Nascent

This week I have mostly been playing Halo 3 (not at work, though Google have consoles in their offices so maybe we could too; haven't suggested this to Timo yet). Anyway, it's pretty good and has ex-Nature staffers in it.

The main problem with video games has always been (IMHO) the deep rooted shame you feel coming out of four hour frag sessions. Four hours gone forever.... hours that could have been spent curing cancer, bonding with your children (yes, really, children - the average gamer is 33 years old) or you know, just doing something, like, constructive.

Nowadays, though, you can cure cancer with your PS3, when you go into hospital for an operation you should pick pick the surgeon with the best highscore on Sonic and psychiatrists use first person shooters to treat traumatized war veterans. Games are a force for good in science and medicine on many different levels. Edutainment is cool.

Will Wright thinks so too. Wright is the guy behind the Sims series - SimCity, The Sims etc.

Back in the early nineties SimCity - which you can now play online for free - let you plan and build virtual cities from scratch and then watch them tick along. When you got bored you could unleash terrible disasters on them (nuclear reactor meltdowns were best).

SimEarth went further. You played a godlike entity with power over an entire planet. You could tweak atmospheric composition, raise mountains, seed ecosystems and watch as your subjects formed nascent virtual civilizations in low resolution, 16 colour graphics. Plate tectonics, evolution, ecology, astronomy, the Gaia hypothesis... it was all there and it was fun (sort of). Also when you got bored you could unleash terrible disasters (meteor storms were best).

Wright's latest pair of games also have strong science elements. The next version of SimCity has an environmental impact component 'developed in conjunction with BP':

The low-carbon electricity choices and monitoring of SimCity's carbon emissions provide an entertaining, fully-integrated and accurate look at some of the causes and some of the major solutions available to combat rising levels of carbon and to help address the threat of global warming.

This is a great idea - get a feel for the problem (tackle climate change in a realistic, sustainable way) by trying out different solutions for yourself.

The long awaited Spore is effectively SimEarth with the boring bits taken out:

[Spore is...] an epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and eventually all the way into the deepest reaches of outer space.

It looks awesome. You start off with life at a microscopic level (the 'tide pool phase') that evolves - with a little bit of help from you, we'll ignore the intelligent design connotations for now - into multicellular organisms and finally sentient creatures capable of forming a tribal society and taking over the world. Evolution, anthropology... they're the gameplay fundamentals.

Let's hope that when you can get bored you can unleash terrible disasters (bubonic plague would be best).