Now attending . . .” says the bland, female computer voice welcoming me to my San Francisco conference call. “. . . Lizbar the Horrible,” groans what sounds like a drooling space monster, probably with a horned helmet and a quantum destructo-gun.

“How do you spell your first name, Mr Horrible?”

The question is drowned by giggles. His real first name is Will, and Mr Horrible is just his conference-call persona. In fact, he is the compulsively playful Will Wright, creator of The Sims, the most successful computer game ever made. It has sold 98m copies worldwide and is likely to pass 100m with Sims 3, to be announced this week. (Mario Bros has sold more, but was a console rather than a computer game.) At between £30 and £40 a pop, this is real money. Big computer games gross significantly more than big movies.

Wright doesn’t play The Sims much any more. Instead, he spends “several hours a day” playing Spore, his latest creation. Spore is due out in September, but I had a go at the UK headquarters of the games company Electronic Arts (EA) in Chertsey. It is, to say the least, engrossing. This is what is known as a God-game, in which you are the creator of your own world. I created my own animal, a vaguely dinosaurish beast called Bryan, with a rather pathetic squeak and an extra pair of eyes on its haunches to look out for predators, or, indeed, editors.

To understand Spore, you need to understand The Sims; and to understand either, you need to know about Wright, about human and cosmic history and the evolution of what Wright calls the metabrain, the aggregated intelligence of millions of online human brains. These may only be computer games but, if Wright is right, they are precursors of the future human condition.

Brought up in Atlanta, Georgia, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Wright studied first architecture then mechanical engineering, and, finally, computers, before dropping out of college without a degree. He was already making computer games, though. In 1987, he formed the company Maxis and produced SimCity, a brilliant, open-ended game about the evolution of cities. I was hooked – the only time this has ever happened to me with a computer game. In 1997, Maxis was bought out by EA. Wright pitched an idea of a virtual dolls’ house. It came out as The Sims in 2000.

The game – in case you haven’t played – allows you to create people, homes, jobs and stories. It’s a computerised soap opera that you write yourself. “It mirrors the player,” says Rod Humble, the English-born head of the Sims Studio at EA in San Francisco. “With soaps, you shop around to get the one you like and you hope the writers keep it like that, whereas with an interactive experience you craft it so that it suits you.”

As with hundreds of soaps, the primary setting of The Sims is American suburbia. This made it, perversely, universal, in that everybody knew what it looked like from television shows. Only in Japan was it resisted. EA tried to get around this last year with MySims. This was a console version of the game with the cartoonish, anime look favoured by the Japanese.

About 55% of Sims players are female - the boys still mainly go for shoot-’em-up games such as Gears of War - and it tends, for some reason, to be most popular among women in their twenties and early thirties. Perhaps this is explained by the maternal, nurturing aspect of the game. You have to look after the characters you make. The same is true of Spore. Claire Ridley, the UK marketing manager of the game, showed me, with a noticeable degree of pride, a rather gentle Spore tribe she had created. I asked her what would happen if she just left them alone. “They would die of hunger,” she said with a note of real anxiety. “You have to nurture them and look after them.”

Sims is a single-player game. In 2002, there was an attempt to turn it into an MMOG – a “massively multiplayer online game” – in which you play against, or with, hundreds or even millions of others around the world. It didn’t work, because people liked to be alone with their homemade Sims communities.

Online, people started to “impact with other players in a bad way”, as Wright puts it, which is not what the female Sims addicts were looking for. “We learnt a lot from that,” he says.

Primarily, they learnt how to make Spore “massively single player”.

Whatever emerges or is created by you on Spore is automatically uploaded to EA servers. These creatures, buildings, landscapes can then be downloaded to other people’s games. You can create “buddy lists” that specify which players you want to receive your creations, or it can happen at random – so my Bryan might suddenly appear on your screen. Beware: he, like his maker, has a bad attitude.

Spore begins with a comet impact on earth. It thus borrows the theory of pan-spermia – the idea that life on earth was seeded from outer space. You then preside over developments in a tide pool. Single-cell organisms are your protagonists, and DNA points are your assets. This moves on to the creature phase, with complex multicellular organisms (this is where Bryan was born); the tribal phase, where you enter a social world; the civilisation phase; and, finally, the space phase, in which you indulge in interstellar travel and alien interactions.

