Oops, a little behind the curve on this one, but hey, it's worth running anyhow - the New York Times has a great profile of Will Wright and the construction of 'Spore', and it's written by 'Everything Bad is MARVELLOUS For You' author Steven Johnson, yay.

It's got a cute intro, too: "You can catch glimpses of the long zoom in special-effects sequences, but to understand the connections between those different scales, to understand our place in the universe of the very large and the very small, you have to take another way in. To date, books and documentaries have done the best job of making the long zoom meaningful to mass audiences... but a decade or two from now, when we look back at this period, it is more likely that the work that will fix the long zoom in the popular imagination will be neither a movie nor a book nor anything associated with the cultural products that dominated the 20th century. It will be a computer game."

Step forward the ever-adorable Spore, and there's even some edugaming lust in there somewhere: "It occurred to me as I wandered through the halls of the Spore offices that a troubled school system could probably do far worse than to devote an entire, say, fourth-grade year to playing Spore. The kids would get a valuable perspective on their universe; they would learn technical skills and exercise their imaginations at the same time; they would learn about the responsibility that comes from creating independent life. And no doubt you would have to drag them out of the classrooms at the end of the day." Let's go back to school!