Sitting around playing virtual God might not sound like the most constructive pastime, but The Sims actually allows creativity to flourish, its creator Will Wright tells Kate Holmquist.
I've been abducted by an alien, and I may be pregnant!" The shout from the bedroom is nothing to be alarmed about. "Mom! I have to feed from the udder of a carnivorous cowplant! Mom! I'm a zombie!"
They're playing The Sims, a game whose surprisingly creative virtual world is so absorbing that, unless you want them playing it eight hours a day, you have to tear your children, kicking and screaming, from the computer. Meeting Will Wright, the game's creator, is a chance to get the measure of the man who has colonised your children's minds.
He's not a twentysomething mad genius, as you might expect him to be, but a gangling 46-year-old absent-minded-professor type who betrays none of his wealth in the way he dresses. And the subject that really turns him on, rather surprisingly, is education. This may be partly because, when we start talking about how differently our children relate to the world from the way we did, in the 1960s, he and I are on the level. I must be the only person his age who has interviewed him all day. Games fanatics aren't usually fortysomething mothers, after all.
Wright, whose engineer father died when Wright was nine, was reared by his artist mother in California. He was bright but not academic, and he hated school. Having to absorb facts and figures, then regurgitate them for exams, made no sense to him. In today's climate of conformism in education he would probably be diagnosed with something. He was hiding away with his computers, after all, in the 1970s, when nobody understood them.
Today Wright has come into his own. He believes his games are so successful because our media-literate children - especially our bright but unacademic children - have finally discovered a way of expressing their creativity that doesn't limit their imaginations.
Wright is an idealist who sees himself as having helped to develop a form of game that is actually about learning (but don't tell the kids). As long ago as 1982 he was developing the virtual-world Sims concept. On one level it is like a doll's house on a screen. Unlike the static toys in a doll's house, however, Wright's dolls grow and develop emotionally - a good way to get all the brain synapses firing.
The way Wright sees it, his games link the creative and rational sides of the brain in a way that few activities do outside art - music is a rare example. Playing Sims games, children also learn that there are consequences to their actions. The more complex their interaction with the game, the more intriguing the consequences. Children see the results on the screen over time if they're persistent and consistent, so that the game rewards attention.
Children who are regarded as having problems with paying attention become engrossed in The Sims. So what's going on? We discuss the theory that old-fashioned academic learning hasn't kept pace with the development of the brain and that, in future, children who are creative rather than academic will be encouraged with new, game-based ways of learning. Perhaps unacademic but bright children are like canaries in a coalmine, exploring dark and dangerous areas where adults fear to tread.
That was a rather lonely place for Wright to be in the early 1980s, as a twentysomething who didn't fit in with traditional notions of success. When he first got the idea for SimCity, which involved creating a virtual world where people were born, ate, formed relationships and communities, got healthy or sick and eventually died of old age (or worse, if they were unlucky), the games industry rejected his concept as terminally boring. There was no winning or losing involved, so where was the fun? Computer games, after all, were basically tactical war games, involving shooting, bombing, torturing and outwitting the enemy.
Wright's notion was too cerebral, too gentle, perhaps too feminine. His idea involved human development, social interaction, urban planning, architecture and a weird, slightly sick humour that may have been incomprehensible then but is totally in tune with the times now. If your children watch SpongeBob SquarePants, Futurama or Invader ZIM, you'll get the gist.
Twenty years later The Sims has become one of the most successful games ever developed, partly because it appeals to girls as well as boys and to adults as well as children. After it was launched in 1989, SimCity developed a cult following, but the concept really took off when Electronic Arts released The Sims in 2000, having bought out Wright's development company. Since then it has rolled out numerous spin-offs, including The Sims 2 and various expansion packs, which add to existing games, among them the vampire-ridden Nightlife and the newly launched Pets - in which each Sims family can have its own animals, looking after them and dealing with the consequences of how well they manage it.
But that's nothing compared with Spore, a new game, separate from The Sims, that, in the new year, will allow players to create not just a family, a community or a city but an entire planet and, then, a universe, all starting from a single-celled organism. Wright shows me how Spore lets you play God by choosing the rules by which the creature develops, taking on weird forms as it colonises the Spore world - a place that makes the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars seem tame. In one sense this is Darwinism run amok, yet you also get to play God.
Perhaps there's a philosophical point here: each one of us can create our own universe - a place so satisfying that there will, ominously, be no need to relate to real people, animals or nature. Actually, says Wright, it's only a game. He stresses the way that Spore allows players to register online and play together, co-operatively creating universes. He doesn't see this as an isolating activity or as a dumbing-down of young people by gluing them to their computer screens; his games are, he believes, like brain gyms, helping young people to develop new ways of thinking.
Wright's aesthetic inspiration is Japanese anime, films in which deeply emotional stories are told almost entirely visually. He admires Studio Ghibli and the director Hayao Miyazaki, creator of Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke.
Ultimately, Wright wants to enable players to create their own animated films. Spore is the first step, as one aspect of the game is that, when players have finished, they will be able to play it back as a film.
Does this mean that our children will become interactive multimedia artists, doing away with the need for film-makers? Wright thinks not, suggesting that we'll always need artists who can think beyond the rest of us. His games offer the masses the opportunity to participate in the artistic process, an experience that, he believes, will help young people appreciate even more what true artists have to offer.