If you haven’t seen Will Wright’s GDC talk about Spore and content, do it now. (registration required). It’s an hour long, but well worth it. Watch it to the end. Then come back.

Done?

The highlight, of course, is the demo of Spore and it does not disappoint. I haven’t seen any game so original since, well, The Sims.

But the point is a return to algorithmic programming with no loss of data for the player and this is done through player creation based on simple systems.

Though the idea of having other players’ animals being pulled into my ecosystem is a little odd, the challenge of infinite content is met through the compression of the data into a small rule system. Wright says that the player creations will run around 1k in size – an amazing saving of space and necessary to make an ecosystem look real and convincing.

And then the game changes to a RTS civ management game. And then to SimCity. And everything is done through simple rule sets and an amazingly obvious editor.

I don’t think I have ever seen a tech demo that promised such emergent gameplay. Though the Civ bit looked uninspired and, frankly, a little dull, the development of an authentically foreign culture and truly original world – for minimal cost in space and processing power – with a focus on light and player driven gameplay.

His concept of player experiences being the better story than anything scripted by the designer is not new. I think that strategy gamers have always understood this.

But if you compare the demo of Spore, a game still many months off, with the glorified cut-scenes on display for the new consoles at E3, there is no question what the most important presentation there was. Wright’s GDC presentation didn’t get the attention that it deserved in the gaming press at large and most of the E3 coverage has been about the new hardware in the pipeline.

But this – Spore and games like it – this is what I live for.