schmoozy space Mark Szpakowski's szpace blog

My 13 year old son said, "Dad, I've dropped something into your public folder". What was there was a Google Video of Will Wright, developer of The Sims, at the 2005 Game Developer's Conference, showing an early version of his next game, Spore (there seems to be a more complete movie as well). This is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen: he shows how a player can develop and evolve life forms, from simple multi-cellular to fish-like to climbing on land to developing societies and civilizations and planets - Powers of 10, next generation (he acknowledges the inspiration of that short movie). Worlds created by other people can be shared. This is all done by dragging together, assembling, and shaping procedurally active map and life-form components. I couldn't help thinking about the implications for virtual societies, for modelling, for scenario-planning, for intersecting real and virtual worlds, for language.

Complementing this is multi-touch display technology, screens sensitive to multiple simultaneous gestures by fingers, hands, elbows for that matter.

This is what we need for a Planetary Ecologists Collaborative Situation Room, where habitat partners can watch over and care for the earth, and for specific scenarios, threats, and opportunities.