At every level, there is a strong didactic element. In the tide pool, the creatures are subject to Darwinian survival pressures; in the tribal and civilisation phases, the player has to experiment with social and diplomatic strategies ; issues of global warming emerge as pumping too much carbon into the atmosphere can produce a lifeless desert. And so on. These are the scientific stories everybody knows and, now, everybody can play.

The zoom effect, from tide pool to the stars, is partly inspired by Powers of Ten, a short film made by the great American designers Charles and Ray Eames. This starts with a man lying in a park seen from a metre away, then 10 metres, then 100 metres and so on, until we are zooming out through the galaxies. This is a very distinctive contemporary effect. Science has provided us with convincing biographies of the universe and of life. We have become accustomed to being bit-part players on a stage billions of light years across and billions of years old. To the Victorians, this was a nightmare – when they saw the abyss of deep time in geology and our interconnectedness with all other living things in Darwinism, they saw only a loss of faith and the futility of human existence. To us, the story has become a new myth of belonging. We take pleasure in the spatial and temporal vastness of our playground and in the variety of our playmates. Spore is a contemporary parable.

“It’s something everybody can relate to,” says Wright, “if they can step back far enough and see it.”

Wright is also keen to defend computer games against their reputation as sad, lonely ways to pass one’s time. He thinks they are more creative pastimes than television, which, he says, is a “lean backward” medium, whereas games are “lean forward” – they engage more of the brain. In addition, they have democratised the story-telling function.

“I think that, throughout human history, people have built other worlds in their imaginations. Typically, a lot of these worlds were very skills-based. You had to be a very good writer or artist for people to be able to see them. One of the things games do is allow average people to manifest their imagination in a tangible way that other people can see. It’s creative enablement. They are tools for self-expression.”

Just as cars extend our legs, telescopes our eyes and telephones our voice, Wright says, so computers extend our imagination. Specifically, by connecting millions, they offer the possibility of a “very strong collective intelligence”. He speaks of the “metabrain” that is emerging.

“Any human institutional system that draws on the intelligence of all its members is a metabrain. Up to now, we have had high friction between the neurones of the metabrain; technology is lowering that friction tremendously. Computers are allowing us to aggregate our intelligence in ways that were never possible before.

“If you look at Spore, people are making this stuff, and computers collect it, then decide who to send it to. The computer is the broker. What they are really exploring is the collective creativity of millions of people. They are aggregating human intelligence into a system that is more powerful than we thought artificial intelligence was going to be.”

This may sound a bit much coming from a maker of computer games who calls himself Lizbar the Horrible, but it is a point he is well qualified to make. The Sims and Spore distil two important aspects of the history of computers, neither of which was foreseen by even the most wild-eyed futurologists.

The first is the mimicry of life. From the beginning, computers were used successfully to produce lifelike effects by generating multiple iterations of simple equations. Computer simulations dramatised chaos theory, producing beautiful, exotic images from the input of just a few numbers. People’s imaginations were stirred by the possibility that, somewhere behind the screen, lay the secret of life. Artificial life – lifelike systems on computers – became a distinct academic discipline.

The idea of a parallel living world on the screen fed not just into The Sims and Spore but also into Second Life, the website where you can live an entire alternative existence, interacting with people from around the world (usually for virtual sex, I gather) and into the whole world of social networking. It is now commonplace, especially among the young, to live half your life online, to take it for granted that cyberspace is alive.

This leads to the second development: the way computers have, strangely, become less important. They are no longer seen as magic boxes but rather as connection devices, windows on the wired world. What is important is not the box on your desk or lap, but the vast, interconnected realm to which it gives access. In presenting a model of the entire universe and its history, Spore is a precursor of a future when the world behind the screen becomes more real than the real world.

Inhabited by Bryans and Lizbars, this world may seem harmless; inhabited by the avatars of computer-dazed zombies, it may seem appalling. Still, it is just a game. Isn’t it, Mr Horrible?

www.bryanappleyard.com