Is the world we live in the ultimate software game managed by the ultimate Software Engineer? Evolution and Creationism are the ultimate universal big questions out there.
Even at the recent UK Festival of Science, now in it’s 175th year, Professor Michal Reiss, Director of Education at the Royal Society, said that he wanted the biblical readings of creationism to be taught alongside Evolution and biology in schools. In a broader sense the nomination of Sarah Palin and her sympathetic leanings to Creationism brings cosmic ancestry to the forefront with the timely spawning of Spore!
The Creator of SimCity and The Sims game series, Will Wright has turned his attention to Panspermia, the theory “that microbes transmit life to habitable bodies in space”. Think of the famous Johnny Appleseed story and you have it! Spore shows a comet crashing to earth bringing organic material from space. The evolution of this hypothesis into a gaming genre presents a new medium to engage the enlightened generation. Challenging established theories without upsetting religious and evolutionary dogma is going to be fun.
The genius of Wright as a writer of software is his ability to put creative narrative in the hands of his players. Since the makers of Spore released their Creature Creator programme to generate hype before the game’s scheduled release at the beginning of September 2008, geeky gamers have created a new art form already, Spornography or Sporn which is sweeping the internet.
What it shows, good or bad, is that the creative arts have yet to deliver more…
