Last week one of my coworkers shared a great video of Will Wright
demonstrating "Spore" for the Long Now Foundation (you can view it
at http://fora.tv/2006/06/26/Will_Wright_and_Brian_Eno). It's an
amazingly ambitious game, and showcases the potential for games to
change the way you look at the world.

As software, I think it's interesting how they've distributed the
burden of complexity. On the one hand, the developers have created
relatively simple algorithms that produce very complex, multivariate
outputs. The game allows players to create their own creatures that
will live in the Spore universe, body part by body part. You can
download the tool at http://www.spore.com/trial.

The interesting thing is that the little critters are imbued with
this sort of mystical mathematical soul. Wherever you position legs
on a creature's body, the computer figures out how that would affect
its gait, balance, and stride. When you map a stripes onto its skin,
it crunches a few formulas to figure out how they should flow from
body part to body part. Simple algorithms are processed by the
player's computer to produce very complex results.

On the other hand, the rich diversity of life in the game is a
product of the collective efforts of the many people who will be
playing it. Rather than limiting themselves to a handful of
creatures they prepackage with the game, they leave it open to the
masses of players to build a complex game experience for each other.

So in a way, Maxis is working in two fundamental raw materials: the
computational power of the players' computers, and the limitless
capacity of human imagination. The human investment is amplified by
the algorithms, and the result is something much more complex than
any person or software developer could ever create on their own.