Spore is a much-hyped PC game which has been in development for years, and the brain child of Will Wright, legendary creator of the hugely successful SimCity and The Sims games franchises.

With Spore, Wright hopes to take his passion for intelligent simulation to the next level by creating a game in which you play life itself: starting off as a cellular organism, and playing to evolve into first a creature, then a tribal animal, and eventually taking off in the conquest of space. The game is a wonderful rebuke to the idea that games are mindless entertainment, and also contains many elements which point the way to the future of both gaming in particular and software in general.

Of course, Wright's passion for evolution and his sincere attempt to show children of all ages how evolution works will have little impact if nobody can be bothered to play it, and so Spore also needs to work as a game first and foremost. Initial impressions of the Spore Creature Creator software, which is available for download online, are extremely encouraging.

The Creature Creator is a 3D modelling tool that allows you to build your own creature. You start off looking at a sort of abstract torso, hanging in the air: click on it and you can study the bones of its spine. You then simply drag and drop different body parts on to the main body, adding arms, legs, hands, feet and eyes. You can make each vertebra, joint, or limb any shape or size you want.

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  Michael Parsons

As you add body parts, legs stamp, eyes blink, and mouths snap open and shut. Watching your creations come to life has a slightly scary feel to it: the cries and roars of the animals can be a little unnerving, and our son, who normally has nerves of steel, had to retreat to his mother's lap at one point, just in case the creatures started to climb out of the computer. Eventually your creature stands before you and you can give it a paint job, and then take it for a test drive.

I tried it with my wife, who I normally has to be dragged kicking and screaming to sit in front of a video game, and also roped in our four-year-old son, who likes monsters. Both were hooked in seconds. The deceptive simplicity of the interface masks cunning artificial intelligence that takes whatever you create and animates it with humour and style. For example, there's something very beautiful about the way the animations of the spinal column work: you feel like a Pilates instructor or an Alexander teacher when you watch how pulling on one bone in the spine realigns the creature's posture. I can't think of a more engaging anatomy lesson for a small child.

Once you've created your creature you can name it and load it to a web 2.0 style shared library, called the Sporepedia. In the full game, creatures created by other players will be streamed into the planets you explore, and you can also show off your creatures on Spore web pages and in videos uploaded to YouTube. The tools the game developers have created share a double purpose: both enabling the creation of thousands of different game elements to populate the game universe, but also simplifying the creation of even more content by the game’s users.

Now, users will always be able create more content than any one company, which gives Spore almost limitless scope for expansion. We've seen the same sort of proliferation of user-generated 3D content in online worlds like Second Life, but there the modelling tools are such hard work that only the most passionate and technical get hooked. However, if you can provide the training wheels and invisible help that make 3D modelling much easier to do, you've got a shot at a massive audience, and the team behind Spore seem to have cracked it with the Creature Creator.

As someone who's spent a lot of time thinking about how websites should be put together, I know how difficult it is to understand how users actually experience what you've created for them. What fascinates me about Spore's Creature Creator is how brilliantly realised it is as a user experience: natural, elegant, and intuitive. In a video interview with 1Up, Wright said that the Creature Creator was rebuilt from the ground up ten times, so it's clear that its simplicity was hard won. He also says that their approach was not to make a flexible 3D modelling tool, but to create a toy: and a great toy is by definition easy and intuitive to use, and therefore inherently delivers a great user experience.

This is why some American weapons systems have controls based on console gaming system controllers: because the simplicity and power of gaming interfaces, which have to get you straight into the action, simply can't be beaten. As more and more applications start to use 3D space, we'll need great interfaces that allow you become effective with minimal training. We'll get them from gaming worlds like Spore, which know that nothing is more seductive than playful, intelligent software that just works.

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Michael Parsons helped to launch The Industry Standard magazine, and was the launch Editor of CNET.co.uk

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