The online gaming world is dominated by “massive multiplayer online role-playing games” (MMORPG)’s — worlds where vast numbers of players’ characters interact, fighting each other and computerized monsters, going on quests and practicing crafts like smithing and wizardry. For those who desire the broad, interactive experience MMORPG’s provide, yet tire of fighting monsters and prefer their own space, an alternative may be forthcoming.

As a designer of games like SimCity and The Sims, Will Wright knows a lot about providing a personal gaming playground and giving players room to create and design. His latest creation is a game called Spore, currently in development. With Spore, Wright seeks to provide players with both personal space and a grand scope through procedural generation and a new genre of games, which he calls “massively single player online gaming.”

Procedural generation refers to a process where content is generated by algorithms, rather than through imported graphical and audio files. Procedural generation was popular in the early, memory-scare days of gaming, when games had to be packed onto floppy disks. Today, with CDs and vastly enlarged hard drives and computer processing power, procedural generation is much more rare; popular computer games like Civilization and Age of Empires are non-procedurally generated and often require hundreds of megabytes of memory for extensive graphics and data files.

Wright sees a problem with this model. In a March presentation to the annual Game Developers Conference, he explained: “We’re seeing a trend towards more open-ended games [because] players hate boundaries, especially unnatural boundaries. [They hate] coming up against invisible walls.”

But at the same time, he said, “It seems like the next generation of titles will be incredibly expensive, we’re going to have to build mountains of content, and it’s going to drive most of the smaller players out of the market. I’m going to offer an alternative vision to that.”

His plan to fulfill this ambitious goal revolves around gamers’ enthusiasm.

“Players love making content,” Wright pointed out. “Every time we’ve given them an opportunity to make content, they’ve gone crazy with it. [And] players like ownership over content — player’s [created] stories are more meaningful than scripted stories.”

Wright illustrated the point with a personal anecdote. He described to the around-twelve-thousand person audience his Grand Theft Auto character Moe, who spends his time biking around with “cute underwear and a Barbie watch,” and how he takes pride in and often tells his wife about Moe’s unique exploits.

Players will have an opportunity to create similarly bizarre content in Spore. Spore is comprised of seven levels; from the beginning to the end of the game the player turns “from a bacteria to a galactic god.” The player starts as a lowly microbe in a Pac-Man type game, moves through a creature stage, similar to Diablo, through city and civilization stages similar to Risk, SimCity and Civilization, to a final galactic “sandbox” level where he or she can play with worlds at any stage of the game, creating alien hybrids or making first contact and interacting with alien civilizations. This sandbox level, according to Wright, puts the “player not in the role of Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins, but George Lucas or J. R R. Tolkien.”

What is so revolutionary about Wright’s concept is that at every stage, players can create or import content. In contrast, games like Civilization and Age of Empires have fixed scenarios, non-scenario play, and play editors, but lack a real capacity to utilize shared content. If playing against a fixed computer player bores you, you have to find other players, either online or in person.

Spore, on the other hand, is based on a massive amount of content-sharing but retains the single-player aspect. Procedural generation drives the process, making possible miniscule object files (around one kilobyte) that are easily transmitted between players or from a central database. At lower levels, shared content is restricted to characters; you can load characters other players created, and creatures created, but not controlled, by other players populate the environment. At higher levels, this shared content extends to objects like buildings, vehicles and spaceships — the game, when operational, will even import whole civilizations created by fellow players.

“One of the things we want to do is to make it a toy,” says Wright. “We want to burn tools into the gameplay, to make the portability transparent.”

Content creation via procedural generation has some interesting side effects in Spore. There is procedural ritual dancing, based on how whether the player’s civilization resembles Leonard McCoy or Spock. There are procedurally determined eating habits — the particular structure of a creature determines its predators and prey. There is even procedural mating.

Whether this will attract a base of enthusiastic gamers is unclear. It is not scheduled for release until April 2007 at the earliest. But it has already garnered kudos from the game development community: at the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), it won multiple awards: Best of Show, Best Original Game, Best PC Game and Best Simulation Game. Wright is revealing more at this year’s E3, held this week in Los Angeles. Hopefully, gamers will soon be able to see whether Spore’s revolutionary promises pan out.