(no subject)

If you liked the Spore video I posted earlier, you can see the rest of Will Wright's presentation, where he explains the point of the demo to developers: design based on procedures rather than data.  The only additional content I've seen so far was the beginning, where he says the CD-ROM led to the death of the algorithm.

Emergent games appeal to me.  Chess is based on simple rules, but a complex story emerges from each game.  The same is true of go, which some describe as having only two or three rules.  That's why I also like rules-like RPG systems like Risus, where you can draw up a character sheet in two minutes, and all the character sheet does is tell you how many dice to roll whenever you want to do something, and the GM decides how difficult it is.  Everything else is free-form role playing.  Compare that against traditional d20 games, where you have books and books of data, and you have to look everything up whenever something unusual happens.  The right GM can boil down the rules and fudge things to keep the game moving along, but a Playstation generally can't do anything but enforce a ruleset.  Which is why there's a few d20-based video games but no Risus-based ones, and why computers can't compete against go masters, and why computers win at chess by memorizing every endgame that contains less than eight pieces.

Anyway, watch.  And yes, it's not just from last year; it's from a year ago -- March 11, 2005, to be exact.  But I haven't been able to locate a release date for the game.  I looked on amazon.com, and it returned "Spore by Commodore 64", which I don't think is it.

(no subject)

So far, I've been educated on the following ways EA could ruin Spore:

1. Withhold part of the gameplay so they can sell it as an expansion pack.
2. Sue anyone who airs the video from GDC 2005 -- the unedited version indicated an air of ubersecrecy at the end.
3. Get sued by Paramount. I couldn't tell whether they ripped the original Star Trek fight score or composed a sound-alike. It probably doesn't help that Wright said his stock races would be based on the Klingons and Borg, rather than euphemizing them into "the warrior race archetype" and "the technological singularity archetype".
4. Get sued by the Care Bears. Though I like how he said that the cloud-filled "Caring Kingdom" implied that the Earth was the "not-giving-a-shit kingdom".