The New Yorker has a long preview by game designer Will Wright of his much-anticipated Spore, the origins-of-life follow-up to The Sims (the best-selling PC game of all time) and Sim Cityfor Electronic Arts (ERTS). In short: It’s very cool. (After some blah-blah, you get to the good stuff about a third of the way through.) If you’re not familiar, the gameplay starts with an amoebic form of life, and you basically take it through evolution all the way into civilization, space exploration, etc., by controlling the environment, religion, science, etc.

Wright’s ambitions are pretty huge: Bridge the chasm between game-players and non-gamers, what he calls “the most significant generation gap.” He also wants to help games break out of the ghetto of escapism and bring them into high culture and to teach folks about climate change, to name a few. In other words, Spore seems like his own intelligently-designed seed for evolving a better world. How meta.