Photograph by Dan Chavkin

Will Wright followed a typically eccentric path into computer-game design: some college classes in computer science and architecture, a few homemade robots, no university degree. A deep interest in science, however, infuses all his creations. SimAnt, in which players try to corral an ant colony into conquering a suburban home, was modeled on the insights of ant expert Edward O. Wilson. For SimEarth, a global-ecosystem game, Wright consulted with biologist James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia "Earth as organism" hypothesis. SimCity was inspired by urban-dynamics models developed by MIT scientist Jay Forrester. The Sims games, beneath their animated-dollhouse exteriors, are time-management experiments, based in part on a trove of data gathered by sociologist John Robinson on how Americans spend their hours.

Wright's next game, Spore, due out next year, simulates the entire cosmos; he refers to it jokingly as SimEverything. The player starts as a microbe in a cell-eat-cell world and gradually advances onto land, evolves sentience, develops culture, forms tribes, cities, and civilizations, and finally acquires the ability to move freely through a breathtakingly vast universe of planets, stars, and galaxies. Everything is malleable: A player can create a creature with, say, 3 legs and 15 eyes and stretch it like clay. The animating software then figures out how best to make it walk, run, and stalk prey. A player can create ringed planets and watch the moons orbit leisurely for hours. Meanwhile, the many worlds in your Spore cosmos are pollinated automatically from an online database of plants and animals created by other players.

"As you play, you create the elements of the universe, which are used to populate other players' worlds," Wright says. "In a sense, you're creating the universe for other players. We're making the player the game designer."

Through your games, you come across as a guy who's trying to decipher the natural world bit by bit, through computer simulations.
That's not far off. When I was a kid, I liked taking things apart to see how they worked. Computer simulation is similar, it's reductionist; you've got these parts, you want to see how they interact, so you build a model and compare it to the real world. When you formulate a model, you quickly see your misperceptions. That's the value of simulation in science, to spotlight our ignorance.

Modeling is one of the things that led to an understanding of chaos theory. Back in the 1960s, Dennis and Donella Meadows, a husband and wife team, tried to model the world in terms of things like population, food production, standard of living, and so on to get some sense of where the world was going. When they ran their model, it basically showed the whole world population crashing—quickly, by 1985, according to them. Of course, that didn't come true. Looking back, it became clear that just a couple of variables were off by a few percent and got very amplified. The scientists didn't foresee the green revolution in agriculture—the use of fertilizers and pesticides. So their food production numbers were just a bit low, but it compounded year after year. One little thing off a little bit can have a huge impact on the eventual destination.

What were you doing at age 10 that steered you toward game design?
Building a lot of models—plastic, wood, whatever. That evolved into making things with motors, and that evolved into robots. Robots got me into computers. One of my favorite robots was one called Mr. Rogers. I built it when I was about 20. It had three wheels and an ­ultrasonic sensor for mapping the room and was attached to an Apple II. I still love robots; it's kind of a background hobby. My daughter, Cassidy—she's 19, she's in art school—was doing Robot Wars and BattleBots with me for many years.

Spore takes its cue from astrobiology, both in its spatial sweep—from microbiology to galaxies—and in the interplanetary spread of life. What turned you on to the subject?
Well, I've always had an interest in the SETI program, which led me to astrobiology and to Drake's equation. Drake's equation is ­simple. Basically, you take the average number of stars in the galaxy and you ask what percentage have habitable planets. Then you ask ­what ­percentage of those couple of planets does life arise on? ­And on what percentage of those is the life intelligent? What's the average life span of that civilization? You crunch all those numbers together and get one that tells you how many intelligent species are out there asking themselves the same question. For some reason, most of these models leave out panspermia [the theory that life may have originated elsewhere in the cosmos]; I love to think panspermia's gotten short shrift. Anyway, all the factors lead back to how unique we are. Stars and galaxies are complex and interesting, but they're still nowhere near as complex as life.

One thing that interests me is that all the factors in Drake's equation map to different size scales. It's almost like an index into science at different scales: chemistry, biology, sociology. As humans we're stuck at the scale of our bodies, but there are all these different levels above and below us; each one has its own dynamics, its own processes, its own timescale. I've always been intrigued by Charles and Ray Eames's Powers of Ten book and movie. They really tried to give an overall sense of where we are in the universe, to give some perspective on the history of life. That awareness can make you feel insignificant. But in some sense, it's also the reverse. If we're the only life around, what an incredible responsibility! It's humbling and deeply empowering at the same time.

So Spore is an existential game?
One of my original goals was to give players the equivalent of a drug-induced epiphany. I've been surprised, given Spore's epic scale, that it has such broad appeal—that the average person finds some meaning in it. Of course, every player finds a different meaning: how big the universe is, or the existence of different timescales, or how precious life is. The important thing is getting people to step back and enjoy the view.

The Spore universe plays like a planetarium show; you've clearly worked hard to model orbital and galactic motions accurately.
You should see all the stuff that's not in the game! We did a huge number of prototypes, modeling almost anything you can imagine, from autocatalytic chemistry to the dynamics of interstellar gases. For a brief while, we considered making gas giants playable, but not having a solid surface makes game play difficult.

I'm told you collect artifacts from the Russian space program.
I've always had a fascination with it. I'm impressed by their approach and the success they've had compared to NASA. And they've done it at one-fifth the cost. These days you have to hire the Russians to get you into space, not NASA. I like to collect their stuff, take it apart, see how it works. It's incredibly durable, and cheap. I've got control panels from the Mir space station and the complete interior of a Soyuz spacecraft. I'm going to Russia next week, actually, to Star City and some other places. A lot of the coolest stuff is down in the basements of these aerospace corporations. I'm going with several friends; it's sort of a space junket.

Would you ever go up in space?
Oh, sure, I'd do it under the right circumstances. But not $20 million to fly in the Soyuz.