Will Wright's Quest to Compress Time and Amplify Imagination

Will Wright, toy maker: "Spore, he says, will be 'a philosophic toy,' and like any toy, it will be 'an amplifier for the player’s imagination.' By playing through the life cycle of a player-created species, Wright hopes to change the way the player experiences time. 'It’s almost like the way a telescope or microscope recalibrates our eyesight,' he says. In the same way, a computer simulation can “recalibrate our instincts,' by illuminating the long-term effects of actions that take decades or even millions of years to play out. 'We can take a lot of long-term dynamics and press them into short-term experiences.'" /wired.com/