BROOKE GLADSTONE: The world is changing so fast, fueled by computers, its pioneers can barely stay ahead of the curve. But one who has managed to stay out in front is game designer Will Wright. He gave us the ability to design whole new cities in the game "Sim City." Then he gave us the opportunity to design whole new lives in "The Sims." In a recent New Yorker article, John Seabrook writes that the strange and marvelous Mr. Wright, the god of god games, has been working on yet another game for the past six years, one that allows us to design ourselves, to guide our own evolution from a single-celled organism in a drop of water to potentially master of the universe- if we survive. Seabrook explains the game called "Spore."

JOHN SEABROOK: It's the game of life in the most possibly complex way you could design it. I mean, it tries to take these Darwinian notions of how life works and model them with software and algorithms, and then reproduce all that as a game in which you begin as a single-celled organism and then you evolve through this world of Darwinian- well, it's actually interesting, because, as Will likes to say, even though it's sort of modeled on a Darwinian system, it's actually more like intelligent design -

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

JOHN SEABROOK: - because, of course, it was designed [LAUGHS] by this one guy.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you get to function as something of a god, don't you, John? I mean, he allowed you at one point to be some sort of biological editor?

JOHN SEABROOK: Well, you get evolution points. You get DNA points as you go through the game. And then you get to choose certain improved features for your body based on the environment that you've found yourself in. So maybe you realize you're too slow to get away from the predators, so you want some webbed feet, so you get to sort of spend a little bit of DNA on the webbed feet. And eventually you evolve out of the water, and you get up onto land.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How do you earn those points?

JOHN SEABROOK: By surviving, by surviving into another generation or two. And you do that by killing, essentially, at the beginning. But then later on, of course, you acquire the skill to, you know, conciliate and not just kill. Another aspect of the game which is extraordinary is that although it's sort of realistic in a sense that it sort of models real life processes, it doesn't look realistic. It looks kind of like a cartoon. It's very sort of kid-like, in a way.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So he hasn't spent a lot of time on fancy, complex graphics. On the other hand -

JOHN SEABROOK: Right.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: - he has spent a lot of time on the game, and a lot of that is to create, it seems to me, this ever-expanding horizon. I mean, once you've evolved to a point where you have mastery over the world, you get to move out into space and have mastery over the universe.

JOHN SEABROOK: Yeah. You get to evolve beyond where we are now. I mean, that's sort of like the midpoint. But then, beyond where we are now, there's technology that we don't even have yet. And the most powerful of all technologies is a spaceship, because once you have a spaceship, you can do anything. Will refers to it as his Swiss army knife. It's full of tools. It's a totally cool concept, because it's just this thing on your screen, but it will actually give you all these powers. And in order to have it, you'll have to earn it by surviving. And then once you get there, you can explore other worlds. And this is another [LAUGHS] cool thing about the game is that the other worlds are actually content-created by other players that the game will pollinate your copy of the game with, based on how you play.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But it's not a multiplayer game or even a multiplayer world, like Second Life, right? This is your own space. I don't know how that cross-pollination happens.

JOHN SEABROOK: It happens because the central computers back at Maxis, which is Will Wright's company, are sort of monitoring your style of playing the game and comparing it against other people's style of playing the game- assuming you're networked into the Internet- and then it's taking their content and putting it into your content based on what it decides is the best way for your game to be played, or the most fun for you to have.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You wrote that conceptually, "Spore" is radical. What makes it radical?

JOHN SEABROOK: Well, Will's going more toward a realism of sort of dynamic processes and away from a realism of graphics, and the industry is just the opportunity. It's all about realistic graphics. Will's the opposite.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Sort of a philosopher/game designer?

JOHN SEABROOK: Yeah, he's a philosopher. Will has all these very interesting thoughts about how the world works and how our emotions work and how people interact. I mean, Will is an interesting character, because, like a lot of sort of software people, he seems slightly sort of to have to reverse-program whatever social situation he finds himself in.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

JOHN SEABROOK: He's not like intuitive, right? He has to sort of like study you. And you get the sense that -

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You're describing a kind of highly-functioning Asperger Syndrome.

JOHN SEABROOK: Well, that- and I think Oliver Sachs said in The New Yorker that he thought that 80 percent of all Microsoft employees were technically suffering from some form of Asperger Syndrome. I mean, he's sort of trying to figure out how life works and then reproducing it in this model in his games.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I guess that's always the question I want to ask. There's that saying, you know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. You know, what happens in these games stays in these games.

JOHN SEABROOK: [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Or is there any application to real life?

JOHN SEABROOK: That's actually an interesting thought, because that was one of the things I struggled with when I was writing this piece- what happens in games stays in games. It's very difficult to translate the emotions and the whole sort of scenario you become absorbed in when you're playing a game, outside of the game. The terms just change. There's this concept called flow. It's like the ideal moment when you and the game kind of flow into this state in which you're sort of one, and you're making moves and the game is responding, and it's almost anticipating what you're going to do. It is kind of the ultimate man/computer moment, where you just become one.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: John, thank you very much.

JOHN SEABROOK: Yeah, thank you. It was fun.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: John Seabrook's profile of Will Wright, called "Game Master," appears in the November 6th issue of The New Yorker. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD: Up next, if a real journalist interviews a fake person, is he still a real journalist - and blogging the Bible.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from NPR. END SEGMENT B STATION BREAK 2 (MUSIC)