Sim City & Creation

"Instead of making fixed definitive things that we put out into the world, I think we’ve both decided that it’s much more interesting to make things that even we can’t predict."

- Brian Eno, on game designer Will Wright (Sim City, the Sims), from "The Long Zoom," New York Times, October 8 2006

Reading about Will Wright's progress on his new game Spore, I never expected to find a "thin" place. But the above quote certainly was.

Wright works in a genre called "god games," open-ended experiences in which players supervise "a bustling and multifaceted system, managing resources, juggling different objectives." The nomenclature is no accident; "god games" allow the player to assume the role of an intervening God, manipulating the game-universe, creating and destroying, rewarding and smiting. Spore's gamer is quite like the God of "intelligent design."

I don't find our Holy One to be that invasive, or capricious, or contemptous of our freedom. But it still seems remarkable to me that Wright and Eno, at the bleeding edges of creativity and art, are interested in giving up control; endowing their work with unpredictability and freedom, seeking out surprise and novelty from their creations. In a very real way, they are creating an Other - and with the Other, a relationship - that they no longer control, but are a partner in. Now that sounds like the One I know.

"As Wright’s appearance with Eno suggests, the game perhaps deserves to be seen as a work of art first and foremost, a way of seeing and making sense of the world. If it succeeds, it may be in part because of the way its long-zoom perspective resonates with this particular moment in time."

"Everybody has a different take on it: for some people, it has a religious theme; for others, it’s awe at nature and science. But everybody seems to understand that it’s a valuable perspective, and it’s a perspective that they like to have. In a way, what I’m trying to do is connect the almost inconceivable universal scale to the deeply personal, because what you do in the game is deeply personal." - Will Wright

“'One of the things that’s obviously been happening for the past 100 or 200 years,' Eno told me, 'is that the range of our experience has greatly expanded: we can see much smaller things and much bigger things than we ever could before.' But we can also start thinking about much longer futures and much deeper pasts as well. That really makes a big difference to us as humans, because on the one hand it makes us realize that we’re very powerful in that we’re able to comprehend and see all of this universe. But it also makes us seem so much less significant. We’re a tiny blip on a tiny radar screen. I think this is a feeling that people are trying to come to terms with, the feeling of where do we fit in all of this." - Will Wright

I feel consonant with Wright, that coming to grips with humanity's place in the universe is currently (and always?) a magnificent challenge. Notwithstanding those who cling to a capricious and intervening God/gods, we face a 20-billion-year-old universe, with perhaps 80 or 100 billion to go, with Earth as the only island of life and intelligence we know. Why? - does intelligence destroy itself? Is it that rare? Are we just the first? I certainly feel powerful and insignificant, usually at once.

We learn more every day that Creation is not what we once thought. That God's ways in the universe are not what we imagined them to be. So now what?

Or, more pointedly, will we choose to love as God loves anyway?

-h