about it, and I will be looking at it again, but what strikes me now is its similar focus on user authoring.

The idea behind Real World is to cut the time it takes to create a gaming software-based mission rehearsal tool, or simulation, down to nearly nothing.

Real World will not really be a game, but instead, a game creation platform designed to allow soldiers in the field to use satellite imagery, UAV images, photographs, blueprints or even a hand-scrawled picture or a map scraped in the sand with a stick to create an immersive, online location in which to practice an upcoming mission, plan a strategy, test tactics or envision enemy or civilian behavior. The hallmark of the platform is that it is designed to be almost completely user authorable.

It's clearly unrealistic to expect deployed troops to create on the fly in-game versions of all the equipment, weaponry and other items they use. So unlike in Spore, character and world creation will be in the hands of Real World's creators, the folks at Total Immersion Software in Alameda, Calif. and/or other companies.

And the physics of the game--the ways various different types of ammunition and ordnance behave when they hit concrete versus wood versus a human being, for example, also will be built in. But the details of an ambush just hours after it happened? The unit that suffered the casualties will put those in and then use the resulting "game" to replay and learn in order to avoid the next attack. They'll also be able to send the new scenario as a training tool back to the units that will replace theirs.

In both Spore and Real World, "players" become godlike. In the former they create life-forms and "evolve" them to enhance their survivability. In the latter, they create scenarios and environments in which human life-forms can practice in order to survive.